The books many start, but few ever finish: Survey reveals the reads nobody reads (HRC 1.9%)

ukmail ^ | 7-8-14

[InvisibleChurch]

It's the cultural crime we don't dare admit - starting that big, high-brow book with the best intentions before leaving it half-read down the back of the sofa.

So those who give up on tough reads will be relieved to hear they're not alone.

A mathematics professor has singled out which books are our most 'unread' - and intellectual big-hitters are far and away the worst culprits.

Readers in their droves gave up on Hillary Clinton's memoirs, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century before they were even a tenth of the way through.

Far more bookworms persevered with the light erotica of Fifty Shades of Grey and the teen violence of Catching Fire, part of the Hunger Games series.

The ingeniously simple test was devised by Jordan Ellenberg from the University of Wisconsin, who studied the Popular Highlights feature on Kindle e-readers.

The function allows users to select their favourite sentences from a book, and the results are collected centrally to build up a picture of which phrases are the most popular among the public.

[Vision Thing]

“Lolita is difficult but well worth reading. It’s pretty fantastic.”

I thought Lolita was difficult to read not because of its style, but because a few of the characters, including the star of the book, were just awful! But yes, it is quite a story.

[Vision Thing]

I’m struggling through Les Mis right now. The disjointed style in the different parts of the book are a bit of a turnoff, but the parts that I’ve liked so far are just hints of how great a book it is.

[Vision Thing]

After reading A Moveable Feast, in which Hemingway raved about Fitzgerald, I read Gatsby, and I could see why Hemingway made such a fuss.

[Diamond]

When I was 19 I memorized the first 14 chapters of Romans (NASB version). I would have memorized all of it but my brain ran out of space.

Cordially,

[latina4dubya]

I would have memorized all of it but my brain ran out of space.

:)

[KarlInOhio]

Any list of unreadable books mustinclude Dianetics. Granted, it's not supposed to be considered fiction, but still, it's the worst thing I've ever read that comes to mind.

Interesting choice. I've never read it, but at or near the top of awful books I actually finished reading was Battlefield Earth by Hubbard. A (thin) novella's worth of story spread over a forest worth of pages. A master of the English language can say in two or three words what an average writer says in ten. Hubbard took a hundred.

[IronJack]

Hemingway and Fitzgerald became good friends, even though the only thing they had in common was their love of distilled beverages. Stylistically and in terms of temperament, they couldn’t have been farther apart.

[zeugma]

Interesting choice. I've never read it, but at or near the top of awful books I actually finished reading was Battlefield Earth by Hubbard. A (thin) novella's worth of story spread over a forest worth of pages. A master of the English language can say in two or three words what an average writer says in ten. Hubbard took a hundred.

Funny. I thought Battlefield Earth was the only book of his that was readable.