This week we released some early results from the University of Wolverhampton's 'citizen literature' project. Nobody was surprised to see hobbits and wizards featuring highly - but the list still contained a few surprises:
Image: Dariusz Sankowski / Unsplash
"The prevalence of trilogies and series connects many of these disparate stories. Of the 11 most popular authors chosen by readers, only Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne were best known for their standalone novels. The other nine writers all created well-loved worlds that they revisited in sequels or epic series.
Readers’ reasons for nominating those particular books were revealing. We might think of adventure stories as simple tales of good and evil, yet many reported that they were drawn to rich and complex worlds in order to explore difficult choices and moral complexities."
Here's a link to the full story, which I wrote for the BBC Arts website: