Face it, you are never going to read War and Peace. You might have, with great conviction, bought a copy years ago, but you are never going to crack the cover. You might have, with the best of intentions, placed it on your bedside table, but sleep, or Netflix, won out every time. No, if you have not read it by now, you are never going to. You, like me, are probably afflicted with tsundoku. More on that later.
Bookstores are filled with lofty titles that are considered classics, or which vault up the New York Times bestseller list. Best selling, however, is a far cry from best read. Thomas Piketty's book, Capital In The Twenty-First Century, scaled the heights of international bestseller lists but, at more than 600 pages, few people actually read even half of it. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James sounded like it was a hit, but people found the prose repetitive and did not finish the book. Hillary Clinton's 656-page opus, Hard Choices, got snapped up in great numbers, but e-reader completion data showed many people did not read the whole thing. Only a finite number finished reading Infinite Jest, the infinitely dense novel by David Foster Wallace.
The Gap Between Buying and Reading
We may be intrigued by the premise of a book, we may want to participate in the zeitgeist of our times, but buying a book and actually reading it are two different things. Buying a book is like casting a vote — reading the book is like volunteering for the candidate. One takes considerably more effort. It turns out there is a mechanism that sorts out what is being read as distinct from what is being bought. The actual reach and efficacy of a book can be calculated by something known as the Hawking Index.
The Hawking Index
In 2014, Jordan Ellenberg, an American mathematician, created a method of calibrating the actual traction of a so-called bestseller. He named it after Stephen Hawking. Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, was published in 1988, but — poor Stephen! — very quickly earned the ignominy of being the "most unread book of all time." The Hawking Index uses mathematics to measure the moment when people give up on books. The method is based on calibrating engagement with the highlights in the book.
Historically, Hawking's book had found the least favour with readers. However, that honour was more aptly bestowed on Clinton's 2014 book — it registered 1.9 per cent on the Index, whereas A Brief History of Time showed that 6.9 per cent of readers completed the book. These computations are now all the more reliable thanks to e-readers.
Tsundoku: The Art of Piling Up Books
Buying books is a pleasurable activity, and you have got to admire the intention of reading them. Time, however, is a thief, and those books pile up, unread. I was pleased to learn that the Japanese have a word for buying books and letting them accumulate, unread on shelves, floors and nightstands. That word is "tsundoku." It breaks down to "tsun" (meaning "to pile up") and "doku" (meaning "to read books"). As vices go, it is one of the better ones, don't you agree?
