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.
Yeah. My grandpa made me read Atlas Shrugged when I was in HS and it was so dumb it made me a communist. I did like the scene with the fast train on the green rails. Literally the only scene in the whole book with imagery.
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
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-John Rogers
Can you blame them? Even South Park made fun of how bad Atlas Shrugged is.
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.
Jesus
You should burn them for warmth so they finally serve a purpose
People can just enjoy them for stories and not actually believe in what the writer wants them to believe.
I can personally attest to that as I have to do it with most fiction, including Ayn Rand stuff.
Nothing killed libertarianism for 19 year old me like reading that trash.
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.
Ulysses by James Joyce.
I convinced myself it was very important to read this book when I was 17, physically dragged my eyes across ~200 pages of it, and understood nothing of what was happening.
Lmao me with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (makes sense ig it’s just a guys whole childhood)
i liked the hell-fire sermon. My one office job I ever had, I did a dramatic reading of it for an old man and a former improv kid.
Sdgflk I read that part out loud for no reason at a band camp once and nobody was interested. I was a weird kid
Why exactly would you buy a book and not read it ?
Adhd
I have a few dozen books. A third I’ve read all the way through, the rest I’ve picked up and put down or skimmed.
It helps to have a lot of options so that I’m more likely to find one that clicks and holds my attention for longer.
Plus I frequently reference books for specific info or quotes.
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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
People buy false books for decoration, so…
I had no idea
I have a pretty decent sized library. My fiction section is about 95% read, but the non-fiction sections are much less. You sometimes buy non-fiction as reference materials, to flip through, etc. Not necessarily to read cover-to-cover. (I’d guess my non-fiction is 25% read.)
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.
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.
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.
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
meant to read it then never actually got around to it
Without a shadow of a doubt the Bible.
No, reading the Gospels, Paul’s letters, Revelations, Genesis, Exodus, and selected Psalms doesn’t count as reading the Bible. Do you count reading 10 chapters of a 60+ chapter book as reading the book? Of course not.
I was raised in a Christian household, and I was told that when I turned 12 I could be baptized. I looked forward to, and on the summer I was 10, I decided I wanted to be ready. I sat down and read the bible, front to back. I got to the end, and I paused: this was nothing like what they were telling me! I decided to read it again through, certainly I missed something? At the end, I decided to work through again, one more time, and then I was no longer Christian, at least not like these other ones. Now I’m not at all, but I love being able to source the bible more accurately than my Christian family members.
I grew up in an evangelical house and I constantly get to wield the line: “I guess I took the wrong lessons” as my comeback to literally any political dispute and it is wonderful having the ability to actually quote the Bible when arguing with my child relatives
Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk To Freedom. So many people want a copy to signal that they’re cool and love the idea of the rainbow nation in South Africa, and that racism officially ended™ when Mandela wore a Springbok rugby jersey in 1995.
They don’t realise that in his autobiography Mandela says that he takes inspiration from other left wing leaders like Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, and rips into the ideology of people like F.W de Klerk. If they actually read it, they’d probably be shocked.
Sometimes I buy physical copies of books I’ve read digitally.
Sometimes I buy physical books, then listen to them digitally instead
The bible
I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread. One of them has nice art in it.
I inherited a ton of books from my father, who was a minister & a Jungian psychologist. Lots of old interesting bibles, in a handful of languages. (Plus a Koran, and some Crowley, and of shelf full of Trotsky… ha ha. Lotta books.)
I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread
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 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.
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.
Why refuse free toilet paper?
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.
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.
Sadly, they thrive on the social mandate to be polite even to abusers.
American? I haven’t seen a bookstore selling a bible in ages, if ever
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.
Sucker play, it’s trivial to get a bible for free. For instance, one could find it on libgen or something idk
I just take the complimentary ones from hotels
Yeah, haha I was hoping the joke would land
They’re really lousy for critical reading, though. I like the ones from United Biblical Society, with maps and appendices. They’re good for linguistic reference, and they add titles and illustrations.
I can’t name very many people that have finished the whole dictionary
When it defined Zyzzyva, I cried butterfly tears.
Spoiler: the killer, it’s Zytugur!
The book gave me a roller coaster of emotions, I never knew what was coming next!
You joke but I read the dictionary as a kid (and not for the naughty words); helped me expand my vocabulary and gave me knowledge of stuff I wouldn’t have known about at that age.
Hey, I did that as a kid too! My school was a glorified daycare, it was often the only reading material available, and it was somewhat more interesting than staring at the clock all day.
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
hoping to get adults’ seemingly godlike intuition for spelling words.
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.
A Brief History of Time was the classic one amongst self-described sapiosexuals
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.
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
The art of war. I would say anything by George Orwell but I know for a fact kids are forced to read his shitty fairy tales in high school as a part of their ideological brainwashing
hiding amazing emojis
Kids being forced to read 1984 in high school like “THIS IS LITERALLY 1984”
The art of war is actually quite short though
Imagine the number of stonk devils, business ghouls, and tech demons that have a copy as a library or coffee table decoration piece.
it’s not even relevant if they did read it. It’s an instruction manual for running an ancient chinese army
I’m sure it was revolutionary back in the day for warlords to learn that keeping your supply lines defended was important and also you shouldn’t fight a battle against an uphill defender with the sun at their back on muddy ground.
Yeah but it’s about as relevant to running a business as a manual to use a toaster
Tbf far from the worst book they haven’t read
I think they’re good books, it’s just that they’re again and again referred to as “proof that communism was horrible” by people who have not the slightest clue how communism actually was besides what the western governments tell them about it
Written by a British imperial cop who doesn’t have the slightest clue about the place he’s writing about and relies on his own life experience of oppressing Indians for King and Country to fill in the gaps
Really I found them dull 1984 especially
We found the conservative
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