Read a Classic Challenge discussion

Congratulations to everyone on a very successful challenge! I had fun with it and have enjoyed chatting with all of you on here and Facebook as well! I am looking forward to next year.
- Best, John

Scott's Post:

Here’s the moment that you’ve all been waiting for, the data from the 2013 challenge: We had 154 active participants, logged 728 books, and read 208,893 pages! That’s a huge jump from last year when we read 227 books and logged 77,500 pages. You folks have been an inspiration and I love the passion and excitement for literature that we've generated together. I look forward to another great year in 2014.

The top five readers by number of books were:
John Sauter: 50 (wow!)
Brian Stone: 35
Aaron Meyer: 33
Liz Holmes: 28
Martha Smith: 27
Scott Howard: 27

The top five readers by number of pages were:
Brian Stone: 9,380
Martha Smith: 9,374
John Sauter: 9,374 (I don’t know how they tied, but they did)
Liz Holmes: 9,250
Scott Howard: 7,294

The top five authors read by number of books were:
William Shakespeare: 30
C.S. Lewis: 27
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 21
Edgar Allen Poe: 19
J.R.R. Tolkien: 19

The top five most read books were:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: 11
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 9
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien: 9
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: 8
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: 6

Book formats read by number of books looked like this:
Print: 500
E-reader: 174
Audio books: 54

For a bit of personal interest, I had 95 books logged by my former students, 93 logged by my teaching colleagues, 79 logged by my family members, and 384 logged by some very well-read people that I don't know personally.

Finally, I'd like to give a shoutout to Brian Stone and declare him the boss of this year's challenge. We're pretty lenient here on what constitutes a "classic," but as we all know, some classics are more classic than others (yeah, that makes sense). He's read some very daunting tomes this past year. So, here's Brian's list (there isn't a typo--yes, he read The Song of Roland twice--two different translators):

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Faust Part One by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dune by Frank Herbert
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner
The Aleph and Other Short Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Categories by Aristotle
Diamond Sutra by anonymous
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion by George Bernard Shaw
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Their Eyes are Watching God by Nora Neale Hurston
Aesop's Illustrated Fables by anonymous
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Arthurian Romances by Chretien De Troyes
The Song of Roland by anonymous
The Song of Roland by anonymous
Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephriam Lessing
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
Peter Pan by James Barrie
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare
Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall
All's Well that End's Well by William Shakespeare
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

John's Addenda:

Here are some more stats from the 2013 data.

Average Book Length - 287 pages
Average Pages/Reader - 1356 pages
Earliest Book - Epic of Gilgamesh -1300 BC

Longest Books:
Anna Karenina - 1816 pages
The Count of Monte Cristo -1462 pages
War and Peace - 1315 pages
The Stand - 1153 pages
The Complete Sherlock Holmes - 1077 pages

Highest number of books read by publication years:
16 books - 1954
13 books - 1953, 1952, 1951
10 books - 1920, 1950, 1959
9 books - 1847, 1911, 1925, 1939, 1938, 1960, 1961, 1963
8 books - 1798, 1897, 1922, 1929, 1932, 1962

Number of books read by century:
1900s - 445
1800s - 176
1700s - 18
1600s - 20
1500s - 18
1400s - 1
1300s - 10
1200s - 1
1100s - 1
0-1000s - 10
BC - 16

Uncertain (Logged as 2000s but published earlier) - 11

And thanks to you, John, for setting up the Goodreads page. Three of our top five readers were from Goodreads this year, and I'd guess that somewhere between 30-40% of the volume of books logged came from Goodreads as well.