Controversial Books

This page shows your 100 most controversial books, as measured by the standard deviation of members star ratings. (This is also the source of the Zeitgeist category "25 Books People Can't Agree on.") To be included, a book must have been rated at least 20 times. Work titles are given.

Standard
Deviation
RatingTitle
1.2172.83Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism by Thomas Kohnstamm
1.183.48Honeymoon with My Brother: A Memoir by Franz Wisner
1.1324.06Europe Central by William Vollmann
1.1033.64Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
1.1023.29Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
1.0853.37No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late (Adventura Books Series) by Ayun Halliday
1.0534.31Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
1.0183.91The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1.0163.58The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp
1.0113.63The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
1.013.9Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
1.0033.61Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
0.9993.48The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
0.9913.73Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs* by Chuck Klosterman
0.9823.72A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
0.9793.52Shopgirl by Steve Martin
0.9793.47Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure by Sarah Macdonald
0.963.79Without Feathers by Woody Allen
0.9483.6Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
0.9393.71The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
0.9313.67The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway
0.9243.62Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz
0.923.75Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
0.9193.54Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley
0.9063.35Black Wave: A Family's Adventure at Sea and the Disaster That Saved Them by John Silverwood
0.8883.61Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
0.8873.4The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
0.8873.9Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
0.8854.07Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
0.8843.96The Captain’s Daughter and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin
0.8773.25Me of Little Faith by Lewis Black
0.8763.33The Undutchables: An Observation of the Netherlands, Its Culture And Its Inhabitants by Colin White
0.8764.29The Master and Margarita by Mikhaíl Bulgakov
0.8753.87Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
0.873.18Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road (Travelers' Tales) by Jennifer L. Leo
0.8654.18Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
0.8643.65The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
0.8643.96She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
0.8633.29Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking: A Novel by Aoibheann Sweeney
0.8624.09The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
0.8614.26Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
0.864.24The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
0.8513.92The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost
0.853.93Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
0.853.76Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
0.8454.12How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex by Cristina Page
0.8434.15Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
0.8423.64The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad
0.8364.16A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
0.8354.4The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
0.8324.02A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
0.813.75Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
0.8043.97In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
0.7993.83Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl
0.7924.15Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum
0.7894.54The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
0.7853.57Lust, Caution: The Story by Eileen Chang
0.7834.06A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck
0.7634.02The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
0.7353.72Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana by Stephanie Elizondo Griest
0.7334.11Journey into the Whirlwind by Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg
0.6554.28Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov
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