Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

Check out Books that make you dumb, a ranking and comparison of books by correlation with college average SAT scores. Virgil took the laborious time to grab the top 10 books from thousands of college networks on Facebook and the SAT scores from the Collegeboard, and produced this beautiful clustered graph (truncated to religion):

Yes, apparently fans of the Bible have pretty terrible SAT scores. Draw what conclusions you will about the role of religion in modernity. Personally, the data just confirms the old suspicion that reason flourishes in the absence of superstition. Nonetheless, growing up in a conservative American household, I read the Bible a dozen times through, and it didn’t hurt me. It’s all in how you approach it, I suppose.

The other interesting data is what books are positively correlated with high SAT scores, and therefore intelligence. The top books correlated to 1100/1600 SAT score or better are as follows:

• Lolita
• 100 Years Of Solitude
• Crime And Punishment
• Freakonomics
• Catch 22
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Alchemist
• Cats Cradle
• Enders Game
• Life Of Pi
• Pride And Prejudice
• East Of Eden
• Jane Eyre
• The Great Gatsby
• The Kite Runner
• 1984
• Anna Karenina
• The Catcher In The Rye
• The Lord Of The Rings
• Quiet On The Western Front
• Shakespeare
• A Wrinkle In Time
• Alice In Wonderland

I’m not sure that this project is statistically sound, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Other commenters have noted that in addition to religion, African-American literature gets a low ranking. This probably has more to do with SAT score biases than anything.

In an anonymous high school student’s paper about Oedipus Rex, we find this gem of a citation:

Riding in the benzo, poppin my colla
See some fine wenches, I hafta holla
Diamonds, gold, and all the mighty dolla
I’m oedipus bitch, the original balla.
I bust out my 9, to light up your impala.
Fuck that police!

Thanks to George Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy the teacher was forced to give this inebriated student a 61% for his creative efforts. Much to my shame, I’m unable to locate the citation in any of the translations of Oedipus that I posses, but my friends assure me this is a truthful rendering of the original Greek.

I read today a nice edition of Plato’s Symposium (aff), which tries to describe the true nature of Love. Note that this is Love rather than love, so much time is spent deciding on if Love is a god and if so what kind of deity he is, only to have those notions overturned by Socrates who claims Love is in fact a spirit, something that binds different things together but in and of itself is not a thing:

The first, most startling thing about the book is that love between men and boys was considered not taboo, but the most ideal course of nature, so that what we might call today homosexuality and pederastry were simply mentoring and affection. Probably the lifespan of the Greeks had something to do with it, as they lived at most half of what we do now. Interesting, as well, is the idea that the only form of true love is between two men, for the purpose of attaining virtues and sharing intellectual discourse.

My favorite bit is Aristophanes’ speech about the nature of Love, where mankind originally had two heads, eight limbs, etc, and was sundered in half by the gods. So love is literally us trying to reunite with our missing half:

That’s how, long ago, the innate desire of human beings for each other started. It draws the two halves of our original nature back together and tries to make one out of two and to heal the wound in human nature.

This is just too funny:

OPERATOR: 911. What is your urgence?
CALLER: Operator, I need an ambulance. I think I just cut my finger off in the blender …
OPERATOR: (The sound of a cigarette being lit, then an exhale.)

We should do this for all of our favorite philosophers.  I call Jean Jacques Rousseau!

This is the cover to the first quarto editor (1600) of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Fabulous!  (Thanks Wikipedia)