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!
It's from Second Kings 2:23-25, which is part of the Torah and the official 66 books of the bible. Though some (most) translations say that the curse is in the name of the lord/god.
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.
Just how many boys in totality are we talking about here? And did the bears have to stop and take a break?
And he went on to Mount Carmel and...
"And then he went about his day, completely disregarding the two exhausted bears and the 42 mauled boys that were part of a sizable mob that he casually called a curse down upon'
When I was in college, once or twice a year there were people from some religious group who would come and stand at the most busy intersections for foot traffic and literally hand them out on the street, yes. They were quite pushy about it
Look, the people who hand out Bibles are usually from a specific sect of Christianity.
I get it, they're just as shitty as most Christians, in most ways, but...
The reason they give the Bibles away is because they figure that knowledge is power and they don't want to force people to have to spend money they don't have to be able to read the Bible.
I hate to say it, but I agree with their attitudes regarding freedom and access to information. They may not be distributing information I care for, but I can't fault the attitude. Information and access to it shouldn't be limited, because knowledge is power.
The reason they give the Bibles away is because they figure that knowledge is power and they don’t want to force people to have to spend money they don’t have to be able to read the Bible.
I want to choose when (and if) I read bullshit, thank you very much.
I mean they are giving them away freely and not forcing the book on people. They accept "no" as an answer if you don't want a copy. You are really free to ignore them.
I have pretty bad social and general anxiety, it is extremely difficult for me to be pushy with anyone, at least in person. At the time I think I mostly avoided them or lied and told them I already had a copy at home, which seemed to placate them.
In any case, I think all they really achieved was wasting a lot of paper and ink, because the trash cans around campus and especially the outdoor ones near those intersections were absolutely filled with bibles by the end of the day whenever those people came around. Once or twice I saw some student accept one and then two steps later toss it in a bin that was right next to the guys handing them out.
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.
Her writing is simplistic, but conservatives and libertarians have pushed her as an “intellectual” because it gives them a well-known writer that supports their trash values. She was strongly against the welfare state and altruism, yet she herself received social security, so she was a bit of a hypocrite as well.
I mean, they’ve elevated Trump as their God-Emperor and he’s very likely an atheist, had multiple affairs, and paid women to get abortions, but whatever, none of that matters when you’ve been conditioned all your life to believe impossible things. Next to Jesus walking on water and two of every animal fitting on a boat, the rest of it is child’s play.
Nearly every religion preaches to be giving and kind to those in need. It's absolutely not a non-sequitor to admit that a large number of atheists don't believe there is any guiding morality to the universe and that we have to come to our own conclusions about morals and ethics. Moral relativism is a generally accepted thing among many atheists. This does not mean all atheists are selfish, I would classify most as Humanists. Rand was mostly an outlier.
She was able to promote the idea that selfishness could be good because she didn't ascribe to any religion that defined that as a sin.
She wrote anotehr novel, 'The Fountainhead,' with all the same ideas but much easier read. I finished 'The Fountainhead,' but it was mostly WTF comes next kind of book. There's an old B+W movie that sums up her ideas pretty well.
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
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
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.
Yeah, exactly. Orwell was trying to paint a picture of how willingly people would accept gross oppression. You can see him talk about it in some of his letters IIRC.
In the West way more than just your TV watches you, but it's done in a very invisible way and for now you won't even hear back unless you join ISIS or something. Cynical forces manipulate the political process, but it's out in the open except for being just boring and complicated enough to avoid too much publicity. None of this is very overtly oppressive.
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
It's actually not bad at all, especially if you're into military history like I am. It's basically just standard soap opera stuff interspersed with treatises on what war is really like. The worst part is that interminably long section about the fucking freemasons, thrown in for no apparent reason.
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 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’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 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 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
It's been a long while since I read it, but the one thing I remember is the idea that you should let people talk about themselves and they'll like you for 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
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.
It's quoted to death on the internet, most of the time in completely the wrong context that would be obvious to anyone that actually read it. It's become a popular strawman, sales rocketed since 2016. If everybody actually read it, it wouldn't be so misunderstood.
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
I get it. I didn't imagine books could be purely ornamental, but the consensus seems to be that's not too rare. I personally organise them broadly by genre and theme, so if I have to recommend something to friend I will point at a particular shelf and go "look in there"
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.
The Bible
The trick is to jump around like a choose your own adventure.
Just popped in to find and upvote.
When I was in elementary school I actually tried to just read the bible. I didn't get very far through Genesis before I gave up.
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!
For me, nothing tops the guy whose neighbors want to rape the angel that came to visit him, so he offers the crowd his daughters to rape instead.
That first bit is part of the Apocrypha. It's not in the official bible.
It's from Second Kings 2:23-25, which is part of the Torah and the official 66 books of the bible. Though some (most) translations say that the curse is in the name of the lord/god.
Just how many boys in totality are we talking about here? And did the bears have to stop and take a break?
"And then he went about his day, completely disregarding the two exhausted bears and the 42 mauled boys that were part of a sizable mob that he casually called a curse down upon'
Thanks for the specifics.
The bible
I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread. One of them has nice art in it.
How? I've read this many times, but I never understood it. Do people just hand them out on the street or is it customary to give bibles as a gift?
When I was in college, once or twice a year there were people from some religious group who would come and stand at the most busy intersections for foot traffic and literally hand them out on the street, yes. They were quite pushy about it
You missed the chance to push back in your refusal. You had plenty of justification to be nasty.
Look, the people who hand out Bibles are usually from a specific sect of Christianity.
I get it, they're just as shitty as most Christians, in most ways, but...
The reason they give the Bibles away is because they figure that knowledge is power and they don't want to force people to have to spend money they don't have to be able to read the Bible.
I hate to say it, but I agree with their attitudes regarding freedom and access to information. They may not be distributing information I care for, but I can't fault the attitude. Information and access to it shouldn't be limited, because knowledge is power.
Right attitude, wrong values otherwise.
I want to choose when (and if) I read bullshit, thank you very much.
I mean they are giving them away freely and not forcing the book on people. They accept "no" as an answer if you don't want a copy. You are really free to ignore them.
I have pretty bad social and general anxiety, it is extremely difficult for me to be pushy with anyone, at least in person. At the time I think I mostly avoided them or lied and told them I already had a copy at home, which seemed to placate them.
In any case, I think all they really achieved was wasting a lot of paper and ink, because the trash cans around campus and especially the outdoor ones near those intersections were absolutely filled with bibles by the end of the day whenever those people came around. Once or twice I saw some student accept one and then two steps later toss it in a bin that was right next to the guys handing them out.
Sadly, they thrive on the social mandate to be polite even to abusers.
Why refuse free toilet paper?
When you celebrate a life event in church you go home with a new Bible.
Really? I've been to weddings and funerals and baptisms in churches and never have I been offered a bible. Maybe it's a local thing?
Count yourself lucky. If you want one, any church would be happy to provide.
American? I haven't seen a bookstore selling a bible in ages, if ever
The dictionary
Do they have those at the lie-berry?
The Silmarillon - the yellow pages of middle earth
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.
I sought that shit out and read every word. I gobbled that shit up. "The Middle Earth Bible" is 100% an accurate description of it.
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)
As someone who has read the Silmarillion several times, any attempt at reading The History of Middle Earth peters out quite quickly.
That's exactly my experience. It doesn't help that I have the 12-in-3 book boxed edition that has almost see through thin pages... 😅
The Silmarillion I have also read multiple times though, both in English and German.
This is the best description of it =]
It is literally easier to read the KJV of the Bible than the Silmarillon.
Easy != Fun
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.
Hey, I read half of it
Alright, name 6 characters with a name starting with fin
Atlas Shrugged.
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.
Wow, I didn't know this author, and it seems I wasn't missing much.
Her writing is simplistic, but conservatives and libertarians have pushed her as an “intellectual” because it gives them a well-known writer that supports their trash values. She was strongly against the welfare state and altruism, yet she herself received social security, so she was a bit of a hypocrite as well.
She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.
What's funny is it's the mostly Christian right-wing which has embraced her.
I guess they're okay with atheism as long as its playing for the right "team."
I mean, they’ve elevated Trump as their God-Emperor and he’s very likely an atheist, had multiple affairs, and paid women to get abortions, but whatever, none of that matters when you’ve been conditioned all your life to believe impossible things. Next to Jesus walking on water and two of every animal fitting on a boat, the rest of it is child’s play.
What the hell is this non-sequitur?
Nearly every religion preaches to be giving and kind to those in need. It's absolutely not a non-sequitor to admit that a large number of atheists don't believe there is any guiding morality to the universe and that we have to come to our own conclusions about morals and ethics. Moral relativism is a generally accepted thing among many atheists. This does not mean all atheists are selfish, I would classify most as Humanists. Rand was mostly an outlier.
She was able to promote the idea that selfishness could be good because she didn't ascribe to any religion that defined that as a sin.
So basically she profited from existing bullshit to promote her own brand of bullshit. That's even worse.
She wrote anotehr novel, 'The Fountainhead,' with all the same ideas but much easier read. I finished 'The Fountainhead,' but it was mostly WTF comes next kind of book. There's an old B+W movie that sums up her ideas pretty well.
As a teenager I had a crush on Dominique Françon and her sexual assertiveness until I understood how deeply perturbed she was.
She and Howard are supposed to be the sane ones.
[sigh]
It worth reading, because you get perspective on how anarcho capatalist view the world.
Read the whole thing. It's OK.
The worst part of the book is that stupid chapter in the last third. Which summarizes the previous 2/3.
I can't name very many people that have finished the whole dictionary
The book gave me a roller coaster of emotions, I never knew what was coming next!
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
Dit you manege to sucseed dough?
Haha kind of, but I still need to have little games for some words, like how the word "parallel" has two parallel "ll" next to eachother.
I'm almost certain my spelling has got worse since autocorrect/suggest became a fixture of my daily life.
Spoiler: the killer, it's Zytugur!
When it defined Zyzzyva, I cried butterfly tears.
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.
You should burn them for warmth so they finally serve a purpose
Jesus
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
Literally 1984
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.
Yeah, exactly. Orwell was trying to paint a picture of how willingly people would accept gross oppression. You can see him talk about it in some of his letters IIRC.
In the West way more than just your TV watches you, but it's done in a very invisible way and for now you won't even hear back unless you join ISIS or something. Cynical forces manipulate the political process, but it's out in the open except for being just boring and complicated enough to avoid too much publicity. None of this is very overtly oppressive.
They just look at it for their daily two minutes of hate haha
The Bible
When was the last time you heard of someone buying a bible?
For Christians, there's one called The Bible.
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
Not as relevant as it used to be regarding this question, but...
War and Peace
My Godfather tried to read that to me in it's entirety when I was 4 lol.
I think I learned the naming stuff while reading Metro 2033, or maybe it inspired me to look it up. Much easier read than Tolstoy.
It's actually not bad at all, especially if you're into military history like I am. It's basically just standard soap opera stuff interspersed with treatises on what war is really like. The worst part is that interminably long section about the fucking freemasons, thrown in for no apparent reason.
Read Anna Karenina you won't regret it. I would argue it's the best love story ever written.
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.
A Brief History of Time - a fair number of people do read it but there's a pretty big chunk of people that just want bookshelf clout.
I prefer the album "A Brief History of Rhyme" by MC Hawking.
I was looking for this. 15 years ago this would have been top of the list.
Definitely the bible for most christians.
Non christians, probably To Kill a Mockingbird.
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.
Infinite Jest
Fuck me it is dense.
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.
My mom is reading it! She said that it is confusing and messy, but wants to finish it anyway.
It honestly feels like something he wrote as a joke
As a jest, perhaps?
And at over one thousand pages long, one can also say it's infinite
Read it twice, absolutely love that book.
I need to go back and finish Gödel, Escher, Bach
You’ll actually never finish reading it.
I have reread it several times, I know I’m far from done. So much I still need to return to.
You got me. I'm sitting next to my bookshelf, looking at it right now, but diddling my phone instead of reading a book. RIP, me 😑
I abandoned it at some point in the second half. It was getting even more interesting but summer was ending and I no longer had as much time.
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 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
Most of friedrich nietzsche's books
Dictionaries or lexicons. Who reads those from start to finish?
To be honest. I did.
I found another of my kin.
I got a really good one that I've seen everywhere but most people read summaries of it at best.
How To Win Friends and Influence People
Haha, one ai bought and actually read. It's a good book
Whats the tl;dr? Is it 'be hot and/or rich'?
It's been a long while since I read it, but the one thing I remember is the idea that you should let people talk about themselves and they'll like you for it.
I don't remember having bought even a single copy but somehow I have 5 copies of Catcher in the Rye, and I've never I've read it.
How many people have you assassinated?
Did you sign the inside of any of these books?
I always forget Patrick Stewart was in that film.
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
Good on ya. The whole book is like that.
I read it. I read the whole damn book. I kept waiting for something to happen. Nothing really did. 1/10
I think I'm in the minority here, but I read it and thought it was great. Worth a go IMO.
I enjoyed it as a teenager, I don’t know if I would like it now.
Maybe you could you read 8too!
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.
Atlas Shrugged.
This book gets a lot of shit, probably deservedly so, but I enjoyed the story, but skip over the monologue.
I think no one has read Manufacturing Consent beyond the first chapter.
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....
Well the first chapter is very good and reading it will explain why this book is so influential. It's also not very long. You can do it 💪
Thank you! I'm sure I'll get there. So many other books on my 'to read' list, but I'm going to bump this one back up.
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.
1984
Fahrenheit 451
In my experience a lot of people have read 1984...
You definitely got me on Fahrenheit 451 though :)
Fahrenheit 451 is highly readable.
Do people not read 1984? They should, it's great.
I've not read F451, but I also haven't bought it, so I'm off the hook! :-)
The Wheel of Time: Eye of the World
Not for a lack of trying
Are you kidding? This is a great book! I've probably read it about 10 times.
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.
I think that if you are willing to buy something like that, you're probably also willing to read it.
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.
Atlas Shrugged
Gravity's rainbow
Probably meditations or some popular philosophy book.
1984
You're missing out. It's one of the few books I've read and I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
The question was what's a popular book everyone buys but no-one reads. Plenty of people read 1984.
It's quoted to death on the internet, most of the time in completely the wrong context that would be obvious to anyone that actually read it. It's become a popular strawman, sales rocketed since 2016. If everybody actually read it, it wouldn't be so misunderstood.
I assume they don't buy it though.
And most misquotes and references are sarcastic.
Assume these nuts nerd
Literally 1984
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.
What the fuck kind of hipsters do u hang out with lmao
Here’s my molten hot take:
Hell’s Angels was his only good book. All the rest were him just huffing various substances and ranting. We get it, you don’t like Nixon.
Very few people can credibly dispute this because nobody actually reads the books.
For certain sets of people:
Das Capital by Marx
A Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
Ulysses by James Joyce
Why exactly would you buy a book and not read it ?
The same reason anyone buys anything that they don’t use, they think they’ll enjoy it but in reality they don’t find time or lose interest.
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 meaning of OP’s question seems blindingly obvious to me, as long as you don’t take it too literally…
I’d say the DaVinci code would be a good answer, I’ve got a copy that I’ve never read. Same with the Harry Potter books as well.
The girl on the train is another book that everyone seems to own, but nobody reads.
Looks good on the book shelf. Many people decorate with books. Look at all those old mansions you see in movies, where there is a giant library.
I guess it's never crossed my mind. I never thought someone would get a book for a reason other than reading it. They do look good in a living room
Every IKEA has books all over the place for decor, and they’re all in Swedish.
I get it. I didn't imagine books could be purely ornamental, but the consensus seems to be that's not too rare. I personally organise them broadly by genre and theme, so if I have to recommend something to friend I will point at a particular shelf and go "look in there"
People buy false books for decoration, so...
I had no idea
So other people think you did read it. Perhaps for the binding color in a background. Maybe to impress people while holding it in a cafe. To burn.
I’ve purchased many books that I haven’t physically read.
I mostly read on my Kindle, or I listen to audiobooks. But for books I really love, I will also buy the physical copy to display.
Fair enough, I've never considered that before, but I understand it
Because the book is boring ? Or poorly written ?
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
harry potter mabye
Demons
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.