Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

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.

Here’s a quote Steve Jobs made during his keynote speech at the Macworld 2008 Expo about competitor Amazon’s Kindle ebook reading device:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

According to the Daily Salty’s reading statistics, Jobs is correct:

* 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school
* 42% of college graduates never read another book
* 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
* 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years
* 57% of new books are not read to completion.
* Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.

A little bit horrifying, isn’t it? Reading is critical for a well-formed mind in a way that iPods / iPhone / PCs / Wiis / PS1/2/3 / PSP / DS / TV / Cinema are not; to lose that is to lose entire generations in a media-induced dark age.

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.

According an MSNBC poll, one in four Americans read no books last year. Here is the horrifying snippet:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.

What are Americans doing instead? Working? Playing video games? Watching TV? How many books did you read last year? I know I read at least three dozen…

You can read The Eye of Argon yourself if you dare traverse such passages as:

Grignr threw his hands up to shield his face, and flung himself backwards upon his buttocks. A fuzzy form bounded to his hairy chest, burying its talons in his flesh while gnashing toward his throat with its grinding white teeth;its sour, fetid breath scortching the sqirming barbarians dilating nostrils. Grignr grappled with the lashing flexor muscles of the repugnant body of a garganuan brownhided rat, striving to hold its razor teeth from his juicy jugular, as its beady grey organs of sight glazed into the flaring emeralds of its prey.

The love scene which occurs at the beginning of the book is worse, displaying a completely inadequate knowledge of what “making love” actually is:

The engrossed titan ignored the queries of the inquisitive female, pulling her towards him and crushing her sagging nipples to his yearning chest. Without struggle she gave in, winding her soft arms around the harshly bronzedhide of Grignr corded shoulder blades, as his calloused hands caressed her firm protruding busts.

“You make love well wench,” Admitted Grignr as he reached for the vessel of potent wine his charge had been quaffing.

Protruding is usually not the right adjective to describe a sexy woman, but yet here it is. Read the whole thing for more juicy bits of TERRIBLE english!