The Hawking Index is a way of measuring how soon you give up reading a book. A famous " largely unread" book is Stephen Hawking's " A Brief History of Time", which scores around 6½% ...... The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt : 98.5% ( Obviously incredibly popular and readable) Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins : 43.4% The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald : 28.3% Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James: 25.9% A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking: 6.6% Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty 2.4% ( Obviously cack ) It is measured "officially" in an odd way ... "The calculation is simple, and as Prof. Ellenberg says, “quick and dirty.” It exploits a feature of Kindle that allows readers to highlight favourite quotes. It averages the page number of the five most highlighted passages in Kindle versions, and ranks that as a percentage of the total page count. Although it does not measure how far people read into a book, it makes a decent proxy for it." That's how they got those figures up there. But for us ordinary mortals, an obvious way to find our own personal " giving-up-reading-it " figure would be to get the page we gave up at .... and the number of pages in the book ... and get a percentage. So if I gave up on a 500 page book at page 300 , that would mean I'd given up after reading reading 60% of it. So my Hawking Index for that book would be 60% ... or just 60 . When I tried to read War and Peace, I gave up at the end of volume two ... there was one more volume to go, and I'd completely lost track of all the characters in it, mainly because they all seemed to have about 8 different names each ! So for me, the Hawking Index would be just below 67%. Not bad for such a boring, tedious and dull book. But here's my question ..... have you "given up" on any bird books ? And if so, why and when ? Here's my excellent example ..... I gave up on reading "The Biggest Twitch" at page 49,at the end of the "Ecuador" chapter.... and the book is 300 pages long, so it gets a Hawking Index of 16.3 % from me. That puts it neatly between A Brief History of Time and Fifty Shades of Grey. If you want to see why I stopped reading it, here's the link ... 715-the-worst-world-tick-fest-book.html Because I was going to write about it, I dipped into various other bits of it to confirm that it was indeed nothing more than a cavalcade of hotels, mad drives/flights, new-found "friends" etc in an endlessly repeated loop ...and all in the tiniest print known to mankind. Oh ... and lots of ticks. So .... have you given up on a bird book ? And if you have, which one ... and why . And then you could tell me about it. ( [email protected]) And I could put it on here. Aha ! A Ms. Belinda Snodworthy from Totnes has sent me the great news that she also gave up on The Biggest Twitch ...on page 137 where they take the night boat to Cairo...... .... so she's given it a Hawking Index of approx 45½ %
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
|