Month: March 2010

For the past month, I have been following the Best 100 Children’s Books poll over at A Fuse #8 Production.  It’s gotten quite the following, and even my husband, Brian, got in the game.

So much in the game, in fact, that he began to do an experiment with it.  Brian is a pathologist and geneticist.  He’s someone who enjoys doing math for fun.  Seeing a list of ranked books with accompanying poll data just made his brain whirr, and he spent many eager hours with an Excel file before presenting the following findings.  (And even though I am known as a rampant Anne of Green Gables fan, I should say that I had no interference in any of this.) 

It’s like someone took our two professions and slammed them together in a classic chocolate-and-peanut-butter way (“You got kidlit on my statistics!  You got statistics on my kidlit!”).

Says Brian:

I have noticed that fuse #8’s list of the best 100 children’s books of all time is heavily skewed towards newer books.  For example, so far there are 17 books written in the last decade, but only 11 written in the 70s, and 5 written in the 40s.  This is not an absolute trend, but it is clear enough that it is pretty obvious. There could be several reasons for this. One is that there are just more good books written now than in the past. Another is that we tend to rank more highly newer books or books that were relatively new when we were children, so newer books are really overrated compared to where they will be 60-70 years from now.

I thought it would be interested to adjust the scores (and rankings) under the assumption there have been about the same number of good books each decade, and that the total scores of those books should be about the same for each decade.  I plotted a rolling average of all the books that were on the best 100 list that were published in the same decade.  An exponential curve fitted the plot surprisingly well (R = 0.63) and I could generate an adjusted score using the formula:

adjusted score = 100 x (actual score/(353 x e^(0.0146 x (year-1900))))

This yields the following rank list, which I think may underrate some more recent books a little, but will be closer to what the list would look like if the poll is repeated 10 or 20 years from now.  The book the went up most in the rankings were “Swallows and Amazons” and “Caddie Woodlawn” moving up 54 and 49 rankings, respectively.  The books that went down the most were “When You Reach Me” and “Inkheart” (down 19 and 17 respectively).  “Bridge to Terabithia” and “The View From Saturday” did not change in rankings.  The formula may change slightly with the addition of the final 8 books to the regression curve, but it will probably not change dramatically.

This week my aforementioned Olde Fashioned Colde Virus morphed into Ye Devil’s Sinusitis and then progressed merrily on into Thine Ear Infectione o’Doom. 

Not much work was done on the book this week — my writing time was 100% staring at the screen while miserably pressing a cold compress onto my face and counting the hours until my next dose of antibiotics. Oh, wait — at least 30% of that time was spent making mincemeat out of many, many boxes of Kleenex.  All of Friday was devoted to harassing a doctor into giving me stronger medicine (she did.  As she put it, “it looks like you have a giant blister on your eardrum”).  Owwwwww.

The best thing to do, I figured, was to spend time reading about people who were infinitely more miserable than I was, and so out of my mass of wallowing self-pity I turned to Dante’s Inferno.  It’s simply impossible to feel bad about constant ringing ear pain when reading about being buried alive with 1,000 Arch-Heretics in a flaming red-hot coffin.

I’ll admit that my desire to Inferno-ize myself was also owing to running into one of my old literature profs. at the grocery store (he remembered my name, which is stunning) and feeling residual guilt at not having read Inferno as thoroughly as I was supposed to for class.  Also, I heard about the new video game based on the poem, and found it both intriguingly bizarre and unintentionally hilarious.

In the game, Dante Alighieri is a scythe-wielding ex-Crusader who engages in hand-to-hand combat with Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the end of Level 3.  (Hear that? It’s the sound of hundreds of Dantean scholars all spitting out their rose hip tea at the same time.) 

Oh oh oh — and Beatrice is also in hell, because Satan wants to make her his bride.  Thus effectively giving one of the greatest epic poems in world literature essentially the same plot as Super Mario Bros.

May I add that Super Karamazov Bros. would also make for an awesome video game?  Especially if it took the steampunk route . . .

Anyway, I’ve much more to write regarding Inferno, but I’ll save it for further posts (if I can scrounge up the time).  I’m really enjoying this read, it’s much more enjoyable than when I read it as a harried undergraduate.  I’m in Canto XVI right now — Seventh Circle, Third Ring, Second Zone, if you’re interested.  Thank goodness for the map in the back of the book.