The Un-read

I started reading this book by Niall Ferguson titled Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. The first quote in the book was by Thomas Jefferson and I loved it:
“Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can.”
How prophetic!

The reason I picked up the book was that I don’t consider America an empire; so I was curious. Ferguson seemed to know most readers wouldn’t either, so he went to extraordinary lengths to change the definition of empire from what the British/Spanish/French had to, well, something. It didn’t make any sense and my eyes glazed. Then he quoted American military bases in Japan and Germany as signs of an empire. Really? Did Ferguson check whether the Japanese wanted the US to leave so they could be walked over by the Soviets first and the Chinese today? If you really want a foreign army on your soil, it’s not called an occupation.

As you might have guessed by now, I gave up on the book. Inside 20 pages! Funny thing is that you could have guessed the number of pages I had read by seeing the distribution of my quotes above!

Turns out Jordan Ellenberg did exactly that kind of analysis:
“Amazon's "Popular Highlights" feature provides one quick and dirty measure. Every book's Kindle page lists the five passages most highlighted by readers. If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length of the book. If nobody has made it past the introduction, the popular highlights will be clustered at the beginning.”
Before you go ballistic at this technique, know that Ellenberg knows it too:
“This is not remotely scientific and is for entertainment purposes only!”

And yet, check out the list of “unread books” that Ellenberg came up with. He calls it the Hawking Index, since it turns out that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is very high on that list! Other books that came up high on the Hawking Index included:
-         “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman
-         “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg
-         “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis
-         “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E.L. James

No wonder then that Lizzie Dearden referred to the Hawking Index as the “Top 'unread' bestsellers”!

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