Not to mention, it can be read several times at one sitting, being as short as it is. And seeing how its target audience loves hearing the same book over and over again. While it’s great bedtime reading, the Firebug has frequently asked for it at other times of day too. I’m not even going to try to estimate the number of times my wife or I have read it to him in the past year. Hundreds, certainly. (Though now that he’s closer to three than two, he’s starting to grow out of it, more’s the pity.)
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who thinks that. My wife and I thought parts of it were just plain creepy.
In terms of books that you read to your kids, GE&H is longish, and (like most Dr. Seuss books) a bit of energy is required to read it aloud. I’m not sure if the Firebug has ever said “Again!” after I’ve read GE&H (as he often does after I’ve read other books to him), but if he did, I’d tell him we need to read something else first, before re-reading GE&H.
A Seuss book really has to be pretty short to read it multiple times at a sitting. Hop on Pop or Mr. Brown Can Moo, sure, but not The Cat in the Hat or GE&H.
(I must confess that I don’t like GE&H nearly as much now as when I was young. While Dr. Seuss’ world obviously works differently from ours, usually you wish our world could work more like his. But in the case of GE&H, I definitely prefer to live in a world where whether the grumpy guy tries green eggs and ham is somewhat less important than calamities involving ships, trains, and cars.)
Shouldn’t there be a ‘some’ before ‘Christians’? Episcopalians read through the Gospels on a cycle like that; Southern Baptists don’t. Lutherans do; Pentecostals don’t.
I would be surprised if ‘of all time’ made much of a difference. Remember what the literacy rate was like between the time the Biblical canon was defined, and the time of the Protestant Reformation. And remember that, west of the Byzantine Empire, the Bible was read exclusively in Latin for almost all of that time, which most listeners wouldn’t have understood.
I think the point in history where the Bible would have gotten the most reads would be in the era (varying from one part of the predominantly Christian parts of the world to another) where most people could read well enough to get by, and when the Bible was in practically everyone’s homes but few other books were. 19th-century America would be a good for-instance.
But even then, it would be a fairly rare person who would have read the Bible in its entirety more times than brother Shodan has. I have to ascribe to our literate but book-deprived forebears the good sense to prefer reading the Gospel of Matthew or Paul’s letter to the Corinthians for the hundredth time, or even the less interesting parts of Isaiah or Jeremiah for the fiftieth time, to slogging through Leviticus for the tenth time.
It conflates “read” and “read to.” If you count “read” as a separate category (which I think you should), then far fewer than those 10% will qualify.
I’m really not sure that the three-year rotation is common among 100% of churches; if it’s not, it throws your calculations way off.
The Wikipedia’s cite itself goes to a blank page, and searching the Writer’s Almanac for the statistic turns up a blank (in fact, their index has no listing for Margaret Wise Brown). The context of the stat, however, is annual sales; according to this cite from 2007 (obtained from a previously-linked Wikipedia page), in 2007 sales equaled 16 million. If we accepted your stats with this one change, you’d see that GNM has been read cover to cover more than twice as much as the Gospels, in double the time.
I still think the gospels might be in contention, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think those calculations amount to much :).
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter is short enough to read in one session, and I did that just last night to my son. In a few years, I would not be surprised to see a Boyton book on that list.
I love reading that book out loud. It won my heart when my daughter brought it to my mother, and my mother started reading it out loud. I still hear her asides when I read it to my daughter (dear lord Lee Ann!), and picture the rolling eyes and glares at me. She had no idea what was in store when she started to read, but she read it all, no cheating.
One population assumption times one attendance estimation times one Gospel-reading rate wild-ass guess times one time assumption equals one accurate statement of certainty!
Total guess here but could it be one of the Sherlock Holmes books or maybe something by Dickens ?
My other guess would be the prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer as it was part of the English Lit requirments when I was at school, and read and reread by a good many unwilling children.
If the question is what is the most read book cover to cover or what not in all of history… the bible is the winner hands down… Everyone here who talks about bible owners not making much use of it are taking into consideration current reading habits… the bible was a lot more important to generations previous to X… You know when there were no TVs and people did a lot more reading…
I would put in a bid for the Torah, the five books of Moses, first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
Each year many Jewish congregations (pretty much all Orthodox and many of the other branches) read the entire Torah, in Hebrew, in weekly portions over the course of a year.
Given the aggregate number of Jewish congregations which have for the past thousands of years have read the Torah through, I would say that would knock even Goodnight Moon off the top ranking.
Part of that depends on how you interpret the question. I had a Bible that had several “plans” for reading it in one year. One of those took it from cover to cover and one selected relevent passages for each date. If you interpret it as reading from cover to cover I’m really skeptical that many people have read the Bible that way.
Excluding children’s books, what are the fiction candidates?
I think the OP overestimates the number of people who read the same book every night. 10 million people have read it 500 times each? The book has only sold 18 million copies.
Growing up I babysat at least once for about 20 different families, and none of them had a bedtime story ritual at all, let alone the same book night after night. None of my friends have such a ritual with their kids, nor have they mentioned it growing up. My few encounters with the bedtime story phenomenon have always involved a variety of books rather than one.
I ride the train every day and can tell you there are plenty of people spending an hour or more, five days a week, re-reading the Bible. If you can accept that the Bible is a collection of books starting with the Book of Genesis, the number of people who have read that particular book (or Matthew) is much higher than the entire Bible.
Given that the Bible has such a big headstart over modern children’s books, and that people who read it regularly do so their entire lives, I think it’s fair to say that one or more books of the Bible, if not the entire thing, has been read through more times than any one children’s book.
Children’s books are likely read more often cover to cover, and more repeatedly due to the bedtime ritual repetition that accompanies many parents (and big sis & bro) uncles, aunts, grandparents, habits. I was reading well before I turned five, so I found lots of thin, illustrated books I could devour at bedtime or before, often sticking to one until I found a new favorite.
Where the Wild Things Are mesmerized me so much that I had it memorized at almost the same time I could truly read. I still think I read to myself and my little siblings more than my folks did, and of all the Dr. Seuss works, I believe his first kids book: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was by far his best. It is a cautionary tale for critters whose imaginations sometime get the better of their good senses, so it worked well for me.
Other than childrens books, I would have to guess the most re read books are probably The Catcher in the Rye since the older we get, the more it speaks to us about our youth. JRR Tolkien’s Rings trilogy is very frequently a five or six timer for many who have manged to enjoy it after the second time through. Others I have re read include *To Kill A Mockingbird, The Old Man and the Sea, In Cold Blood, * as wel as assorted Shakespeare works. I have become partial to Martin Cruz Smith’s body of works, and have re read every one of his Arkady Renko novels beginning with Gorky Park.
You’re absolutely right; when I made that statement I had no idea that the sales of the book are as low as they are. I’d revise it downward to say, half a million people.
But still, many people I know have this as a nightly read, and I had friends of my generation (babies in the late '70s) who had the same nightly ritual. I think plenty of folks have the nightly bedtime read-aloud ritual, although I have no idea how to estimate the numbers.
This points to something I hadn’t really thought about: those books may be read repeatedly by more than one person. The parent reads them; then the kid reads them when the kid is old enough to do so. Then the next kid in line reads them. It wouldn’t surprise me if some copies of GNM have been read 2,000 times, over the course of (say) four kids. I very seriously doubt there’s any bible in existence that has been read cover-to-cover that many times.
Didn’t have very much time to post the first time… will do a better job of defending the bible now…
You have to put some historical context on this… The Bible has been in print since 1454… its got a pretty decent head start on pretty much everything…
Granted, current reading habits don’t see the Bible read in its entirety all too often but that is not the way it has been for 500 of the 550 years that it has been in print…
If I take my own family into consideration… I know for sure that 3 out of my 4 Grandparents read the bible, cover to cover, multiple times… I can vividly remember my mother’s mother’s bookmark making its way repeatedly through the entire book… That is how she read the bible from cover to cover and repeat… Those couples produced 4 offspring and of those only 1 has read the Bible… and of the next generation zero have read the bible cover to cover… I’m not arguing that people don’t read the bible anymore… but it was quite common even a few generations back…
Now if you think about the people that lived in the world previous to the 20th century… You got Monks and Puritans and Calvinists and all kinds of other people who took the bible pretty seriously…
Good Night Moon seems to be a book that has been mentioned a lot in this thread… It was published in 1947… the bible has a 500 year head start with lots of people previous to 1947 that were quite religious about how they read it…
If there was a way to quantify it I would wager that the Bible was read more times cover to cover before Good Night Moon was published than Good Night Moon ever will be…
I’ll even go further and say that the Bible has already taught many many many more people to read than Good Night Moon ever will…
And I myself have read Good Night Moon multiple times and never once even attempted the bible cover to cover… but ya gotta put some historical perspective on it… If anything could challenge the Bible it would be another religious text like the Koran or Torah…
As for a specific book of the bible that has been read the most… I would say the Book of Revelations… I think there are a lot of people who have read that book, but are not regular bible reader…
I think the key to this thread is “read the most times”. I would think the Bible would be read by the most* people* but probably isn’t read the most times all the way through. (I know I haven’t. Couldn’t get through all that OT genealogy and laws :))
The book I have personally read through the most times cover to cover is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. I’ve read that at least once a year since I was eight and I’m past 30 now…
I just don’t think that the global population of Orthodox Jews has ever rivaled the number of dejected that, each day, reach for the bible for salvation…
You gotta remember, one thing the bible has going for it is a lot of desperate people who pick it up and somewhere in between “In the beginning…” and “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen” they are saved…
