Popular Post jannesan Posted March 19, 2025 at 07:52 PM Popular Post Report Posted March 19, 2025 at 07:52 PM I was curious what the most mentioned books in the long-running "What are you reading?" thread were, so I did a quick and not so accurate analysis. I extracted all fragments of Chinese text from the whole thread and filtered them down to actual book titles. Below are graphs for - Top 20 book mentions - Top 10 authors based on total frequency of their books being mentioned - Top 10 authors based on how many different books were mentioned Unsurprisingly 活着 and 余华 come first. Personally, I have read books from 8/10 of the top authors (by frequency), which is probably because most of my book picks came from the thread I do wonder if these statistics are representative of the broader Chinese learner community. At least 余华 does seem to be the number 1 suggested author for people picking their first novel, not only on chinese-forums. Let me know what you think 10 Quote
Tomsima Posted March 19, 2025 at 10:22 PM Report Posted March 19, 2025 at 10:22 PM I've wondered about this a few times in the past, very interesting. Surprised to not see 老舍 in the top 10 authors, I feel like there must be a lot of 骆驼祥子, 茶馆 and 四世同堂 in there in addition to 猫城记...in fact the Japanese author 东野圭吾 has beaten him to the list, controversial! Quote
Lu Posted March 20, 2025 at 10:24 AM Report Posted March 20, 2025 at 10:24 AM Oh I love those. Impossible to say if these statistics are representative of anything (they might not even be representative of the Chinese-forums membership reading habits, as they track mentions, so books that are discussed in that thread a bit longer will climb in the statistics), but it's an interesting list. I think you're definitely not the only one taking reading suggestions from that topic, which causes some pooling/bandwagon effect. Quote
Johnny-5 Posted March 22, 2025 at 09:36 AM Report Posted March 22, 2025 at 09:36 AM Can you share some of the data you extracted from the thread? It's quite an epic thread and I'm not sure I have the devotion neccesary to read the whole thing Quote
jannesan Posted March 22, 2025 at 02:46 PM Author Report Posted March 22, 2025 at 02:46 PM I'm uploading the sorted books with respective frequency. Note that this is not quite complete data, as the method of extracting book titles from the comments was pretty basic and certainly missed some mentions. All the book titles were verified with Google's books API (https://developers.google.com/books). sorted-books-corrected.json 1 Quote
Johnny-5 Posted March 23, 2025 at 05:46 AM Report Posted March 23, 2025 at 05:46 AM Cool, thanks! Looks like good work. By your count is that just 234 different books mentioned in the thread? I find it fascinating that a thread that has been going for so long and has gone on for so many pages averages out to about two unique books per page. Thanks for sharing your effort! Quote
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