10 Most Read Books In The World

Hi Tim.

Your point about ‘most read books’ being much different to ‘most read 
authors’ is really important. Very true. And this list does only reflect the
last 50 yrs.

Of those comments I quoted, only a few were from my facebook acquaintances. Many
more were from readers on other sites where the list had been published – so they’re
far more varied than my loony leftist allies.

But there are still many of us alive who remember studying Shakespeare at
school. In fact, I think every year we had to read and study, probably also
perform, at least one of Shakespeare’s plays. We studied Latin, too; in school,
not in college or by choice; the Classics. Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss were THE
books we had access to in our school and public libraries as pre- and early
school children. [And Enid Blyton]

There are many of us, many, many of us, who actually really do choose to
pick up Shakespeare to read. The plays were meant to be seen performed, and
given [excuse the bias] a good Royal Shakespeare Company production, they are
brilliant beyond words. Some actors are culturally unable to perform
Shakespeare. It’s sad but true.

We cannot turn the discussion now into a theological one, but I have to draw
you up on a couple of points. Christians have many copies of the bible in their
homes, while other cultures do not buy their holy scriptures? I assure you,
they do. The majority of Christians in Australia, as an example, are nominal
Christians. Many would not own a single copy of the bible, let alone care to
know about various translations or ambiguities in the translation from original
documents to English, or which ‘original’ documents were used.

Statistically, in millions, the world census shows:Christianity 2,000–2,200;
Islam 1,300–1,650; Hinduism 828–1,000; Buddhism 400–500. That’s a lot of
Muslims reading and praying five times a day. I cannot agree with your
reasoning over why there would be a runaway lead for Bible sales, and a no-show
for other holy scriptures. Except perhaps that, more likely, other cultures
were not taken into account in the tallies.

It is a furphy common in fundamentalist dogma that the Qur’an cannot be
translated. It was, for many centuries, only translated by Christians
attempting to discredit the book, and those translations were understandably
rejected. Today, it is widely available in most languages, and certainly in the
languages of the most populated Islamic cultures. In exactly the same way that
serious students of Christian theology require clarification of ambiguities in
the texts in translation from Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic etc into English, so the
problem arises and is dealt with in the Qur’an’s translation from Arabic to
other languages.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_translations]

But, you didn’t say if there were any books there that you thought should not
have been included. Are there books you feel must surely have ranked higher
than, say, ‘The Alchemist’, or ‘Think and Grow Rich’?

Lxxx

Sorry Jennie, I don’t have an email notification from this blog for comments so I missed this.

Yes, I think the read rates of many books at libraries should somehow be tallied among these. Borrowing is just another way to access the titles we read. It is just as valid as counting purchase figures.

I don’t know why the list appears to be so biased. We live in a world that seems often to quote ‘world’ figures for western statistics. Hollywood and Bollywood provide another vivid contrast in statistics – box office records which we tend to ignore in western media.

Lxx