[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Most Influential

Matt wrote:
> has anyone said, um...The Holy Bible!?!

Funny, I had thought the Bible was the *most* mentioned book.  Being the
scientific type, I decided to test this hypothesis.  So I leafed back through
all the posts marked "Most Influential" to see what people had said, and here's
what I found.  (Titles may be shortened for brevity - score is weighted so that
if someone only mentioned *one* influential book, it got one point.  More than
one mention meant that the one point was split up among those works mentioned.)
The Bible wins both on score and on the number of people voting for it.  Only
one other work (if Tolkein's Middle Earth work can be counted as a single work)
was mentioned more than once, although if you count all C. S. Lewis works as a
single entry, he gets a 2.5 score with four votes; much more influential than
the Bible.  Of course, *he* was heavily influenced by the Bible, as was A
Wrinkle in Time, The Greater Trumps and many other of the works on the list, so
perhaps the Bible should get proxy votes from them.  ;-) Then we might have to
knock a point off the Bible's score for Ayn Rand, although I suppose no one
said the influence had to be *positive*...

Here are all the votes I found:

Title		       Score   
The Bible		[1.6] (3 people)
A Wrinkle In Time	[1.0]
Life after God		[1.0]
The Weight of Glory	[1.0]
Thomas Paine		[1.0]
Caged Bird Sings	[1.0]
The Ender series	[1.0]
Run Baby Run		[1.0]
Bart's Guide to Life	[1.0]
Atlas Shrugged		[1.0]
Tolkien			[0.6] (2 people)
Ragamuffin Gospel	[0.5]
Ordinary People		[0.5]
The Screwtape Letters	[0.5]
Saint Paul...Movies	[0.5]
The Four Loves		[0.5]
On the Road		[0.5]
The Diary of Anne Frank [0.5]
To the Lighthouse	[0.5]
Narnia			[0.5]
Anne Rice's Vamipires	[0.5]
The Poisonwood Bible	[0.5]
Letters from Westerbork [0.5]
Foucault's Pendulum	[0.3]
The Greater Trumps	[0.3]
Traveling Mercies	[0.3]
Bird by Bird		[0.3]
Traveling Mercies	[0.3]
Stealing Jesus		[0.3]
Proverbs of Ashes	[0.3]
Sound & The Fury	[0.3]

Make of that what you will...
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy."            - John Whorfin
---------------
Unsubscribe by going to http://www.actwin.com/OtR/