Bad methodology to prove a point: look at average SATs and popular books at different colleges.

Good methodology to prove a point: put up a "sociological image" on a blog.

Some of these posts tend to reinforce the ugly stereotype that sociologists are first and foremost interested in standing up for the underdog; critical thinking and consistent standards are clearly secondary.

Oh, I don't know; the guy clearly knows it's flawed and was just having fun with it. I'm not sure it reinforces much of anything since you have books of different sorts all over the graph.

I was interested to see that I had read each of the top ten books from my undergrad, and counted several of them on my list of favorites.

It's nice to know as an biracial person of half African descent, I have all my life to look forward -not- writing erotica, dystopian, religious, contemporary, children's, misc, chick lit, biographical, classic, science fiction/fantasy, or philosophy literature, but "African-American" literature.

It makes me wonder what was the requirement for a book to be considered "African-American". Does simply having a Black author count, or does it have to involve black characters, or both? To Kill a Mockingbird is synonymous to me with Black issues, but I suppose it wasn't "street" enough for the way they've divided things.

I think the image is meant to be humorous. Also, I'm sure the author of this poster clearly understands that the books are not "making people dumb".

Finally, I find it very hard to believe that "class" is the number one predictor of SAT scores. The best predictor of SAT scores is probably academic ability in reading, writing, and mathematics. One could argue that "class" is too ambiguous a concept to be a "number one predictor" of anything.

It isn't even what they read, necessarily, but what they claim as their favorite books. I've read 100 Years of Solitude and The Color Purple, and still like A Wrinkle in TIme more than both. I got a 1590.

The fact that 'Eragon' and 'The Book of Mormon' rate so highly is automatic cause to make one suspicious.

This is such an exercise in ego-fluffing.

@alicia
But what if someone decides that what you write is not 'African American' enough?? Why, then you will by default be a 'Woman Writer'! Or if your work is not 'Womanly' enough...hell, that's not possible! You'll automatically be judged by one of those criteria, and the cover of all your books will reflect that fact!
Gods, I hate the publishing industry sometimes. :(

I'm afraid you misread the chart. As it says, the vertical axis doesn't mean anything, and the horizontal shows SAT scores. In actuality, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" scored *highest*, with an average SAT score of about 1275-1360 out of 1400. The Book of Mormon ranks in the middle.

I'm not sure I even have any individual books listed as my favorites. I tend to list authors whose works I found particularly enjoyable or noteworthy, so my entries wouldn't have fit this methodology.

"Finally, I find it very hard to believe that “class” is the number one predictor of SAT scores. The best predictor of SAT scores is probably academic ability in reading, writing, and mathematics. One could argue that “class” is too ambiguous a concept to be a “number one predictor” of anything."

George, what does the SAT test? Is "academic ability" as tested by the SATs more or less valued among different social classes?

The argument is that the educational system is built by and for certain groups -- the children of those groups (the middle classes) have an advantage in that the system is tailored to them.

Reading Bourdieu (or a summary of his work on this topic) would explain it a lot more easily.

First, Chase, I am afraid you are reading incorrectly. Though the vertical axis has no meaning, the scores go low to high from left to right.

Setting aside the big picture and looking at a very tiny detail, I find it interesting that the "score gap" between those who refer to it as "The Bible" and those who refer to it as "The Holy Bible" is so wide.

even if it is a classed based scale, no one would argue that society is fair in the slightest. The people who have a better education and more free time are more likely to be exposed to more ideas.

I dont know about the SATs being the scale though...lol it seems libertarians can get high scores and all the ones i've met have very pro-corporate agendas

hrm now that i think about it i should have said "better access to information" instead of "better education"

My favorite books are the Dresden Files and manga, and I got around a 1300. But I guess I don't count, not having a Facebook.

SAT scores are bullshit. You score high if you're good at test taking and if you can afford to take it multiple times and/or the many books and classes that teach you how to take it--something determined largely by class. It has very little to do with actual intelligence or knowledge.

A couple things:

From the site's FAQ, anticipating objections to the genre classifications:
"Don't blame me -- I didn't make them. To defend myself from precisely this criticism, the genres were automatically generated from the most-frequent tags for each book on LibraryThing.com. So go blame LibraryThing."

So while that doesn't make the problem go away, the fact that it's not HIS error increases his ethos a little bit.

Also, he notes that he got the data from Facebook's network pages, which haven't been a feature of Facebook for at least two years. So the data is at least two years old, explaining the presence of short-lived bestsellers like "Eragon" (also maybe: Wicked, The Devil Wears Prada, Harry Potter, The Life of Pi.)

And ditto on "he's just having fun, ease up on the heavy sociological implications".

Yes, yes, I get that the author of the chart was sort of being funny. It was more just a jumping-off point for me thinking about how we classify literature in general [as opposed to just in that particular post], but I didn't make that clear at all, I realize now after re-reading it. Sorry about the lack of clarity.

I second Nataly's second point. The SATs aren't a good predictor of how well someone is going to do in their first year in college, which is what the test is supposed to do. It has more to do with how many times you take the test and the test-taking strategies you employ.

As for the graph, a lot of the books that fall in the center of the graph are those that are required reading by most college-prep high school literature courses. It's not that surprising to learn that college students who list books from college-prep courses as their favorites score within average range on the SATs. Average high school students, average books, average SAT scores. Yawn.

Little Women is "chick lit"? I would have put it under "classics."

Actually, the only book listed under "Chick Lit" that actually fits into that genre is The Devil Wears Prada. I think the creator of this chart just stuck every book that he thought only women would read under the heading of Chick Lit, which definitely does NOT include the entire Nicholas Sparks body of work nor Little Women.

In my experience, those who had done very well in the math section of the SAT are much, much better at math than the average person. Further, those individuals who had done very well in the verbal section of the SAT were much, much better writers and readers than the average person.

I think to say 'the SATs are useless' is a bunch of BS made up by people who didn't do well on their SATs.

Woah, shit storm here. I agree with the sentiment that the image's creator was firmly tongue in cheek, but people's reactions to it certainly not.

I DO want to say to Alicia that very often "African-American" is not a commentary on the author, OR even the book-- but a sales tactic. A bookstore I worked once got rid of the"African-American" book section, just shelved it in with fiction or mystery or whatever was appropriate. The result? Many of the titles stopped selling, & people who were looking for them left after seeing we didn't have an "African-American" section.

A lot of factors go into play here: perception of reading as being classed to "dead white dudes" being one of them. Genres are bullshit, but they are dying & being replaced by "tags," I think. Maybe yeah, you should be able to arrange things by "science fiction," or "African-American," & Octavia Butler should be equally accessible to both searches.

I guess my point is: "African-American" doesn't have to be reductive or a stigma, as a genre term.

The guy did one for music as well. Looking at both of these, it becomes obvious how much this is a question of class and race.

It's also kind of a misleading graph - if I understand it right, the width is a confidence interval, which is why books like Harry Potter, Pride and Prejudice and 1984 are so narrow. But the way they're shown, it's implied that students from schools with high SAT averages tend to prefer Atlas Shrugged and Freakonomics, when what's really being shown is that students from other schools don't.

I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE his response to "correlation is not causation"

Correlation is not causation blah blah.

That's true. However in this case correlation is enough -- the results are provocative regardless of whether A causes B or B causes A, or even an unknown C causes A and B.

WTF. I mean, I think the results could be interesting to examine, my problem is not with what they DID, but with what they said it means.

@opminded--
I don't think anyone said that the SATs are useless, it's more about the lack of validity.

Let's keep in mind that the creator of the SAT, Carl Brigham, was an avowed racist who claimed that the "Nordic" race was intellectually superior to the "Alpine" and "Mediterranean" races and that immigration harmed so-called American intelligence.

Also, no one reads 'Fahrenheit 451', 'Heart of Darkness', or 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' anymore?!?

People use Facebook to attempt to control other people's perceptions of them. Don't like that picture of you? You can untag it. Want to look popular? Friend a lot of people. Want to be exclusive? Refuse to accept friend requests".

People at elite universities often know how to control their image. Maybe they love the Bible, or chick lit, or whatever it may be, but they might not list it on their Facebook.

This is not the case 100% of the time, but it's worth thinking about.

This page has more interesting data. In it, we see that the most popular book at (among other institutions) Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Wellesley is Harry Potter. The most popular book at CalTech (the school with the highest SAT average) is Ender's Game.

Frankly I think sci-fi and mystery books increase your imagination, problem-solving, and empathy, but then again I didn't bother to take the SATs, so I'm a mushroom.

I also prefer books that "have a point," such as a mystery to solve or a goal to reach, not so much pointless writing (like Little Women).

I've met the guy who created this. (We go to the same school.) He's incredibly smart and just creates stuff like this to have fun. It amuses him. Don't take it too seriously. Really.

Becky,
If it is indeed the case that he just did this to have fun and that it isn't meant ot be taken seriously, then he shouldn't go out of his way to publish it on the internet as serious findings with a provocative title. I'm sure he is incredibly smart, so he probably doesn't realize that lots of people aren't as smart as him and don't realize that you really can't make yourself smarter by reading certain books and that there are hidden associations here.

If you're going to publish information you have to take responsibility for its accuracy to a certain degree. If you're going to publish bs, then people are going to call it bs, because if they don't some unsuspecting person is going to actually think that it is true. If he had tried to publish this information as part of academic findings then hundreds of scientists would have called it bs. Since he just published it on a web page, then other people who publish web pages have to call it bs.

OF COURSE nobody who listed 100 Years of Solitude actually loved the book! The people who list it (and Lolita) are demonstrating only one obvious thing about themselves: they know how to "look" intellectual. This means they come from a background where intellectual pretensions are taught...and SAT prep courses are taken...and kids are coached in how to present themselves in order to "get ahead" in life. If you could somehow find out what these people's *real* reading preferences are, you might find they read nothing at all for pleasure, and because they've been pushed so hard through a college-preparatory regime, they haven't learned the most basic lessons a true love of literature can teach. This leaves them as unenlightened as the Holy Bible readers...and just as unprepared for success in real life.

Hi Becky,

Yes, you are right. Booksthatmakeyoudumb, as well as the feedback on this blog, amuse me immensely.

People may take my work as jocular or seriously as they please. I draw no boxes to think within.

Much love,
-Virgil

Hey Virgil, thanks for commenting. Great work!

Question: What are your favorite books?

@Gigi - I love the two books you claim no one loves, though currently they are not listed on my Facebook page. They're beautiful writing! I also love Harry Potter and Jennifer Weiner's "chick lit" books. It's possible to like all of the above!

I got a 1600, so whatever I was reading in high school was actually books that make you smart. If you want to be smart like me, you should read a lot of...

*drumroll*

Star Wars and Dragonlance books. (Timothy Zahn and Weis & Hickman were the best)
Ender's Game gets an honorable mention.

How do people actually finish Crime and Punishment, anyway? Nothing happens for like 400 pages.

I liked the chart, it's funny and cute.

If you really want to do well at the SAT's, just know 2 different ways to do every math problem and be fast enough to use both. (In my year, a single wrong answer would tank your math score down to 770) For the verbal, read a ton. (In my year, you could miss 3 verbal questions and still get an 800).

Has anyone mentioned that these are high school students? A major consideration at that age is exposure, which is directly related to class/income/parental influence--not intelligence.

"To a great extent, what we read is a reflection of our class"

No. I am working class, but my reading is as varied as the shelves of a well stocked library. I've read classics by authors like Jane Austen, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Charles Dickens, but I also love to delve into the likes of JK Rowling's Harry Potter series or Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series for a bit of easy going light reading.

Did any of you idiots read Virgil's disclaimer on his site stating that he is well aware that correlation does NOT EQUAL causation? It was all in good fun, and clearly he means YOU when he refers to those without a sense of humor.

Nat, I don't mean to discount your experience, but it might be that you're an exception rather than the average. Either way, it's pretty hard to flat-out deny such a statement using only one's personal experience. Class can influence access to libraries, what reading material is in one's home, and even how valued the experience of reading is, along with how much time is available for literary pursuits.

Unrelated: do you think we can start deleting obvious troll comments? They're getting a little old.

Gwen - I agree that the methodology of this "study" would be extremely poor for proving...well, really anything at all. To begin with, I'd dispose immediately of the idea that there SAT score measures intelligence.

But it would be absurd to suggest that the books a young person reads most intently - the 'favorites' rather than the half-digested classroom assignments - don't have a direct impact on scores in a test that is 50% verbal skills.

Coincidentally, Marquez and Nabokov - the authors favored at the top end of the graph - happened to be my favorite writers at SAT age as well. The fact that their writing styles require extraordinary attention to complex sentence structure and use particularly esoteric vocabulary suggests that teenagers who enjoy their books have the verbal skills that predispose them to doing particularly well on that portion of the test. (As it were, my verbal score was perfect; math, not so much!)

I grew up in a household so poor that we couldn't afford a TV for much of my formative years, which is probably why I was reading more than the average kid. I realize this is not a statistically common scenario, but it does make me cringe at the association between class and taste in literature.

I'd just like to point out that Lolita is my favorite novel, and (on a totally unrelated, unbiased note) I find this list fairly convincing.

Where is Twilight on this list? It should be dominating the chart.

I’m very unfamiliar with sociological discussion and appropriate terms but I hope you’ll read what I’m trying to say and not the strained parts (we? who’s the “we” I keep talking about below? I’m not even sure)

First, it would be interesting if there was a way to note what books were read in high school, what books were read in college classes, and what books were read outside of the classroom. Like Tomecat said in the comments above, a major part of this is exposure- which to a certain degree is not under our control.

Also, I’d just like to point out that the very question, “What is/are your favorite books” is unanimously hated by myself and everyone I know who likes to read. It’s an awful question. There are so many good books in all genres but trying to pick one (or a few) is like building a zoo and putting one animal in it. But… it’s asked. Inevitably in trying to respond there will be posturing, partly as an adaptation to the circumstances (cocktail party vs. little kid’s birthday party, for example), a tailoring of one’s response to the other person (intimidating and erudite new acquaintance or 7-year old girl, to continue the analogy), and yes, just plain trying to make yourself look good. So, a genuine answer is difficult for two reasons- first, the question is bad and second, we answer to tell the person something more than a title (“I read classics in their original language, so rewarding!” “When I was your age I loved to read stories about horses”)

In making a Facebook profile, you aren’t responding to a single person. So “Favorite Books” usually becomes a weird pastiche of what you’ve most recently read, what some teacher forced you to look at closely to the point where familiarity becomes favorite, and books you discovered and read for yourself at a key time, usually adolescence (for example, that last one for me would be Ender’s Game but for a lot of kids wouldn’t it be Harry Potter, Eragon, Twilight?)

And another thing- it seems like, as a culture (and I’m not familiar with sociological terms) we approach reading as a singular event, consuming one heavily hyped- either by prestige as in the classics or some new, topically relevant- book after another.

Rereading doesn’t play a huge role generally and I include myself in this, even though the few times I’ve read a book more than once, my understanding of the author, the characters, and the story increased tenfold.

We don’t reach for books the way we reach for that CD or DVD.

Two questions I like better and find more revealing are to ask someone “What books have you read more than once?” and “What books have you given to people?”

Ok, that’s my two cents.

Thanks.