I'm just asking because I get the feeling all people read (as far as online discussion goes anyway) are fantasy series(es) or franchise stuff that goes on forever with arcs and universes, much like comics? Or stuff that gets turned into a movie, or is about to, or is a novelization of a movie. Generally speaking teenage/"young adult" stuff.
It seems that if a book isn't immediately somehow tied to pop culture, if there's no promise of "more" and its a literary dead end, if you have to look up a word in like page 1, then it just gets ignored altogether.
Does anybody still read, I dunno, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne? Do you read Shakespeare if your teacher doesn't tell you to? Any of the Russian writers, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Nabokov, Checkhov? The actual unabridged stuff?
Because frankly I'm a little sick of reading self-descriptions where "reading" is a hobby and your favorite books are Song of Whatever and Magic the Magicking. Not that there's anything wrong with it but is that *it*?
