You may be familiar with Goodreads, the social media hub where voracious book lovers can check out what their friends are reading, share opinions, etc. Well, blogger Dan Frank decided to take a deeper dive into the popular site to see what Goodreaders believe are the most beloved and hated classic books of all time.
Obviously, some of these titles may seem familiar: You likely had to read them in high school and/or college. For the data collection here, the term “classic” only referred to books that had “over 100,000+ Goodreads reviews, written before 1970 and not targeted towards children or forming an integral part of a series” (sorry, Little Women and Lord Of The Rings). Unsurprisingly, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird topped the “beloved” list, followed by John Steinbeck’s modern biblical epic East Of Eden and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Also in the top 10 you’ll find authors like Jane Austen (Pride And Prejudice), Mario Puzo (The Godfather), and even Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None).
Readers, meanwhile, really hate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s puritanical The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s sprawling epic Moby Dick, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness. Steinbeck even made the list with The Pearl. Basically, the hated list contains anything you had to read in school that was long and really, really boring, especially for a teenager (although we hear that Moby Dick tends to grow on people… eventually).
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