Books everyone starts, no one finishes

Picking up a book is gratifying: look at me, not reading dumb listicles on the internet. Finishing a book, however, is a challenge. Which of this summer’s topselling books have the highest reader attrition? Dr Jordan Ellenberg has a semi-scientific way to find out, using buyer-generated info from Amazon to identify this year’s most unread book.

It’s a charmingly simple (if not entirely rigorous) method: Dr Ellenberg cruises the ‘Popular Highlights’ listings for each title, which shows the five passages most frequently highlighted by Kindle readers. If most folks make it to the very last page, those passages should come from the front, the back and everywhere in between. If everyone drops off in Chapter 3, the most popular passages will be focused in the first few pages.

Thus, if you average the page numbers of the top five highlights and divide that number by the number of pages in the book, you get a percentage that roughly indicates the likelihood most readers finished the book. Dr Ellenberg calls this the Hawking Index. It’s a nod to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, a book everybody wants to have read but hardly anyone actually finished.

You should check out Dr Ellenberg’s full list, there are some surprises. But here are the bottom four: the books that hardly anybody actually finished.
Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

Running at 12.3 per cent on the Hawking Index, it seems most readers have delegated this task to an underling after just a few chapters.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

At 6.8 per cent, Prof Kahneman’s tour of the psychology of the human mind sounds a little dense for beach reading.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Chalking up 6.6 per cent on the index named for its author, this astrophysics tome is a little too much for most readers to bear. But it’s no longer the number-one unread book, which, in some parallel universe out there, may just be the biggest achievement of all

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty

scoring a paltry 2.4 per cent, even the title is making us doze