In 2014, a mathematician named Jordan Ellenberg calculated which books were the most “unfinished of all time” using Amazon Kindle data.
He named his index the Hawking Index in honor of Stephen Hawking whose book A Brief History of Time was one the most unfinished books ever written.
Here are 10 other books no one ever finishes.
1. Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece is a popular scientific account of his (and his friend Amos Tversky)’s discovery of more than a hundred psychological biases.
Ever heard of loss aversion? This bias describes the phenomenon of experiencing more pain when we lose something than experiencing pleasure when we gain the same thing.
It was discovered by Kahneman.
Anchoring (relying on the first piece of information we get), the endowment effect (people value things more when they own them), the framing effect (people make a decision based on issue framing), or the hindsight bias are all heuristics tested and found by Kahneman.
But voila. The book takes a massive 13 hours to read, and it’s fairly slow.
Kahneman could have written something 10 times shorter and still as interesting.
Of all of the people who began the book, only 7% finished it.