A Cal Tech grad student put together a list of the most popular books across college campuses and then correlated those book choices with S.A.T. scores at those schools. His results reveal that the five books with the highest average S.A.T. scores are Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Atlas Shrugged.
Among those five books, I have to admit that Lolita and Freakonomics are the only two I have read from beginning to end. I started the other three but didn’t manage to finish reading any of them.
The lowest five books in terms of S.A.T. scores are Zane (who is an author, not a book), The Color Purple, Fahrenheit 451, The Outsiders, and Addicted. The Holy Bible almost makes this category.
So which way is the causality running here? Does reading Crime and Punishment make you smart or do smart people read Crime and Punishment?
Unfortunately, I fear that it is the latter. Otherwise, can you imagine how many copies of Freakonomics we could sell? Every teenager needing a little S.A.T. score boost would make a trip to the bookstore and see that Freakonomics is 207 pages long and Crime and Punishment is over 700 pages. The choice would be easy.
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I agree with J. The purity of Rand’s ideas are really appealing to very intelligent people of a certain age (a very angry and impetuous age). Definitely a badge of “counter-cultural intellectualism” for about the first two months of your freshman year at college before you realize that EVERYBODY who wants to look smart has a copy on their book-shelf.
For the right-wingers, it’s a kind of manifesto.
For those leaning left, it’s a great jumping-off point for a critique of capitalism’s most well-known voices.
And for sophomores, it’s really long and was authored by a complete nut-job.
I’ve often been amazed at the opposite: how many highly intelligent people have zero familiarity with literary classics.
I once had a friend who had just graduated from Notre Dame, and is now a med student at Dartmouth. When looking for something to read, she borrowed my copy of Lolita. And made it maybe 30 pages in before turning to me and saying, “Oh my God! Do you know what this book is ABOUT?”
You could put that on the cover of the next printing – “Readers of this book score higher on the SAT!” It would be risky, though. People might buy the book, read it and learn that correlation does not imply causation, and then protest the authors.
I wonder how the list of most popular books was developed. If it was based on sales at the campus book store, it could reflect choices by teachers for reading lists as opposed to student preference. Or if it was a survey of students, there may have been some skewing of choices by respondents in the better schools for more “high brow” books to look better in the survey. I mean who doesn’t want people to know that you read Freakonomics?
Interesting that both the ‘Bible’ and ‘The Holy Bible’ are featured on there, but are separated by quite a large margin. Makes you wonder about how this was all collected. Also it surprises me to see fahrenheit 451 so low down. Would love to see this on a national level though.
The kind of experience that also keeps you from calling yourself “The Darkness” in public. (I’m just kidding you; the cheap shot was so obvious that I just had to take it.)
Agreed that Atlas Shrugged is for freshman pseudo-intellectuals. I hate to say it here, because I do enjoy this blog, but isn’t seeing Freakonomics on that list sort of like looking at a stack of The Economist, Journal of Commerce, Foreign Affairs and then seeing the National Inquirer? You have all of this “Serious Literature” and then Freakonomics… intellectuality-lite. Interesting.
I know you would rather be much lower on the SAT scale. The larger varience across scores means more customers and more sales.