Inspired by this tweet, and something mentioned in @SethS_D's book Everybody Lies, I was wondering if Kindle highlights could show us how far people actually make it through The Luminaries. https://twitter.com/nz_voter/status/1076707569853321216

I plotted the most popular Kindle highlights for The Luminaries using #RStats. There are loads in the first part of the book, then they get pretty sparse. As someone who never made it further than Part I, this is very comforting to see.

It's possible that lots of people read The Luminaries to the end, but about half way they got "highlight fatigue" and decided to just keep reading and stop highlighting so many things.
Or, as I always suspected, basically no one has ever finished The Luminaries.

I compared that with The Dry by @janeharperautho (this month's book club pick which we found to be unputdownable) and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (the inspiration for @JSEllenberg's Hawking Index).
To be fair to The Luminaries, it could be much worse.

And that, friends, is how I spent this lockdown weekend. Still a better use of time than lying to myself that I'm finally going to finish The Luminaries.