The BBC has done a poll about unread books, and found some results that at first might appear surprising:
Some 35% of those who bought or borrowed Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre’s story of a US high school massacre, admitted not finishing it.
The figure was 32% for the fourth instalment in the Harry Potter series, while 28% said the same for James Joyce’s Ulysses, third on the list.
In reality, though, I think this isn’t terribly surprising, because it’s a variant of what I think of as the Labrador Retriever Problem. It’s got that name because when I went to buy homeowner’s insurance before we bought the house, they told me that there are three breeeds of dogs that they won’t insure: Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, and Labrador Retrievers.
“That’s crazy,” you say, “Labs are such sweet dogs.” And, in fact, I said that to the agent. Who pointed out that yes, they do tend to be nice dogs, but they’re also the most popular dog breed in America.
The chances of any given Labrador Retriever biting someone and leading to an insurance claim are pretty low, but there are so many Labs out there that the insurance companies have had to pay out for thousands of dog bite cases involving Labs. As a result, they will no longer provide bite coverage for people who own Labrador Retrievers.
“Yeah, but what does that have to do with the book thing?” you ask. “After all, Rowling was unfinished by a higher percentage of people than Joyce.”
True, but I think the same effect is in play. The Harry Potter book, being a recent pop-culture mega-hit, has probably been bought by a much larger number of people than Ulysses, which means that there are more people out there who have the chance to not finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire than have the chance to not finish Ulysses.
If you provided a thousand Britons with copies of both books, a substantially higher percentage of them would actually finish the Rowling than the Joyce, but that’s not what they did. It’s not surprising that a higher percentage of people who thought they might want to read Ulysses finished it than those who thought they might want to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, because the latter group includes, well, just about everyone, including people who don’t normally read very much. Those people are unlikely to ever think “Boy, I could really go for some James Joyce right now,” but might buy J.K. Rowling just because everybody else is.
On a related note, you might well ask “Why is the fourth Harry Potter book, which is actually pretty good, the one that goes unfinished, as opposed to, say, the fifth book, which was dreadful?” It’s because the fourth book is the first eight hundred page Harry Potter book. The previous ones were pretty short, and thus much easier for people to finish, even if they don’t read regularly. The fourth book is the first one that required a large investment of time, and is where you’d expect people to start not finishing them. And, of course, people who don’t finish the fourth book aren’t likely to buy the fifth one…
(I could be wrong about this, of course– I haven’t looked into the methodology of the survey to see if there’s some quirk in the way they asked the question that would explain the result. This was my immediate thought on seeing that list, though, and it seems like a good explanation to me.)
(Credit where due: I saw the BBC link via Peg Kerr.)