I spent a good share of last week poring over election results for the One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t) project. I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear that American Gods, a Hugo Award winning novel, won handily with an aggregate of 431 votes.
That said, AG didn't win as easily as we anticipated. Fahrenheit 451 came in a relatively close second with 358 votes. (Quick explanation of scoring: Votes recorded here reflect the difference between "Up" votes and "Down" votes—Thus F451 received 611 Ups and 253 Downs for a total of 358 votes). 1984 came in close behind with 348 votes. These three books dominated the leaderboard, as they had from almost the first minutes we opened voting.
This reveals something about social media and online voting, where a considerable advantage goes to those books nominated early in the process. The mechanics behind the final round of voting next week won't have this bias.
The books to come in fourth and fifth place were Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22, with 113 and 104 votes respectively. The One Book, One Twitter board will be adding four more titles to this list to make a slate of ten finalists. We'll be voting on these books for a few weeks starting on April 12. Whatever book wins that is the book we'll read. Woo Hoo!
A bunch of entries deserve honorable mention: Someone suggested "Books about Twitter," which received 82 "Good God, No!" votes and exactly one "Yes" vote. A few other titles managed to pick up considerable steam, but someone—script kiddies, I know you're out there — seems to have marshalled enough "no" votes to keep them out of the final count. These include Paulo Coelho's *The Alchemist, *Garth Stein's *The Art of Racing in the Rain, *and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. I'm not sure any single one of these would have made it into the final six, but I found it suspicious that Art of Racing, for instance, had 147 Yes votes, and 176 no votes.
One problem with this round of voting — as many of you pointed out — was that we allowed multiple nominations of the same title. American Gods, for instance, had 28 separate entries for it. This proved confusing — our apologies. The next round won't allow submissions of course, just the ability to vote on the ten finalists.
Again: Voting starts a week from today, but we'll be announcing the four "judges choice" books later this week.
Winners:
- American Gods
- Fahrenheit 451
- 1984
- Brave New World
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Catch-22
