Recently, Jordan Ellenberg noticed that, judging by the most-frequently-highlighted passages in Kindle bestsellers, the overwhelming majority of people who buy Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century don’t make it far past the first pages. As William Falk observes, “the Kindle formula also works with fiction”:
Ellenberg’s dullness detector uncovered a curious phenomenon among readers of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year. The five most popular highlights all occur in thelast 20 pages of the 771-page novel. Is that a compliment? I suspect not. The Goldfinch is one of those self-conscious “masterpieces” that some readers and critics adore — and some, like me, find bloated and self-indulgent. To get to the end, I found myself skimming over dense chunks of pointless description and meandering subplots. … I think Tartt’s novel would benefit if it were cut by, say, 250 pages. Kindle doesn’t lie: To be read more, write less.
Meanwhile, Tom Lamont advocates abandoning boring books early on:
[O]f course you should stop reading when the fireworks aren’t there. When you aren’t impressed, lulled, entertained, lightened, depressed, remoulded, whatever you go to books for. Even if it means reshelving the thing with that telltale halt in the creases on the spine, or admitting to friends, spouses or book clubs that you’ve bunked a recommendation.
Alex Clark differs:
Believe me, I am not defending every book that gets published, nor telling people to force themselves onwards when something is clearly a) dross or b) so completely antithetical to everything they as a reader hold dear that only misery awaits. That would be ludicrous, masochistic and likely to result in a more total disenchantment with reading. … But I am saying that if you give up on a book the minute you don’t like a character, twig a plot development, see quite where the author’s going with it all, have a sudden yen for a game of Candy Crush – then you’re going to miss out. I’ve nothing against reads that are quick and dirty fun, but seriously good books are immersive experiences, demanding of time and patience. Respect them.
Previous Dish on Piketty here, and previous Dish on The Goldfinch here.
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