Jonah, I nominate one book above all others – perhaps in all of publishing history — as having the highest purchased/read ratio: The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. This book was number one on the bestseller list for weeks, if memory serves, and there’s simply no way that that many hundreds of thousands of people read that much Tocqueville and Nietzsche in one shot. I got halfway through and never picked it up again, but in my shame and self-loathing have lied repeatedly – mostly to members of the opposite sex – about having knocked it out cover to cover.