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, can you justify ranking "Huckleberry Finn" as #20, and "All Quiet on the Western Front" as #82 and "Hunger Games" as #1371. 2. When books appear only in a few lists, it leads often to 1000 books occupying a single rank. Listing them without rank would have the same effect. 3. The titles of the books 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 random...