This is part 1 in examining what makes a book a classic work of literature. If you haven't already, start with the introduction here. It's OK, I'll wait.

Does the definition of a classic depend on the person, or is it universal? For simplicity, let's look at people within the same generation, all finishing high school in Canada.

I asked all my least busy Canadian friends which books they consider classics, and got these results, omitting those books which received only a single vote:

As you can see, there's some consensus on the books. The overall distribution can be seen below. The x-axis represents the number of people who believe that this book is a classic. The y-axis is the number of books chosen by that many people.

Next post coming on 2018-06-16. Stay tuned!