Books that make you dumb

Here's a fun little project I stumbled across while watching WebbAlert. (I really like that show, by the way.) A guy at Cal Tech named Virgil Griffith decided to take book and SAT/ACT data available on Facebook and see how they matched up. The result is a big list of popular books and the test scores and schools of the people who read them. Click on the picture below to blow it up huge and take a look at the data.

Several other graphs and break-downs are also available on his site. I think this graph with the books broken down by genre is particularly helpful. As he readily acknowledges, correlation certainly doesn't equal causation, but the correlations are still pretty interesting. Some of the results I could have anticipated. For example, I'm not entirely surprised that genres like erotica and contemporary fiction rank relatively low on the list. Those sorts of books usually don't need much thinking (or in the case of erotica, perhaps no thinking at all). Other results are sure to cause some controversy. For example, African-American literature and books on religion were linked to lower test scores.

I also admit that there were a few surprises on the list. Even though you usually think of sci-fi and fantasy as being nerd books, I was still amazed how high the genre mapped out, second only to philosophy, and even higher than classic literature. And dystopian books like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Animal Farm actually fared quite poorly, ranking as the third-lowest genre.¹ I usually think of those books as being quite nuanced and brilliant, but I guess the people who read them aren't. The highest-ranking book seems to be Lolita, with 100 Years of Solitude a close second and Crime and Punishment coming in at third.²

On an individual level, I probably have higher test scores than the average person in this data set, but I have books from both the stupid and the smart side. Apparently, my sci-fi, philosophy, and classics collection are making up for my pop lit, dystopian, and religion books. I'm also fairly pleased about how many of the books on the list I've read and enjoyed, although there are plenty that I haven't. For example, I've never read Lolita, but I can attest that 100 Years of Solitude is a very challenging book to read. I read it in the original Spanish, which should get me some bonus points, don't you think? But don't expect me to read Crime and Punishment in Russian; I've had a hard enough time in English.

I know there are a lot of smart people and bibliophiles who read my blog (though I can't quite fathom why). What do you guys think? How do your test scores and library compare to the Facebook crowd? What other data would you like to see?
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¹ The data on dystopian literature may be a bit forced. Fahrenheit 451 is pretty far back from the rest of the group, which is perhaps indicative of its frequent assignment in high school English class. Even more telling, Mr. Griffith categorized Brave New World as science-fiction rather than dystopian. Given that Brave New World readers on Facebook had an average SAT score of just under 1100, the dystopian genre would undoubtedly have performed much better if the book had been classified as dystopian rather than sci-fi.
² Lolita is another problem for categorization. As you can see from the picture I have posted above, Virgil Griffith initially categorized it as erotica, which created an extreme outlier in the erotica genre. But once he classified it as classic literature, that problem disappeared. I don't agree with several of Griffith's other classification determinations, but I think Lolita really is best described as classic literature, despite its erotic content.