Books that made a Difference to 2000 X readers
"Culture Critic" --"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire"
Culture Critic Has a Huge Audience
“Culture Critic “ is an X/Twitter Feed with over 21,000 subscribers and 1.2 million followers. Here is the link: Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) / X (twitter.com)
"What is the one book that changed your life the most?"— “And Explain Why.” —”Culture Critic” asked these Questions on March 10, 2024.
2000 Readers Answered
I answered1 and so did 2000 others.
Here are the Top Fifteen
Here are the top 15. Go to the Thread to see the covers and comments: Culture Critic on X: "I asked X: "What is the one book that changed your life the most?" These were the top 15, in order... (thread) 👇 15. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley https://t.co/ZLq2o3vCwq" / X (twitter.com)
The Holy Bible
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Iliad - Homer
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
The Odyssey - Homer
The Quran
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium - Seneca
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
The Republic - Plato
Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert T. Kiyosaki
The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
And what about Libraries?
OCLC provides a list of the top books owned by Libraries.2 Below are the top 15 (seems only fiction)
1.Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
2.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
3.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
4.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
5.Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
6.Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
7.Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë
8.Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
9.Moby Dick Herman Melville
10.The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
11.Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
12.The Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
13.A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
15.Charles Dickens15.A Tale of Two Cities
I answered Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Unset but didn’t make the top 15.
FYI...knowing what people read and what influenced them is interesting and advisory to librarians. The many responses are well worth reviewing by anyone developing library collections. You can go to the link and read what people responded and their reasons why.
Fascinating stuff, just a little bit dismaying. I don't think I could come up with just one book. It would be interesting if people could choose ten or twenty, and see if the results were the same.
The OCLC list shows, I believe, how often libraries weed bestsellers but don't remove their holdings from OCLC. At least I hope that's what it reflects - nineteen books by John Grisham, and only five by Thomas Hardy?