You didn't even make it to the part where a man of god uses nature magic to summon bears to kill 42 children, or where a guy is mad that a father gives him the wrong daughter as property that he combines genocide with animal abuse!
I was going to contradict you, that bookstores always carry bibles...but then I realized the memory I was thinking of was from the 90s.
I'd say this is just a good excuse for me to go to the bookstore and check...but they've all become so small and sad that I kind of don't want to. I just get depressed.
I know ebooks and audiobooks have massively taken off so people are reading/listening still...I just miss my childhood refuge being stuffed chock-full of treasures.
Not in my experience. 100% of people I know that have it, also have read it. We buy that because we're Tolkien nerds. People who don't want to read it don't buy it. Also it's not at all like yellow pages for looking stuff up, it's more like the Bible I guess, a collection of mythological tales of old.
I guess there are some people that have inherited it, or just bought it for collecting, but I don't think this is the main case.
It might be different for The History of Middle Earth, it's huge and requires a lot of time, and it's more yellow pagey as far as I understand. I have them but have not read much of it yet. (Maybe you meant these?)
I rarely check people’s bookshelves but my experience has also been that people either don’t even know what it’s really about or they absolutely love it.
But I guess it’s possible that some people buy it after reading LotR expecting more of the same and then give up after reading the first few pages of the Ainulindalë.
There is not much statistical evidence for my statement. Mostly from the people I know (though one actually read it, she is a true nerd) and myself (tried it but am probably not as much a middle earth fan as I thought)
Strong disagree. I've read The Silmarillion. Sure I don't remember much of it now, but at the time it was interesting and entertaining to me. It's also not that huge a book, on the same order as one or two of the main LoTR books. If the KJV were in the same (normal) font size+width and paper thickness it would be Gigantic.
It's a massive paperback and looks impressive on a bookshelf but it's a dull narrative. I got about 200 pages in and was like fuck all these people and these stupid trains.
That was legit one of the few books I read halfway through then put down in disgust at how banal, ridiculous, and repetitive it was. The first part was okish because there’s something of a mystery, but the “revelation” that all the industrialists moved to a sort of entrepreneur’s shangri-la and that life without government created this perfect utopian society, it was just such a stupid thing and I was so tired of all the dead horse beating. Anybody who says they like this book is either lying or has mental problems.
Anything by Ayn Rand. She’s a terrible author and most people are more interested in showing that they could have read The Fountainhead than actually reading that unfun, meandering garbage.
I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.
Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.
If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.
I tried to read the Fountainhead twice when I was a teenager and I never got more than a third of the way. It felt like watching an old person try to remember their shopping list
I think kids might. I remember reading it front to back when I was first really getting into literacy, hoping to get adults' seemingly godlike intuition for spelling words. Still like to open it up from time to time to peruse a letter
You can really tell that people who reference that thing have never read it. Honestly if you have a legitimate criticism of Western society to draw from a dystopian novel there's probably better choices. The totalitarianism in 1984 is in no way subtle or hidden from anyone, that's a big part of the point of it.
Of course, to reference something relevant you have to have read things other than rage clickbait.
Heya fellow raccoon, raccoon Bible is much better than the one compiled by Roman bishops in 325AD in Nicea e.g. "let there be trash for all" and "give to racoons what belongs to the raccoons" :D
I wouldn't say most people buy them, but Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For me, they're unreadable. Or, I should say I actually read them during a time when I was reading classics that everyone seemed to claim were great, but I didn't know anyone who had actually read them. At the time I was doing it just to be able to say I did. A dumb reason.
I got nothing thoughtful out of either of them. There were some individual sentences and paragraphs that were fun to read just because of the alliteration and poetic flow, but they made no sense. A book written for others to read shouldn't need external commentaries or a knowledge of the author's life and mental state to understand.
Now if someone says they've read Joyce and not for a literature degree, I lose a bit of respect for them, as I did for myself, and as other people should for me. 0/10, not worth, would not buy again, would not read again
Oh phew. I studied English Lit at university and had to wade through bits of both. I used to feel like I was some sort of uncultured swine for not "getting" them. But honestly, I just don't think they work as novels. As a piece of art, I guess, sure. Fine and modern art can look like nonsense without context, but often make sense when seen as part of a conversation with other artists and movements. If taken like that, fine, you do you, Joycey-boy, and write incomprehensibly. I'll be over here with my Iain Banks and Ned Beauman, enjoying them.
I’m an avid reader and I find I have to take breaks every 20-30min with IJ and just let stuff settle. Otherwise I find myself reading the same passage several times while my mind wanders.
I read it in school, but honestly did not find it to be all that special. Its a good book, but its message was pretty simple and i think modern audiences would agree with the premise immediately.
I found "The Catcher in the Rye" to be the most thought-provoking of high schools books. However, i dont think it really would improve society if more people read it.
If i could think of a book everyone should read to improve humanity, it would have to be something akin to either statistics for dummies, moral philosophy for dummies, or wealth management for dummies.
I came to answer "the Bible", but it seems that was already taken. Multiple times.
It would seem that the people complaining about Christians not studying their scripture, commented without reading the comments ... that's somehow very meta
I suspect not many people go and buy religions texts. Most people seem to get them for free or as a gift, so I'll skip that.
Dictionaries and reference books like encyclopædia don't get read much, but that feels like cheating, because that's not really what they are for.
I'd guess something from classic children's literature? I bet a lot of adults have never read Robinson Crusoe but buy it for kids. Or they pass on the copy that someone bought them as kids, that they never read. As a kid I managed to get through some classic literature, but I'd sometimes encounter one that was actually less interesting than just... doing nothing and waiting for time to pass.
As an aside, I don't think there's anything wrong with having books around that you haven't read! It seems most of the value of a library is in the books you haven't read yet. Or refer to, without fully reading, to inspire you as you need. Or even just have because you think they are interesting or contain ideas of value, and hope to get to someday. The books I've actually read just get shoved in boxes somewhere dark and dusty. On my shelves or on display are all the things I haven't gotten to yet!
For some reason, you mentioning Robinson Crusoe makes me want to either reread it again after all these years, or to see if there is a movie adaptation.
Haha, that's the one classic I couldn't get through as a kid -- I'm essentially immune to boredom, but after the 20th time ol' Rob thanked God for stranding him on an island, I was done with it.
I tried to read it, I really did. I have a rule -- read the first 10% of the book, and if it doesn't hook me, I can give up. Catcher in the Rye is the only book I've given up on
I had a dictionary of etymology that I truly loved. Can't say I'd read it from start to finish like a novel, it's not meant to be used that way, but I did spend time jumping from word to word learning about their histories.
But I'm a writer so I'm one of the few that would genuinely be into that.
If you're Gen X, the entire three fucking ton collection of whatever encyclopedia itanica set out there and fifty time life books about random shit with pictures. Maybe sex by Madonna.
My parents, and those before them loved to appear as if they could ready but only really recognized the logos of gas stations and liquor bottles.
I swear I had all the best intentions, but that book literally taunts me from it's place on the bookshelf where it's been sitting for the past 2 years. Not sure I even made it to chapter 2....
I've read the whole thing, but all the interesting bits were definitely in the first chapter. I didn't know anything about the political situation in Nicaragua in the 80s, so it didn't make much sense to me as an example. Was reading more Wikipedia than Chomsky at one point.
All his examples also seemed like very local problems? Like, the New York Times' reporting on the Nicaraguan situation may have been biased, but international NGOs were reporting the truth (which is how Chomsky himself got his information) and newspapers all over the world were reporting that information. I checked the newspaper archives from my own country and when they reported on the cases from the book (which wasn't that often, because South America is pretty far away), they had the same narrative as Chomsky.
So the interesting mechanical bits were definitely in the first chapter and the rest of it was only relevant to 1980s Americans who got all their information from national media.
I'm not saying nobody desires to read it, I'm referring to how difficult it is to read because it's so wordy for some people. It's longer than the Deathly Hallows, has hundreds of characters, and the main characters only scratch the surface. Not negative things if you ask me, just these are complaints other people have.
If you can get through it, the rest of the series is fantastic. TEotW suffers from a period of time when fantasy publishers pretty much demanded LotR, so everyone wrote LotR.
That series took me something like 5-6 years to read, broken in the middle with Game of Thrones. WOT gets extremely dry by book 9 and Robert Jordan is tied up in something like two dozen plot lines with no way out.
I only finished the series because I was overseas with nothing to do except listen to audiobooks on my time off for a year and a half. The last 3-4 books being written by Brandon Sanderson was the best thing that could have happened to the series.
A lot of hipsters have Bukowski or Hunter Thompson on their shelves that they haven't read. They place them strategically on the corner of their $8,000 coffee table or bookshelf.
I’ve got a library’s worth of books, board games, and video games that I’m planning to read/play/consume “at some point” when I get the time. I actually have more content to digest than I probably have time left to live and that’s kind of depressing.
But those things aren't the answer to OP's question, are they? I'm sure that out of all the Harry Potter or DaVinci's Code or whatever whatever popular book you look at there'll be a nice % of books that haven't been read, but I'm pretty sure that a majority of.peoole that buy them also end up reading them.
The more reasonable answer would probably be something that's popular but not necessarily something you read. Like others have said, a dictionary, cookbook, or book related to some other skill. Those are a lot more likely to go unread
The OP seemed to imply that not reading the book was always the plan, not because it was dropped halfway through because it's boring. But perhaps I'm reading too much into it
The Dostoyevsky novel? I don’t think that qualifies as “popular.” I’d bet money there are far more copies of Crime and Punishment that sit unread on pretentious peoples’ bookshelves thank Demons.