Everyone was asking each other the same questions. How many have you read? Which ones are you going to read now? What must-reads do you think are missing?
Matt Freeman, a 46-year-old designer from London, resolved to finally get around to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie: “I’ve had it on my shelf for years – a clothbound edition because I thought that if I invested in a really great copy, I’d read it. And now I’ll finally do so – it’ll mean I can tick another one off this list.”
He was talking about the Guardian’s list of the 100 best novels of all time, which was compiled from the votes of more than 170 authors, critics and academics from around the world. Matt was one of 400 Guardian readers who gathered in London’s Conway Hall last week for a sold-out panel event about the list, which we’d published as a countdown throughout the previous week. Around another 1,000 readers joined via a video livestream.
Kiaran Weil, 74, had travelled from Darwen in north-west England and was there with her daughter and granddaughter: “We thought this would be a great thing to do together and so we’re three generations here tonight.” Her favourite novel, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, hadn’t made the list. But her granddaughter’s top pick had clinched a spot: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was ranked 16th.
Some of our readers had brought along a copy of a favourite book to swap with others. But even the bustle and vibes in the hall didn’t fully capture the buzz that had brought them there: the interactive list has now had more than 4m page views. As the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said when she introduced last week’s event: “The result has been an online sensation.”
Since then, more than 3,000 readers have told us their own top three novels as part of a follow-up readers’ poll that we’ll be publishing next week.
To spark this kind of global cultural conversation is no simple feat. It took months of teamwork across the Guardian. And of course, it took our audience, whose hunger for life-changing reads transformed the project into such a phenomenon.
To give you an insight into the work that went on behind the scenes, I spoke to colleagues about how the whole thing came together – the polling, the coding, reporting, designing and data-crunching behind our landmark list.
Poll positions
When Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer, the Guardian’s joint heads of books, first proposed the idea of a list of the 100 best novels, they knew they wanted it to be a more ambitious undertaking than previous rankings. “We wanted to think beyond previous lists that had just been curated internally,” says Liese. “So we decided to poll lots of people who read a lot and spend their days thinking about books.”
All in, our books desk polled 380 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels. After some gentle nudging, followed by a bit of urgent prodding, 172 respondents cast 1,720 votes – including Stephen King, Elif Shafak, Salman Rushdie, Maggie O’Farrell, Ian McEwan, Bernardine Evaristo, Colm Tóibín and Siri Hustvedt.
But it wasn’t just about ranking the novels. The list contains nifty interactive features that allow readers to check out who voted for each novel, and then peek at their favourite novelist’s top 10 – including those books that didn’t make the final list. There’s also a feature that lets you tally which of the 100 you’ve read and share your score.
“We wanted it to be a fun experience where you could click on the list and go as deep as you want to,” says Liese. “There was so much enthusiasm and input from across the organisation, with different desks bringing different ideas to make this work. We couldn’t have done this without the data and digital design.”
One dilemma was how to weight the votes. Even if someone’s all-time favourite novels remain fairly consistent, if you’re anything like me, your actual order of preference might vary from day to day depending on your mood. “For the scoring mechanism, we didn’t know how much significance to give to each respondent’s order of books,” says Tom Richards, an engineer on the Guardian’s digital investigations team who worked on the project. “For some voters, the ranking was arbitrary. So, to begin with, we placed more emphasis on the raw number of votes.”
A list such as this will always be subjective. Each voter will have had their own criteria about what makes a novel great – and about what greatness even means. As the author Elif Shafak told readers at last week’s Guardian Live event: “I didn’t think of [my top 10] as the greatest novels for everyone, but personally for me: these were books that had touched me, changed me and have stayed with me at different stages of my life.”
Sitting beside her on the stage, the author Guy Gunaratne said they’d also selected “books that I would love to give to someone because I know it would have such a monumental impact on them. Like [James Baldwin’s] Giovanni’s Room, the way that made me feel – I would like to offer that to someone else”.
But even if this kind of list can never be scientifically definitive, the work that went into compiling it still needed to be rigorous. For example, those working on data and development had to deploy a more hard-nosed analytical approach when it came to ties in the final tally. “We knew there’d be lots of tie-breaks in the bottom half of the list because those novels by definition would have had fewer votes, making it more likely they’d end up with identical total scores,” explains Tom. “So we then tried to resolve those mathematically by looking at factors such as the average position in people’s ranking, the best position, and so forth.”
It wasn’t just about numerical data. The book titles also needed to be crunchable. “We cautioned against allowing voters to just type the names of novels into a text field because there might be typos or slight variations in the title, especially for novels that were originally published in a language other than English,” says Tom. “All those factors could potentially lead to mistakes when it came to counting votes.”
His solution was to build a bespoke voting tool to help voters search for and submit their favourite novels in a standardised format, with the search function powered by the open source platform Open Library. The tool generated personalised ballot forms that were sent to voters. “And then, when they submitted their forms, the data flowed straight into our spreadsheet.”
The sheer effort that went into making it a smooth and polished experience for our voters was matched by the work that went into making the list visually arresting and user friendly for the Guardian’s audience.
Barry Ainslie, a digital designer who worked on the project, explains the thinking behind one of the striking animations that accompanied the list: “There’s a vogue for replicating nature with coding, so the team had this idea of books falling like leaves. The falling effect feels arresting and organic.”
However, because the list was unveiled in stages over the course of a week, some of those falling books needed to have their covers blanked out until the novel in question was revealed in the list. “We also had to temporarily redact some of the titles in voters’ top 10s so that we weren’t giving anything away too early,” Barry adds.
Frederick O’Brien, a journalist and software developer, says this was the trickiest aspect when it came to coding the project: “Although there were plenty of moving parts to the interactive itself the biggest challenge was probably wiring up the data so that we could safely reveal the list 20 books at a time, leaving ‘censored’ spots to tease those yet to be revealed.”
Other clever design features include a function that allows you to view the top 100 either as a stack of titles that resemble book spines or as a gallery of book covers. There are even little dog-eared folds that appear on the tabs that readers click on to indicate they have read that book.
In the age of the so-called quantified self, the function that allows readers to tally how many of the novels they have read has proved a great hook. “That’s your entry point for talking about the whole thing,” says Liese. “And it’s also quite motivating.”
‘A meeting place for authors and readers’
The other big talking point has been around which books and authors are missing from the list. Lisa Allardice, the Guardian’s chief books writer who chaired the live event, interrogated the list in this thoughtful accompanying article.
Another topic raised by a Guardian reader at the event was how to make some of the more challenging books more accessible for readers who might be put off. Some panellists highlighted the benefits of making it more of a collective pursuit. Guy held up a battered copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses that contained notes in the margins of opinions from friends who had tackled the novel together: “A communal experience when reading is very fruitful.”
It seemed a fitting comment, not only for that evening’s event and the list itself, but also for the Guardian’s books coverage generally. “One reason there’s been such a great response to this list is because the Guardian has always been a lovely meeting place for authors and readers,” says Liese. “And Guardian readers are very passionate about books. We knew that already, of course, but the response to the top 100 novels list – and now the reader poll – has been truly inspirational.”
This idea of a meeting place for readers and writers sparks a flashback to a time at school when I was mocked by fellow pupils after fessing up in an English lit lesson that I read novels outside our syllabus for fun. Reading felt like such a lonely pursuit back then. Thankfully, I soon found a place I could turn to in order to make it less isolating and more of a shared experience: the books section of the Guardian.
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