Thursday, January 04, 2018
It's a Scruffy Thing
H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 1:
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We all know the reader-annotated book of the present day, and we prefer not to think about it. It's a scruffy thing. Somebody has used yellow highlighter to mark significant passages — most of the text, it seems. Perhaps it was the same person who scribbled some page numbers in ballpoint pen inside the back cover, with the odd word to show what subject the page numbers refer to, and who wrote a disparaging comment on the title page, just under the author's name. If it is a library book, there will be no way of telling who marked it up, but if it is private property, the owner's name will almost certainly be on the first blank page inside the cover, at the top right-hand corner. If it is left behind on a bus, nobody will carry it off: it is unlovable and unsaleable.In one small point, my experience differs from Jackson's. I would write:
Somebody has used yellow highlighter to mark significant passages — just in the first ten or so pages, it seems.Cf. the Hawking Index, explained by Jordan Ellenberg, "The Summer's Most Unread Book Is...," Wall Street Journal (July 3, 2014):
It's beach time, and you've probably already scanned a hundred lists of summer reads. Sadly overlooked is that other crucial literary category: the summer non-read, the book that you pick up, all full of ambition, at the beginning of June and put away, the bookmark now and forever halfway through chapter 1, on Labor Day. The classic of this genre is Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," widely called "the most unread book of all time."Related posts:
How can we find today's greatest non-reads? Amazon's "Popular Highlights" feature provides one quick and dirty measure. Every book's Kindle page lists the five passages most highlighted by readers. If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length of the book. If nobody has made it past the introduction, the popular highlights will be clustered at the beginning.
Thus, the Hawking Index (HI): Take the page numbers of a book's five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. The higher the number, the more of the book we're guessing most people are likely to have read.
