Give a Poll and Write about It

Fall Blog Challenge 2010 Post #2
Sometimes writing a blog post can be as simple as asking a question and getting everyone to give a simple answer. Example: What was your favorite part of the field trip? Scott: the giraffes Mary: the elephants or What did you learn today in reading?

So I gave a Google form poll and collected some information.
My questions were:
1. What are you reading now?
2. What is your favorite book of all time?
3. Which of these best describes you?
Professor
Graduate Student
Undergraduate Student
Other

I sent it to random people in my address book--colleagues, former students, current students, university staff, and some friends. We’ll see what the responses are. After several days, I have a total of 34 responses to my Google form poll. For some general descriptives, here goes: 15 professors answered the survey, 8 graduate students, 5 undergraduate students, and 6 “others”.
Only 3 people who answered put they weren’t currently reading anything.

The other 31 people were currently reading all kinds of things from The Pacific to The Girl Who Played with Fire to Blink to The World is Open to the Bible. Of those reading something, 11 people were reading fiction so the other 20 were reading non-fiction. I wonder if having so many professors and grad students had anything to do with that. Probably so.

And since the responders were from varied backgrounds, I got many different answers to the what was your favorite book. Several of the participants in my little survey either emailed, called or texted me to say the favorite book of all time was not a fair question because they had so many to choose from since they were “experienced” (or old) readers. So, here are some titles that jumped out at me from the favorites list: The only ones that were repeated as faves were the Bible and To Kill a Mockingbird. Hmm, I wonder if I lived in the northeastern or western United States if that would be the same. Probably not.

So what did I learn from this exercise? That most folks around me are reading so I guess they are lifelong readers. I also found that many people listed books that I had read, too. This list included: The Help, Blink, South of Broad, Harry Wong’s The First Days of School, Walden, Shakespeare’s plays, Jurassic Park, To Kill a Mockingbird, Prince of Tides, The Adventures of Huck Finn, The Color Purple, The Thornbirds and Eat, Pray, Love. I also discovered some titles that I will add to my Amazon wish list or download from Audible. The “finds” included Extraordinary, Ordinary People, The World is Open, iBrain, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the others by Steig Larson, and The Pacific. So there is my blog post on my simple survey about reading.