Selecting extensive reading materials

General discussion about learning languages
Whodathunkitz
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby Whodathunkitz » Thu Mar 22, 2018 10:47 pm

I'm no expert but wanted to add a thought.

It seems that extensive reading for first thousand words is quite efficient. Also lots of context, grammar.

By the time you are learning the less frequent words you should have an understanding of the language, grammar, how words differ from other languages in the same family (add e to words starting with s, vowels split under stress puede / poder).

The less frequent words are however widely spaced, so the reinforcement becomes weaker and weaker. So extensive reading becomes inefficient for 5000 plus (frequency order)

Therefore a more efficient way might be extensive reading for a reasonably short period and then spaced repetition for frequency levels. The anki / memrise that are first 5000, 10000 etc. These at least would ensure you met the words frequently enough to stick.

I also think that less frequent words might be less ambiguous, having fewer possible meanings. Pure guess though.

If so, this is good news to me as I like readlang, memrise (web) and ankidroid.

But also bad news because I won't be as forced to do skills other than reading.
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby reineke » Thu Mar 22, 2018 11:52 pm

The inescapable case for extensive reading
Rob Waring

http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_wh ... _vital.htm

What Is Advanced-Level Vocabulary? The Case of Chunks and Clusters
http://www.tesol.org/docs/default-sourc ... .pdf?sfvrs

What do you Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language
Paul Nation

Some excerpts:

"A large part of this book focuses on the principle of the four strands. This principle says that in order to have a proper balance of opportunities for learning, we need to spend about one quarter of our time learning through input, about one quarter of our time learning through output, about one quarter of our time doing deliberate learning, and about one quarter of our time working with easy input and output in order to develop fluency."

"Is there a best method for learning a language?"

"Unfortunately, the answer is no. Language learning can occur through all kinds of methods. What is most important is that good principles of learning are applied."

The four strands (and suggested exercises)

Meaning-focused input (including reading while listening, extensive reading and narrow reading),
Meaning-focused output (speaking exercises like prepared talks, read&write)
Language-focused learning (transcription, Intensive reading, memorized sentences and dialogues, delayed copying)
Fluency development (repeated listening, speaking, repeated reading, speed reading, repeated writing)

"Will following the principles described in this book help my learning?"

"This book can help you, and here are some possible reasons why. If your language course does not provide large amounts of input through reading and listening at the right level for you, then you are missing a very important opportunity for learning."

"Similarly, if you are not doing deliberate learning through using bilingual word cards, but instead are spending time doing a variety of vocabulary related exercises, you are likely to be learning vocabulary at less than half the rate that you could easily achieve.
If your course does not include fluency development activities such as timed reading, then following a timed reading course taking a total of around three hours of study will increase your reading speed in the foreign language by at least 50% and in some cases will double your reading speed."

A large number of words are very infrequent

"Half of the words in any text will occur only once in that text. So, if you read a novel which is 100,000 words long from beginning to end, you will meet around 5,000 different words (Captain Blood is 115,879 words long and contains 5,071 different word families). Half of the different words that you meet (well over 2,000) will occur only once. That means there will not be repeated opportunities to meet these words to help learn them, and if you look them up in a dictionary and study them, you may have to wait a long time before you meet them again."

"One of the skills in learning a language is to know what words are worth learning at each stage of your proficiency development."

"If you are learning a language other than English, it is useful to get hold of the books that native speakers use at school when they begin to learn to read. This is because these books are written for learners with small vocabularies and do not introduce words that these first language learners are unlikely to know. Another good source of reading is to read an encyclopaedia especially written for young
children."

"Read electronic texts using a program that has easy dictionary look-up. For example, using Kindle or Kobo, you can look up the meaning of a word just by touching it."

"Make sure you do plenty of reading. The higher your level of proficiency, the more you will need to read in order to meet words at the right level for you enough times to have a chance to learn them. "

"Reading helps language learning by providing the important learning condition of repetition. That is, through reading learners meet words, word groups and grammatical constructions several times and so have a good chance of learning them."

Narrow reading

"Staying within a single topic or subject area is sometimes called narrow reading. It has three major positive effects on language learning. Its strongest effect is to reduce the total number of different words that you meet. Having a lot of different topics results in a very diverse vocabulary, and in many more words that will occur only once in the texts."

"There is a lot of research on learning foreign languages, but the findings of this research do not always get put into practice. Applying the findings of some of this research can result in very dramatic increases in learning."

"However, if you already have a rather large vocabulary, over 6,000 or 7,000 words, it may be more useful for you to read widely so that you can meet more unknown words that you can learn. Reading across a range of different topics greatly increases the number of different words that you meet. You need to consider whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for you at your present level of
proficiency."

"Is it a good idea to choose a book that interests you and read it from the beginning to the end learning all the new words you meet?"

"Generally this is not a good idea if the book is not written in a controlled vocabulary, or if the book is not on a topic that you already know a lot about. The main reason why it is not a good idea is that it will contain a large number of unknown words (possibly more than 1000), most of which will be well outside your current knowledge and which will not be repeated in the book or even in the next book you read. Around half of the different words in any text occur only once."

"You can make reading such a book easier if you buy an electronic version of the text or scan it to make an electronic version. "

"The advantages of re-reading a book are:
1 it will be a lot easier than reading it the first time
2 it will guarantee repetition of the vocabulary
3 it will provide an opportunity for recall of previously met vocabulary to occur
4 it may help develop reading fluency
5 it will take much less time than reading a different book of the same length."

"...it would be good to have a mixture of re-reading and different reading in a language learning program."

"Deliberate learning is very efficient and effective and so it is worth doing it. This deliberate learning can involve the teacher teaching, but it must also involve you as the learner taking responsibility for your own learning."

What deliberate learning should you do?

"You need to organize your own deliberate learning. The most important deliberate learning activity is using word cards (see Activity 5.1). You need to take control of this very effective activity and keep using it to learn new vocabulary and even more importantly to keep revising previously met vocabulary. You may find that some teachers advise against using this strategy largely because of the belief that all vocabulary learning needs to occur in context. They are wrong."

:)

"It is important that there is vocabulary learning in context through meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, and fluency development, but it is also important that there is deliberate decontextualised learning through the use of word cards, because such learning is very efficient and effective. Some people also believe that because word card learning involves first language translation, it encourages thinking in the first language rather than the foreign language. Research however has shown that in the beginning and intermediate stages of language learning the first and foreign languages are unavoidably stored together. Using bilingual word cards is a very effective deliberate learning strategy that you should use."

By extension bilingual dictionaries are also OK. Not that it matters, but I like old-fashioned, paper bilingual dictionaries.

"As well as word card learning, you should also use concordancers to study words and grammar, you should do dictation, transcription, delayed copying, and oral repetition activities to gain familiarity with spoken and written forms, and you should do intensive reading preferably using an electronic reader."

Concordancers may sound a bit intimidating but there are some nifty online corpus research tools one can also use.

How do you learn grammar (or anything)?

"Typically, people think of the learning of grammar as involving learning the names of parts of speech, learning to describe grammatical constructions, and learning how to correct errors. However, these are all ways of doing deliberate learning, and most of the learning of grammar needs to involve using the language."

"We can learn grammar through listening and reading. When we repeatedly meet grammatical constructions in our reading and listening, we learn them without having to give them much, if any, deliberate attention. This is partly because a lot of grammar learning occurs through learning phrases, that is, we learn what words go with other words. The more we read and listen, the more we have a chance to increase our
receptive grammatical knowledge. We can also learn grammar through speaking and writing."

The Four Principles:

"Principle 1 → Work out what your needs are and learn what is most useful for you
Principle 2 → Balance your learning
Principle 3 → Apply conditions that help learning
Principle 4 → Keep motivated and work hard–Do what needs to be done"

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/st ... e_1125.pdf
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby reineke » Tue Aug 28, 2018 12:58 am

Reading a whole book to learn vocabulary

This paper investigates whether it is a good idea to choose a book that interests you and read it through from the beginning to the end learning all the new words you meet. For the analysis, it is assumed that learners already know the most frequent 3,000 words of English. The criteria used to guide this investigation include the number of unknown words met, the usefulness of the unknown words, the density of the unknown words, and the number of repetitions of the unknown words. Reading a whole book intensively is not a good idea unless the book is a graded reader, a technical text in a relevant subject area, or a set text that would be examined as a part of assessment. Where learners need to do such reading of unsimplified texts, they should be strategic in dealing with unknown vocabulary.

Reading a whole book to learn vocabulary. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... vocabulary [accessed Aug 27 2018].
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby patrickwilken » Tue Aug 28, 2018 9:13 am

reineke wrote: Reading a whole book intensively is not a good idea unless the book is a graded reader, a technical text in a relevant subject area, or a set text that would be examined as a part of assessment.


Can you summarize why the authors thought it wasn't a good idea to learn all the words in a text?
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby RachelMeier » Wed Aug 29, 2018 3:28 pm

So does intensive reading automatically mean you're trying to study all the words? Because I'm definitely not doing that, though I do try to look up almost all the words I don't know.

I think scientists would probably find my reading method foolish. Haha.
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby patrickwilken » Thu Aug 30, 2018 8:18 am

RachelMeier wrote:So does intensive reading automatically mean you're trying to study all the words? Because I'm definitely not doing that, though I do try to look up almost all the words I don't know.


Intensive Reading = looking up words as you go.
Extensive Reading = reading without a dictionary and guessing/ignoring words you don't know.

You don't have to "study" words you don't know, simply looking them up is enough for it to be "intensive".
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby arthaey » Thu Sep 27, 2018 3:27 am

patrickwilken wrote:Intensive Reading = looking up words as you go.
Extensive Reading = reading without a dictionary and guessing/ignoring words you don't know.

You don't have to "study" words you don't know, simply looking them up is enough for it to be "intensive".

How would you categorize what I do, where I read a book while simply putting little sticky notes next to lines that I come back to later to look up?

So I'll read for 30 minutes, not looking up anything at all. Then maybe the next day, I go through the pages with sticky notes and make flashcards out of the ones I still find interesting enough to study.
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby reineke » Tue Dec 21, 2021 3:43 pm

Like graded readers in a publisher series, student performance rises across CEFR levels. For example, examine the aggregate range and one sees that A1 goes from below 0L to 620L, A2 rises from 180L to 910L and at the upper end of C2 the range is from 1405L to 1595L. In terms of student performance, these ranges are well aligned to the reading demands of university and career readiness documented across a number of different countries. Whether in Seoul or Durham (England or North Carolina, USA), the threshold for university and career readiness tends to be 1200L and above. A CEFR learner range for B2 from our linking studies would be around 1000L to 1370L.

In Table 4, student and text ranges have been combined. As one can see, student performance is higher than its associated text aggregate range (IQR) and aligns well with the reading demands of university and career readiness (1200L and above). However, the graded readers in general are too low and not demanding enough for the CEFR levels assigned to them. While the CEFR levels applied to instructional
resources such as graded readers are intended to help and guide the learner through progressively more challenging text are on average meeting this need, they are not quite rigorous enough. The data indicates that this disconnect between test performance and text complexity does not prepare a person who is reading B2 graded readers (588L to 993L) and then expected to perform on tests and classes with reading demands in the 1100L to 1400L.

To address and remedy this disconnect, it is imperative that publishers report a quantitative metric, like Lexile measures, in addition to the CEFR levels of their books and instructional materials. Simply knowing the CEFR level that a publisher has placed on a book is insufficient for determining the reading demand of a book.

https://metametricsinc.com/wp-content/u ... CEFR_1.pdf
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Re: Selecting extensive reading materials

Postby reineke » Tue Dec 21, 2021 10:02 pm

Fiction Text Complexity Ranking


English teachers often have difficulty matching the complexity of fiction texts with students' reading levels. Texts that seem appropriate for students of a given level can turn out to be too difficult. Furthermore, it is difficult to choose a series of texts that represent a smooth gradation of text difficulty. This paper attempts to address both problems by providing a complexity ranking of a corpus of 200 fiction texts consisting of 100 adults' and 100 children's texts. Using machine learning, several standard readability measures are used as variables to create a classifier which is able to classify the corpus with an accuracy of 84%. A classifier created with linguistic variables is able to classify the corpus with an accuracy of 89%. The 'latter classifier is then used to provide a linear complexity rank for each text. The resulting ranking instantiates a fine-grained increase in complexity. This can be used by a reading or ESL teacher to select a sequence of texts that represent an increasing challenge to a student without there being a frustratingly discrete rise in difficulty.


Appendix 2: Texts Ranked by Reading Complexity Score (p 25)

Stine, RL Revenge of the Living Dummy -2.11 595 1 2.80
Fargo, Jimmy I Won Dribble -2.10 822 1 3.00
Cooper, Susan The Magician's Boy -1.96 529 1 5.40
Pearce, Philippa A Finder's Magic -1.56 861 1 2.90
Wilder, Laura Ingalls Little House on the Prairie -1.51 531 1 3.10
Gertsein, Mordicai The Old Country -1.46 633 1 3.60
DiCamillo, Kate The Tiger Rising -1.44 695 1 6.30
Blyton, Enid Five of a Treasure Island -1.42 1899 1 3.80
Sewell, Anna Black Beauty -1.37 782 1 6.60
Holm, Jennifer L Turtle in Paradise -1.37 730 1 4.20
Rawls, Wilson Summer of the Monkeys -1.35 1023 1 6.50
Gardner, Sally Coriander -1.35 760 1 8.80
Yoo, Paula Sixteen Yeas in Sixteen Seconds -1.34 455 1 6.40
Sachar, Louis Holes -1.34 1163 1 5.80
Alexander, William Ghoulish Song -1.29 1223 1 4.50
Cleary, Beverley Ramona and Her Father -1.28 737 1 6.50
Lawrence, Iain Lord of the Nutcracker Men -1.27 719 1 5.40
Baum, Frank The Wonderful Wizard of Oz -1.17 1147 1 7.10
Godden, Rumer Doll's House -1.15 1673 1 7.70
de Saint-Exupery, Antoine The Little Prince -1.13 1407 1 3.00
Brothers Grimm Hansel and Gretel -1.12 2710 1 6.00
Lofting, Hugh The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle -1.12 896 1 7.90
Dahl, Roald George's Marvellous Machine -1.12 1674 1 3.30
Lewis, CS The Chronicles of Narnia -1.10 1613 1 6.20
Stead, Rebecca When You reach Me -1.09 1008 1 4.90
DuPrau, Jeanne In the City of Ember -1.07 540 1 6.20
Clements, Andrew The School Story -1.06 1025 1 3.60
Palacio, RJ Wonder -1.05 1543 1 4.90
Yolen, Jane Centaur Rising -1.04 1419 1 6.00
Nix, Garth Sabriel -1.04 702 1 5.60
Travers, PL Mary Poppins -1.03 1530 1 6.40
Rowling, JK Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -1.03 3452 1 6.20
Cohn, Edith Spirit's Key -1.03 1324 1 3.00
Hill, Stuart The Cry of the Icemark -1.02 701 1 7.80
Carlo Lorenzini The Adventures of Pinocchio -1.01 2428 1 4.60
Pedley, Ethel C Dot and the Kangaroo -1.00 2227 1 7.90
O'Dell, Scott Island of the Blue Dolphins -0.96 1661 1 4.20
White, EB Charlotte's Web -0.94 2082 1 3.50
Wilson, Jacqueline Tracy Backer -0.90 685 1 4.70
Carroll, Lewis Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -0.90 2160 1 10.50

Atwater, Richard & Florence Mr Popper's Penguins -0.88 3126 1 5.20
Farmer, Nancy The Sea of trolls -0.87 667 1 1.90
Selden, George A Cricket in Times Square -0.87 3188 1 4.40
Turner, Pamela Hachicko, the true Story of aLoyal Dog -0.86 379 1 5.10
Shulevitz, Uri The travels of Benjamin of Tudela -0.83 636 1 4.10
Gleitzman, Morris Once -0.81 1789 1 4.30
Dhami, Narinder Bindi Babes -0.79 1699 1 3.90
Castro, Adam-Troy Gustav Gloom and the People Taker -0.79 1806 1 7.70
L'Engle, Madeleine The Twnty-Four Days before Christmas -0.78 2824 1 5.80
Valente, Catherynne
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led
the Revels There -0.78 2880 1 7.20
Kipling, Rudyard The Jungle Book -0.77 6059 1 5.70
McCloskey, Robert Sensational Scent -0.75 1876 1 8.20
Griff, Patricia Reilly The House of Tailors -0.74 1196 1 5.40
Ransom, Arthur A Child's Book of the Seasons -0.73 2967 1 7.80
Curtis, Christopher Paul Bud not Buddy -0.73 1960 1 6.20
Andersen, Hans Christian The Ugly Duckling -0.72 3800 1 7.40
Coraline Gaiman, Neil -0.71 1936 1 5.00
Hughes, Ted The Iron Man -0.70 1345 1 3.10
McKay, Hilary Saffy's Angel -0.69 3123 1 4.20
Horvarth, Polly MyOne Hundred Adventures -0.69 1048 1 6.20
Nesbit, E Five Children and It -0.68 1017 1 7.10
Pope, Elizabeth Marie The Sherwood Ring -0.64 1636 1 7.00
Armstrong, KL Loki's Wolves -0.61 3380 1 2.90
Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying -0.60 2731 0 5.70
Pullman, Philip Book of Dust -0.58 2770 1 4.30
Jacobs, Joseph Jack and the Beanstalk -0.57 4022 1 6.40
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart -0.56 2997 1 4.10
Riley, James Story Thieves -0.53 1767 1 5.80
Cowell, Cressida How to Train your Dragon -0.52 1443 1 6.10
Wilde, Oscar The Happy Prince -0.52 3516 1 5.90
Stewart, Trenton Lee The Mysterious Benedict -0.51 836 1 9.10
Spyri, Johanna Heidi -0.51 1009 1 8.20
Juster, Norton The Phantom Tollbooth -0.51 1008 1 8.80
Hemingway, Ernest The Old Man and the Sea -0.51 1145 0 3.30
Norton, Mary The Borrowers -0.49 2006 1 5.10
Steinbeck, John East of Eden -0.47 2103 0 7.90
Levy, Andrea Small Island -0.43 3538 0 3.70
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm -0.43 1006 1 11.30
Burnett, Frances Hodgson The Secret Garden -0.42 1916 1 6.10
Le Guin, Ursula The Wizard of Earthsea -0.40 2680 1 8.90
Spinelli, Jerry Hokey Pokey -0.39 519 1 3.00
Perrault, Charles Beauty and the Beast -0.37 5723 1 9.80
Adams, Richard Tales from Watership Down -0.37 1406 1 6.20

Bond, Michael A Bear Called Paddington -0.36 2994 1 4.70
Ibbotson, Eva Journey to the River Sea -0.33 3268 1 5.00
Potter, Beatrix The Tailor of Gloucester -0.33 2888 1 7.50
Cather, Willa O Pioneers! -0.32 3180 0 6.30
Morpurgo, Michael Private Peaceful -0.31 503 1 3.50
Winterson, Jeanette Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit -0.30 1745 0 6.10
Barrie, JM Peter Pan -0.27 2551 1 8.80
Ferris, Jean Once Upon a Marigold -0.26 2143 1 4.30
Aesop Fables -0.26 2291 1 7.50
Dickens, Charles A Christmas Carol -0.23 2367 1 3.10
Alcott, Louise May Little Women -0.23 4118 1 7.30
MacDonald, George The Princess and Curdie -0.22 1849 1 13.40
Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid's Tale -0.22 2834 0 5.50
Salinger, JD Catcher in the Rye -0.21 1932 0 4.90
Mass, Wendy The Candymakers -0.20 2984 1 6.80
Riddell, Chris & Stewart, Paul Corby Flood -0.19 612 1 5.10
Chandler, Raymond The Big Sleep -0.19 2452 0 4.80
Porter, Elanor H Pollyanna -0.18 904 1 6.70
van Eekhout, Greg The Boy at the End of the World -0.17 1669 1 3.80
Gruen, Sara At the Water's Edge -0.16 2537 0 4.40
Malamud, Bernard Armistice -0.15 2243 0 5.50
Gratz, Alan The League of Seven -0.11 3908 1 5.60
Montgomery, Lucy Maud Anne of Green Gables -0.07 2958 1 8.90
Homer The Odyssey -0.07 3225 0 12.60
Sedgwick, Marcus Saint Death -0.06 1966 1 6.80
Smith, Dodie I Capture the Castle -0.05 3522 1 7.20
McDermott, Alice Charming Billy -0.05 2497 0 6.80
Wyss, Johann David The Swiss Family Robinson -0.03 3113 1 8.20
Parker, Dorothy The Waltz 0.01 2008 0 3.30
Lessing, Doris Wine 0.02 1903 0 4.60
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 0.07 6509 0 8.90
Plath, Slyvia The Bell Jar 0.09 1723 0 10.00
Camus, Albert The Plague 0.09 5094 0 5.50
Stedman, ML The Light Between Oceans 0.10 1488 0 5.90
Grahame, Kenneth Wind in the Willows 0.13 4411 1 7.30
Gaskell, Elizabeth Mary Barton 0.13 3535 0 12.50
Golding, William Lord of the Flies 0.14 5450 0 4.00
Ballantyne, RM The Coral Island 0.14 3109 1 10.90
Naji, Ahmed Using Life 0.16 3470 0 5.90
Roth, Philip Indignation 0.16 3197 0 7.30
Saunders, George The Tenth of December 0.22 8945 0 3.00
Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 0.27 2436 0 8.10
Tartt, Donna The Secret History 0.27 1570 0 11.10

Author Text Score Word Count Primary Text = 1 FleschKincaid Grade Level

Grisham, John The Runaway Jury 0.32 3069 0 7.40
Bram Stoker Dracula 0.32 5534 0 7.90
Tsiolkas, Christos The Slap 0.33 1159 0 6.20
Berendt, John Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 0.35 7612 0 6.00
Sheckley, Robert Ask a Foolish Question 0.39 2701 0 4.70
Doctorow, EL Ragtime 0.39 2202 0 6.10
Bulgakov, Mikhail The Master and Margarita 0.43 1399 0 6.40
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March 0.43 5153 0 8.20
Woolfe, Virginnia To the Lighthouse 0.50 1612 0 13.60
Salter, James All That Is 0.50 2650 0 5.80
Murdoch, Iris An Accidental Man 0.51 4603 0 5.30
McCulloch, Colleen Let the Dice Fly 0.51 9875 0 6.50
Morrison, Toni Tar Baby 0.52 2628 0 8.50
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 0.53 3389 0 7.80
Amis, Martin Night train 0.56 5214 0 4.50
Burgess, Anthony A Clockwork Orange 0.58 3450 0 8.60
Esquivel, Laura Pierced by the Sun 0.59 2066 0 7.70
Hesse, Herman Siddhartha 0.60 9072 0 9.10
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 0.61 2689 0 9.10
Fitzgerald, F Scott The Great Gatsby 0.62 2649 0 11.90
Proulx, Annie The Shipping News 0.64 3494 0 5.80
Cavendish, Margaret The Blazing_World 0.64 7717 0 19+
Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse 5 0.65 5405 0 5.70
Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey 0.70 1403 0 13.10
James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady 0.70 9326 0 7.60
Beckett, Samuel Dante and the Lobster 0.72 4323 0 5.40
Wilder, Thornton The Eighth Day 0.72 537 0 10.10
McCarthy, Cormac All the Pretty Horses 0.74 3811 0 3.50
Marquez,Gabriel Garcia One Hundred Years of Solitude 0.74 997 0 12.70
Joyce, James Ulysses 0.76 7342 0 3.70
Wharton, Edith Age of Innocence 0.79 1993 0 12.80
Dick, Philip K Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 0.86 886 0 4.90
Christie, Agatha The Mysterious Affair at Styles 0.88 2524 0 6.20
Heller, Joseph Catch 22 0.92 3652 0 6.40
Singer, Isaac Bashevis Shadows on the Hudson 0.93 3151 0 7.90
Waugh, Evelyn The Loved One 0.94 3810 0 5.50
Drabble, Margaret The Witch of Exmoor 0.96 9019 0 6.00
Melville, Herman Moby Dick 0.98 2244 0 9.40
Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four 0.99 9353 0 8.70
Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace 0.99 2087 0 7.60
Chabon, Michael Telegraph Road 0.99 7102 0 7.20
Carey, Peter Amnesia 1.00 3436 0 7.90
Mohsin, Hamid Exit West 1.04 1731 0 14.30

Updike, John Seek my Face 1.04 5436 0 12.20
Capote, Truman In Cold Blood 1.05 2749 0 14.30
Hardy, Thomas The Mayor of Casterbridge 1.15 4635 0 8.20
Pynchon, Thomas Gravity's Rainbow 1.15 2193 0 7.90
Eliot, George Middlemarch 1.19 3304 0 11.40
Sienkiewicz, Henryk Quo Vadis? 1.20 4689 0 8.10
Perrotta, Tom Heroes' Day 1.22 6183 0 10.10
Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote 1.24 26500 0 18.60
Mishima, Yukio The Temple of the Golden Pavilion 1.24 3930 0 10.00
Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain 1.25 2785 0 7.70
Goethe, Johann, Wolfgang The Sorrows of Young Werther 1.36 16023 0 9.70
Eco, Umberto Foucault's Pendulum 1.38 1598 0 11.30
Rushdie, Salman The Satanic Verses 1.40 2643 0 9.40
Barnes, Djuna Nightwood 1.47 1146 0 14.30
Stendhal The Charterhouse of Palma 1.48 4726 0 14.80
Proust, Marcel Swan's Way 1.48 20927 0 17.20
Fielding, Henry The Adventures of Tom Jones 1.51 6137 0 17.90
Franzen, Jonathan The Corrections 1.52 3612 0 10.90
Rand, Ayn Atlas Shrugged 1.56 2663 0 8.30
Bronte, Emily Wuthering Heights 1.67 5385 0 9.10
Borges, Jorge Luis The Aleph 1.68 3831 0 10.50
Abbott, Edwin Flatland 2.02 1328 0 14.00
Rabelais, François Gargantua and Pantagruel 2.07 5827 0 8.90
Shelley, Mary Frankenstein 2.07 17120 0 11.60
Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2.11 5363 0 9.20
Asimov, Isaac Second Foundation 2.12 3701 0 8.60
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter 2.25 9376 0 15.90
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World 2.45 1005 0 10.30
Wallace, David Foster Backbone 2.58 4894 0 14.90
Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron 2.67 5564 0 16.40
Poe, Edgar Allan The Fall of the House of Usher 2.80 7180 0 14


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