Bookmarkers beware: Bookmarks to pages other than the home page may not work after we change our server in April Editor's Choice | This Week in BMJ | Press releases BMJ No 7131 Volume 316 Medicine and books Saturday 21 February 1998 Feed your head More than 100 people have so far responded to our request for suggestions for books to broaden the horizons of doctors and medical students. We started the ball rolling in last year's Christmas issue by publishing 28 invited selections from a motley assortment of BMJreaders (20-27 December 1997, p 1712). Since then another 76 readers have sent us their lists: 57 submitted directly to our internet website, 19 by more traditional means. Special programming of the website allowed a league table to be assembled "on the fly," changing as each new set of recommendations was added. Readers were asked to provide a line or two explaining their choice, and these were linked to individual titles. If these endorsements whetted other readers' appetites for the book then they could order it from the website. Altogether, the 104 respondents suggested 314 different titles. The outright winner, with 10 nominations, was Jonathan Livingston Seagull.Devotees described it as "memorably touching," "deceptive in its apparent simplicity," and "about self transcendence ... we are all capable of recreating ourselves in the shape of our dreams." The winner was fairly typical of the top 12 - having been written by an American and after the second world war. Modernity was a feature of the second division as well (those securing four or five nominations), although the range of nationalities was wider, with two Germans and one Italian, South African, Colombian, Norwegian, and Pole among the 14 authors. Overall, books written before the 20th century were rare. Only two ancients (Epictetus and Thucydides) made the list, each with a single vote - a similar popularity rating to today's cooks (Delia Smith and Martha Rose Shulman). Gastronomic creations aside, the mind expanding worlds on offer were fashioned mainly by men: just 12% of authors were women. Among the top 47 titles there were four: Harper Lee, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Inge Scholl. Some authors featured more than once: C S Lewis, Steinbeck, and Tolstoy each had three nominations, and about a dozen authors had two. Predictably, medically qualified authors were overrepresented, but other patterns were hard to discern. The most obvious feature was the sheer diversity of suggestions: 236 of the 314 selections were unique to one individual. The league table, and the opportunity to add your selection to it, can be found on our website: http://www.bmj.com/7123/7123m5.htm Tony Delamothe, web editor, BMJ Top 12 books Number of Nominations 1 Jonathan Livingston Seagull Richard Bach (10) 2 House of God Samuel Shem 1984 George Orwell (8) 4 The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee The Lord of the Rings J R R Tolkein Catch 22 Joseph Heller (7) 8 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky Medical Nemesis Ivan Illich One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey Bible Les Misérables Victor Hugo (6) Home | Current issue | Past issues | Classified ads | Career Focus | Feedback Collections | About this site | About the BMJ | BMA | Medline