You can't fault the readers' taste. The Travelodge chain today released figures of the the books most frequently left behind in its hotel rooms. In third place comes the second instalment - and counting - of Jordan's work-in-progress autobiography, A Whole New World, which recounts her less-than-gripping thoughts on her relationship with Peter Andre; in second, we have Piers Morgan's quest for C-list celebrity status, Don't You Know Who I Am? - to which, on the basis of this report, there can be only two possible answers: no, we haven't a clue, and yes, but we just don't care. But the runaway winner is The Blair Years, Alastair Campbell's diaries - the former spin king's 1,000 page homo-erotic epic of how no one lied about Iraq.
It's hard to think of three books more deserving of abandonment, and yet ... unlike the books in question, the Travelodge figures leave you longing for more. For instance, were these books left behind because the guests had finished them and couldn't be bothered to take them home? Or had the readers just got bored halfway and lost the will to live? As someone who has had to endure all three titles through to the bitter end, you would have to hope - for the sanity of the nation, as much as anything else - that it was boredom that won the day.
But if that's the case, you also have to wonder why anyone even bothered to start these books. All three were massively over-hyped, with all the marginally interesting stuff either leaked to, or serialised in, the press long before publication. So you have to presume that anyone buying the books must have known exactly what they were letting themselves in for; after all, these books weren't worse than might have been expected; they were every bit as bad as might have been expected. Unless Travelodge guests never read the papers and are the only people left in Britain who could approach the books with an unjaundiced eye.
Even then it's hard to see why anyone would fork out a lot of money - £25 for the Campbell diaries - and then deliberately leave it behind. It's one thing to feel disappointed and not finish a book; it's quite another to hate it so much you would rather leave it behind than have it poison your luggage. No one's asking you to keep it necessarily: but you could give it away to charity or something.
The more you think about these figures, the less they seem to make sense. Until, that is, you start to think of them in a way that Travelodge probably never intended. For what they almost certainly really show is that hotel guests are a fairly dopey bunch who often check out without bothering to pack properly.
The figures also reveal just how easily the book trade can manipulate reading tastes. All the top 10 abandoned books were newly-published titles, backed by huge marketing campaigns, that could easily be found piled high at the front of any store. No one desperately wanted to read them in the first place; they were just familiar and available. And they were forgotten as quickly and as easily as they were bought.
