More of the Wellington College Big Book Vote 2017 revealed!

Wellington College Big Book Vote 2017

We do love a big list of books and hope all of you are just as keen to spot your favourites and find new reading inspiration in the next chunk of the poll. Below we have listed all the books that polled more than vote. The next blog post will reveal all the remaining books voted for by one person. Thank you to everyone who voted and enjoy this incredibly eclectic list of books. Happy reading! Visit the library to borrow copies of these books.

Here is the list of our top 20 most popular books:

1st           Harry Potter by J.K Rowling

2nd          Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

3rd          1984 by George Orwell

4th          Gone by Michael Grant

5th          Cherub by Robert Muchamore

  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
  • His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
  • The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  • Looking for Alaska by John Green
  • One by Sarah Crossan
  • The boy in the striped pyjamas by John Boyne
  • The Martian by Andy Weir
  • Inheritance Cycle (Eragon) by Christopher Paolini
  • The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
  • Atonement by Ian McEwan
  • Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Tied in 21st position

Bodyguard series by Chris Bradford

Wonder by R. J. Palacio

Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Tied in 27th place

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Maze Runner by James Dashner

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Chaos Walking series (Knife of Never Letting Go) by Patrick Ness

 Tied in 37th place

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

Girl Missing by Sophie McKenzie

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

More than this by Patrick Ness

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Pig Heart Boy by Malorie Blackman

Sapiens: a brief history of humankind by Yuval N. Harari

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

 Tied in 52nd place

Alex Rider by Anthony Horowitz

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Everything everything by Nicola Yoon

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Perfume by Patrick Süskind

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder

The circle by Dave Eggers

The Far Away Tree by Enid Blyton

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The outsiders by S. E. Hinton

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Young Bond – Silverfin (and first book) by Charlie Higson

Tied in 72nd place

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss

All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr

Alone on a wide wide sea by Michael Morpurgo

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Candide by Voltaire

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Children of the Lamp by P. B. Kerr

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevksy

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Geek Girl by Holly Smale

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Holes by Louis Sachar

How to be a woman by Caitlin Moran

How to build a girl by Caitlin Moran

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo

Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare

Long walk to freedom by Nelson Mandela

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Once by Morris Gleitzman

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Paper Towns by John Green

Papillon by Henri Charriére

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult

Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Private peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

Ranger’s Apprentice by John Flanagan

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

Room by Emma Donoghue

Rubicon by Tom Holland

Shantaram by Gregory David

Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson

Steal like an artist by Austin Kleon

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Boy on the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz

The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Selection by Kiera Cass

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

There will be lies by Nick Lake

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Watchmen by Alan Moore

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi

Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? by Dave Eggers

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Siege by Helen Dunmore

The History Boys by Alan Bennett

Maya Angelou autobiography books (7)

What If? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions by Randall Munroe

When Mr Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan

 

 

Harry Potter tops The Wellington College Big Book Vote 2017!

To celebrate World Book Day on Thursday 2nd March 2017  it’s time for the grand unveiling of Wellington College’s Big Book Vote 2017.

Perhaps it isn’t such a big surprise that the Harry Potter series tops the list nevertheless it is fantastic that the series that captured children and adult imaginations everywhere remains incredibly popular. Good to see Michael Grant, our visiting author from last Monday is as popular as ever with his young adult series ‘Gone’ and that Old Wellingtonian Sebastian Faulks makes it into the top 20 with his wonderful wartime novel ‘Birdsong’.

Here is the list of our top 20 most popular books:

1st Harry Potter by J.K Rowling
2nd Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3rd Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell
4th Gone by Michael Grant
5th Cherub by Robert Muchamore
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Looking for Alaska by John Green
One by Sarah Crossan
The boy in the striped pyjamas by John Boyne
The Martian by Andy Weir
Inheritance Cycle (Eragon) by Christopher Paolini
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

We canvassed staff and student opinion about their favourite books of all time through a short survey allowing from 1 – 5 titles to be proposed. It was a completely free vote permitting all genres of book from any time period or location – ranging from children’s picture books to graphic novels, biography to fantasy. This has generated a list of around 660 books!

We counted a series as a single book as people generally voted for a series rather than one of the named individual books. Where deciders were needed we used library issue figures to determine popularity.

We’re looking forward to publicising these popular titles and looking at the list in greater detail –  for example looking at top ten most popular authors, picture books, biographies and so on.

Watch this space for more to come and the full list!