What is a popular book that everyone buys but nobody reads?

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.

I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread. One of them has nice art in it.

American? I haven't seen a bookstore selling a bible in ages, if ever

The dictionary dikshunary

Do they have those at the lie-berry?

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?)

This is the best description of it =]

It is literally easier to read the KJV of the Bible than the Silmarillon.

Hey, I read half of it

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.

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 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

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

Spoiler: the killer, it's Zytugur!

When it defined Zyzzyva, I cried butterfly tears.

Read this 2 years ago. Not the ending I was expecting but good book. Not a hard read.

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.

They just look at it for their daily two minutes of hate haha

When was the last time you heard of someone buying a 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

My Godfather tried to read that to me in it's entirety when I was 4 lol.

I wonder whether it would have been as highly acclaimed had it been published under it's original name War: What is it good for??

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 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.

My mom is reading it! She said that it is confusing and messy, but wants to finish it anyway.

Read it twice, absolutely love that book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How many people have you assassinated?

Did you sign the inside of any of these books?

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 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!

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.

To be honest. I did.

Own it and read it, probably 25 years ago. Just ask all my friends I've influenced!

Haha, one ai bought and actually read. It's a good book

This book gets a lot of shit, probably deservedly so, but I enjoyed the story, but skip over the monologue.

In my experience a lot of people have read 1984...

You definitely got me on Fahrenheit 451 though :)

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! :-)

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.

Are you kidding? This is a great book! I've probably read it about 10 times.

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.

You're missing out. It's one of the few books I've read and I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because the book is boring ? Or poorly written ?

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.