There are a lot of books that are great and unread. You know, those books that everyone says are great: “it’s a classic,” “one of the best books of all-time,” “a masterpiece.” But almost no one reads them.
Jordan Ellenberg, a University of Wisconsin professor, used Amazon’s Kindle to do an interesting experiment. In the Kindle version of a book, you can highlight meaningful passages. It also shows the five passages the most highlighted by other readers. Ellenberg realized you could learn quite a bit about how much of the book that people read by where the highlighted passages are. If they all came early in the book, you’d know that it was pretty likely most people never got to the second half.
The winner (loser?) for the “prize” of the most unread recent best-seller was Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The book got a lot of political coverage, but in the end it’s a 700-page “polemical treatise on economic inequality.” All five of the most highlighted occur before page 27! Doesn’t sound like many people made it very deep into that book.
Of course, many have a similar struggle with the Bible. They’ll heartily agree that it’s a great book. But they’ll also admit that they don’t read it. It was given to us to give us the guidance we need and you can’t get that if you’re not reading it.