It's The Bible, of course!

Who the hell reads The Bible?  I've read a lot of the OT, and all of the NT.  But, come on.  It's not really reading.  You don't really read The Bible like you read a book.  People who actually read books and people who have actually read The Bible know that. The way you read The Bible is you find whatever passage proves whatever point you're trying to make and you read that and ignore the rest. 

In all fairness, favorite book for what was not specified.  Favorite book for a doorstop?  A booster seat?  To use in lieu of a TV tray? To thump people with?  My granddad, that old lovable rogue, used to have a big one carved out in the middle that he used to keep his emergency stash of "spirits" in. 

I want to make it clear I have nothing against The Bible, which most people know is actually not a book, but a collection of books.  It's true enough that The Bible as fetish is a single object.  As talisman, as armor worn in the breast pockets of soldiers and policemen to protect them from bullets on the battlefield, it is a single object.  As a platform for public oaths, it need never be opened.

If you do open it, as cultural artifact, and even as literature in spots, it justly fascinates.  It connects those who read it as literature with all the ages of literature, and contains within it the great themes of the Western Canon, which was built upon it.  But like even the best Madonna album (Erotica, in my humble opinion), there's a lot of filler. 

And I certainly have my favorite among its books.  Everybody loves ol' Job, of course.  And The Song of Solomon ("My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him" — gives me goosebumps every time!), and Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite pieces of literature, period. 

But when Americans in some silly poll proclaim that the Bible is their favorite book, knowing as we do that almost half of Americans read at about a fifth-grade level, I think it's fair to say, and?  I mean, what fifth-grader do you know who's ever read the Bible?  It's like asking a fifth-grader what his favorite anything is. 

I mean, nothing against fifth-graders, but who do these clowns think they're fooling, is what I want to know.  Late last year  these new literacy statistics came out showing that "the typical American" (as NPR put it) read only four books over the course of the year, and one in four read no books at all.

A National Endowment for the Arts report found that only 57 percent of Americans had read a book in 2002, a four percentage-point drop in a decade. Book sales have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Among avid readers surveyed by the AP, the typical woman read nine books in a year, compared with only five for men.

Even among those who read, the study finds that the percentage of adults "proficient at reading prose" is only 13%. 

All this latest survey shows is that the people polled still know roughly what a book is, not that they've read one.