photo courtesy holly_in_transito 

On his wonderful “Brainiac” blog, the Boston Globe’s Joshua Glenn posted the results of an experiment by a website called Booksthatmakeyoudumb. The experiment went like this: First, check out the Facebook profiles of students from 1,352 U.S. colleges, and from these profiles, find the ten most popular books at each school. Second, find out the average SAT scores for each of those colleges. Last, create a chart that links certain books to “dumbness” (or, shall we say, test ineptitude) and “smartness” (or, perhaps, nerves/focus of steel).

At the high end of the spectrum was Lolita, while books by Zane were at the bottom of the barrel. The results raise certain questions about the practice of standardized testing (see the low scoring of “Black” books). In addition, they make us realize that trying to qualify literature on any sort of intellectual scale is a ridiculous venture that does no good besides building upon preexisting pretensions and feelings of superiority.