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Writer's pictureDeborah Yaffe

Unfinished business

Jane Austen’s books – usually Pride and Prejudice, sometimes Emma, occasionally one of the others -- perennially land on those ubiquitous, completely meaningless “best novel” lists (for instance, see here, here, here, and here). Currently, P&P is duking it out with the dubious likes of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code for the top spot in PBS’s Great American Read series.


A bit of a shock, then, to see Austen’s entry in the PBS sweepstakes coming in at #5 on someone’s semi-scientific list of Books People Most Often Start and Don’t Finish.


Over at Gizmodo, writer James O’Malley has combed through the Currently Reading logs of some 24,000 Goodreads users to find the books they’ve parked there for more than a year and therefore, he argues, aren’t likely to finish. His top-ten list is half fiction, half non-fiction, and Pride and Prejudice is there in the middle, sandwiched between The New Oxford American Dictionary and Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.


Before you get up a good head of Janeite outrage, it’s worth pointing out some oddities about O’Malley’s list. Even his top-ranked unfinished book, George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, has apparently been sitting untouched on the nightstands or in the Kindle queues of only thirty-one Goodreads members. By the time you get down to P&P, only twenty copies are gathering real or virtual dust – not exactly a tsunami of Austen-haters.


Meanwhile, two of the books on O’Malley’s list – the aforementioned dictionary, and Marie Kondo’s organizing manual, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up -- aren’t the kinds of books that people typically read cover to cover. They’re dip-in-and-out-as-needed books. There’s no shame in not finishing the dictionary! (Indeed, if you did finish it, it might be time to, you know, Get A Life.)


It’s not hard to imagine how books like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (long, not as peppy as the musical) or Martin’s GoT (long, not as much skin as the TV series) or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (insanely long, kinda weird) end up marinating at the bottom of TBR piles.


To me, P&P, which is peppy and funny and not particularly long, seems out of place in this company, but of course pep, humor, and even length are subjective qualities. I suppose if you open the book expecting to find Matthew Macfadyen murmuring, “You have bewitched me body and soul,” the real thing could seem. . . different. Of course, if you don’t finish it, you won’t learn that Mr. Darcy never says, “You have bewitched me body and soul.” But perhaps you prefer to keep it that way.


In fact, the oddest thing about O’Malley’s list is that three of his five Most Unfinished novels – P&P, GoT, and George Orwell’s 1984 – are also among the Great American Read’s one hundred contenders for America’s Best-Loved Novel. Go figure. Or at least go back and finish what you’ve started.


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