How do you select your next book? Do you ask a friend, go to Amazon’s ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…’, look at a top 100 list or simply brows books stores? I, like most people have done all of the above.

In order to better organize my reading, I have just completed my master list using 34 Top 100 or must read lists. I was able to compile all 13307 books and rank them.

How did I rank them? I used two numbers. First, I used the number of lists that a book was on. So if a book was on 8 lists it was automatically hither than a book that was on 7 lists.  Secondly, all the books that are on the same number of lists were ranked by the placements on those lists. If a book was ranked number 1 on a list, I gave it 99 points, if a book was number 100, it got 0 points.

Some numbers:

• 34 Lists
• 13 307 total books
• 10 892 books are unique
• 184 books are on3 lists
• 97 books are on 4 lists
• 60 books are on 5 lists
• 50 books are on 6 lists
• 23 books are on 7 lists
• 16 books are on 8 lists
• 11 books are on 9 lists
• 10 books are on 10 lists
• 3 books are on 11 lists
• 3 books are on 12 lists
• 1 book is on 13 lists
• 3 books are on 14 lists
• 2 books are on 15 lists
• 5 books are on 16 lists
• 2 books are on 17 lists
• 1 book is on 18 lists

The lists that I used:

1. 100 books nominated by Canadian readers
2. Time’ s 100 best English-language nobels from 1923 to the present
3. The 100 greatest novels of all time by the guardian-observer
4. Random House 100 Best Novels (Board’s List)
5. Random House 100 Best Novels (Redears’s List)
6. NPR’s Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books Ever
7. NYPL Books of the Century
8. Telegraph’s top 100 Books
9. Guardian’s 1000 novels everyone must read
10. Telegraph’s 110 best books: the perfect library
11. National Geographic’s The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time
12. The 100 Best Business Books of All Time
13. CWA’s Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time CWA
14. The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time The U.S. list
15. BBC’s Big Read
16. Top 100 Fantasy Books
17. Sports Illustrated’s The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time
18. Library of World Literature
19. CounterPunch’s Top 100
20. Goodread’s Best Books Ever
21. Top 100 fantasy books of all time
22. Radcliffe list
23. Oprah’s Book Club
24. CounterPunch’s Favorite 100 Nonfiction Books in Translation, Published in English Since 1900
25. Top 100 Best Social Media Books
26. St. John’s College reading list
27. Wikipedia List of best-selling books
28. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
29. New York Times bestsellers
30. IMBA’s 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century
31. Larry McCaffery’s “20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English Language Books of Fiction“
32. Waterstone’s Top 100 Books of the Century
33. BBC’s Big Read 101-200
34. Pulitzer Prize

My List of Best 100 Books

And the others are…