Published by the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas (founded in 1990 by Mortimer J. Adler and Max Weismann)
In association with the The Adler-Aquinas Institute and Aquinas School of Leadership
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Friday, June 16, 2017

Sorry James Joyce, the People Buying Ulysses Don’t Actually Read It

From last Bloomsday, Ethan Wolff-Mann at Money.
"In 2014, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Jordan Ellenberg invented the so-called 'Hawking Index,' which uses Amazon e-book highlights data as a proxy for where people stop reading the books they’ve purchased. Some people use the highlight function on the devices and apps, and the unscientific-but-workable 'Hawking Index' uses the assumption that if the most-highlighted passages are clustered at the beginning of the book, the book is more likely to have been abandoned. (The name refers to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which is ranked up with Ulysses for the dubious title of 'most unread book of all time.')"
P.S. Based on my own experience, I don't recommend taking on the Great Slogs. If something well-regarded but shorter by the same author is an option, read that.

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