Ranking King's Best Books

[TerryE]

I think this was mentioned in another thread, but I'm sure it can cause enough discussion to warrant it's own thread. Recently Vulture.com created a list ranking all of 62 King books. It looks like printed screenplay exclusives weren't included, nor were some short special editions of stories that got collected elsewhere (like "My Pretty Pony" and "The Little Sisters of Eluria")

http://www.vulture.com/2012/04/ranki...ng-books.html#

Most won't agree with the ranking, but there are some interesting comments behind their reasoning.

FYI, I agree with the general trends they've got. I guess my tastes run very similar to the editors of vulture.com. Quick changes I'd make would be putting "Christine" a little higher, "The Long Walk" way higher (at least top 25), and "Thinner" and "Roadwork" quite a bit lower. I also enjoyed "Needful Things" more than they did. And I'd trade the positions of Dark Tower 1 and 2. But the rest are within 5 places in my book.

[Teriw]

Lilja wanted to find out how real fans rated the book and is doing a poll of 10,000 fans to find out what "We" think is the best book...

http://www.liljas-library.com/poll.php

[srboone]

Voted. But The Stand should have two separate enties, one of the superior original and one for the ghastly revision.

[Teriw]

I went with The Drawing of the Three. It was kind of a toss up between The Stand, The Drawing, and Tom Gordon. I love them all for different reasons. I went with the drawing because i love the DT characters and this is how they all came to be, so to say. Loved everything about that book.

[srboone]

I went with The Shining. But one of the things we DO agree on Teri, is TDot3 (Good choice for #1). The original The Stand is my second favorite, while the revised version is my least favorite.

[TerryE]

Yes, Squire, we all know your opinion on that.
beating_a_dead_horse_by_potatoehuman-d3fead4.jpg

I was thinking about it yesterday. Would it have made a difference if he'd just added the cut out story and left the time period where it belonged (avoiding all the anachronisms that went along with it)?

I voted in Lilja's poll, but he won't get a true ranking with that, just the most popular. I'm sure there will be 15-20 books with just a couple votes each. If everyone could vote on their top few or 5 or 10 (in order) and the computer could score them accordingly, you'd get much better results. Kinda like they do for the Oscars, etc. Of course to find the true bottom, there should be some ranking for the worst, too, or everthing else just falls in the bottom half.

Maybe Dan could set that up? I'm sure he has an extra 100-150 hours next week to do the programming.

[Teriw]

Very true Terry. Someone should do something like that. Someone with more time on their hands. Dan needs to keep busy shipping our books, preferrably MY Grab Bag.

[srboone]

Stormtroopers with baseball bats. I love it!. But that horse aint dead yet, I saw it twitch!

[peteOcha]

My favorite SK book is one that doesn't get tossed out there as the top dog very often. Hearts in Atlantis. So that will get my vote in Lilja's poll. Although my King favorite does change sometimes, but Hearts... has been on top for a few years now.

[Dan Hocker]

I'll see what I can do.

[peteOcha]

I guess setting up a poll with 63(see what I did there Squire? ) choices would be easiest. Can you give people more than one vote? Or there are a couple of websites that let you set up complex polls so we could just always go down that path...

[Dan Hocker]

I guess setting up a poll with 63(see what I did there Squire? ) choices would be easiest. Can you give people more than one vote? Or there are a couple of websites that let you set up complex polls so we could just always go down that path...

I can set up a poll on here that will give people multiple choices. I'm going to try something else first though. I think there's a function of "google docs" that I can do something interesting with.