Is the Greatest Book List Worth it? Partly Yes and Mostly No.
There is a site, The Greatest Books , which apparently merged 652 "Best Books lists" into one list of over 21000 books. To establish a ranking, they do some hokus-pokus on the calculation of the worth of the lists and finally it outputs, as an example: "The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the 3rd greatest book of all time." Negative points of that site: 1. The ranking 'per se' is absolutely meaningless, how do you justify the rank of "Huckleberry Finn" (20) vs "All Quiet on the Western Front" (82) vs "Hunger Games" (1371). 2. In the ranks of the books from only few lists, there are often 1000 books by a single rank. You could just list them without rank to have the same effect. 3. The titles are either translated or original, no consistency - which shows that they didn't work on the data. Unfortunately, they didn't provide original titles. So, even if the original language is said to be German, they randomly prov...