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!

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