47 Most Recommended Books to Read in 2008

Have you been thinking about what books to read in 2009? Being a book lover, I have. I want 2009 to be a good year of reading and I want to fill it with the best books possible.

The problem is finding the best books to read. While there are many ways to find them, one good way is by looking at others’ recommendations. Books that have been recommended again and again are likely to be good.

Of course, the recommendations themselves should be of high quality. That’s why I made a clear criterion for the recommendations I referred to: they must be popular enough to be listed in Delicious popular. Then what I did is going through all book recommendations that made Delicious popular in 2008 and count the number of recommendations each book in the lists get. In total, there are 14 lists I referred to that altogether recommend more than 400 books. Next, I picked only the books that have been mentioned at least twice and that reduces the number of books to 47.

Looking at the list below, you will see that it contains books from many different genres. There are fictions and non-fictions. There are science, history, and self improvement books. That’s the point of the list. You should read books from many different fields to enrich your life. You should diversify your readings. That way you can cross-pollinate ideas from one field to the other and come up with a lot of fresh ideas.

With that in mind, here are the 47 most recommended books in 2008 (sorted by the number of recommendations and then by alphabet):

1. 1984 by George Orwell (4 recommendations)
2. Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter (4 recommendations)
3. The Bible by multiple authors (4 recommendations)
4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (3 recommendations)
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (3 recommendations)
6. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (3 recommendations)
7. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (3 recommendations)
8. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (3 recommendations)
9. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (3 recommendations)
10. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (3 recommendations)
11. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer (2 recommendations)
12. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (2 recommendations)
13. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (2 recommendations)
14. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2 recommendations)
15. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (2 recommendations)
16. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (2 recommendations)
17. Foundation by Isaac Asimov (2 recommendations)
18. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (2 recommendations)
19. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (2 recommendations)
20. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (2 recommendations)
21. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (2 recommendations)
22. Paradise Lost by John Milton (2 recommendations)
23. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (2 recommendations)
24. The Art Of War by Sun Tzu (2 recommendations)
25. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (2 recommendations)
26. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (2 recommendations)
27. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (2 recommendations)
28. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (2 recommendations)
29. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (2 recommendations)
30. The Histories by Herodotus (2 recommendations)
31. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (2 recommendations)
32. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (2 recommendations)
33. The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer (2 recommendations)
34. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (2 recommendations)
35. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (2 recommendations)
36. The Republic by Plato (2 recommendations)
37. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (2 recommendations)
38. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (2 recommendations)
39. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2 recommendations)
40. The Stranger by Albert Camus (2 recommendations)
41. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2 recommendations)
42. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (2 recommendations)
43. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (2 recommendations)
44. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (2 recommendations)
45. Ulysses by James Joyce (2 recommendations)
46. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (2 recommendations)
47. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (2 recommendations)

I hope this list can help you decide what to read in 2009 and improve your reading experience. Happy reading!

Sources:

• Goodness Blog
• Read Write Web 1
• Read Write Web 2
• Techoozie
• Marc and Angel Hack Life
• Personal MBA
• Lifehacker
• Cool Tools
• Business Pundit
• The Art of Manliness
• io9
• Telegraph
• New Scientist
• The New York Times

Photo by kennymatic