Favorite Animal Fiction: Not Precisely a Bug, but an Irritant
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Transferred over from the Bugs group. Initial post is as follows:
This month's List of the Month is "Favorite Animal Fiction." Most people have been putting in recent books. My list is... different. I've thought of four books so far. Three are problematic:
The Nun's Priest's Tale (the story of Chaunticleer) by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Owl and the Nightingale (Middle English, author unknown)
(My fourth book was Watership Down, which didn't pose a problem.)
The Nun's Priest's Tale is one of the Canterbury Tales, and is almost always (and properly) found in that book. The usual place people find the Parliament of Fowls is in a collected works of Chaucer. And The Owl and the Nightingale -- when I pulled that up, I got a bunch of different editions, usually not of that book alone (see the one in the link above, which is to a Penguin anthology; every other book listed when I tried to link is either an anthology, or criticism, or a modern translation the validity of which I cannot vouch for).
The effect of this is to bias the popularity counts for my three stories, especially for the Nun's Priest's Tale, which is one of the most popular items in a popular book but which is not popular in isolation. Possibly this doesn't really matter, since it appears that I am the only one who cares about my books :-), but perhaps it would be worth considering basing popularity in part on the books in which a story is included, not just the popularity of individual stories.
End of initial post. To this compare another thread: "Extend the list of 'works I own' using the 'contains' relationship."
Just to amplify my own post:
The Nun's Priest's Tale links to a book that has 118 owners as of July 22, 2022. (I don't think it is actually what I would consider The Nun's Priest's Tale, since one I know one of the covers it shows is actually a commentary and another is a critical edition, but anyway....) However, The Canterbury Tales are listed as being in 19,690 libraries -- more than 150 times as popular!
The Parliament of Fowls is listed in 84 libraries. But the Riverside Chaucer alone is listed as being in 1789 libraries (21 times as popular), and then there is Dream Visions and Other Poems (129 more copies), plus others I probably don't know about.
So the popularity shown for these works is simply misleading.
It doesn't apply to many works (only those that are anthologized), but it will apply also to such important things as Shakespeare plays. So it might be worthwhile to try to figure out a way to do this -- although I concede that it's complex, given the nature of work-to-work relationships.
This month's List of the Month is "Favorite Animal Fiction." Most people have been putting in recent books. My list is... different. I've thought of four books so far. Three are problematic:
The Nun's Priest's Tale (the story of Chaunticleer) by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Owl and the Nightingale (Middle English, author unknown)
(My fourth book was Watership Down, which didn't pose a problem.)
The Nun's Priest's Tale is one of the Canterbury Tales, and is almost always (and properly) found in that book. The usual place people find the Parliament of Fowls is in a collected works of Chaucer. And The Owl and the Nightingale -- when I pulled that up, I got a bunch of different editions, usually not of that book alone (see the one in the link above, which is to a Penguin anthology; every other book listed when I tried to link is either an anthology, or criticism, or a modern translation the validity of which I cannot vouch for).
The effect of this is to bias the popularity counts for my three stories, especially for the Nun's Priest's Tale, which is one of the most popular items in a popular book but which is not popular in isolation. Possibly this doesn't really matter, since it appears that I am the only one who cares about my books :-), but perhaps it would be worth considering basing popularity in part on the books in which a story is included, not just the popularity of individual stories.
End of initial post. To this compare another thread: "Extend the list of 'works I own' using the 'contains' relationship."
Just to amplify my own post:
The Nun's Priest's Tale links to a book that has 118 owners as of July 22, 2022. (I don't think it is actually what I would consider The Nun's Priest's Tale, since one I know one of the covers it shows is actually a commentary and another is a critical edition, but anyway....) However, The Canterbury Tales are listed as being in 19,690 libraries -- more than 150 times as popular!
The Parliament of Fowls is listed in 84 libraries. But the Riverside Chaucer alone is listed as being in 1789 libraries (21 times as popular), and then there is Dream Visions and Other Poems (129 more copies), plus others I probably don't know about.
So the popularity shown for these works is simply misleading.
It doesn't apply to many works (only those that are anthologized), but it will apply also to such important things as Shakespeare plays. So it might be worthwhile to try to figure out a way to do this -- although I concede that it's complex, given the nature of work-to-work relationships.
