Discounting the women who read nothing but romantasy and smut and the men who read nothing but self-help financial development slop, what portion of the population would you estimate actually reads anything with even a crumb of literary value? Even genre fiction if it actually puts in a little effort
>>24794003Around 1%, and that's being generous. Even most "smart" people don't bother to read on their own time because the effort-pleasure ratio is too high for them. Usually the only (extremely rare) time I hear people mention having read literary/classical fiction, is when they were in college, as an assignment.
Honestly I lost most of my passion for all creative endeavors once I realized how deep runs the link between art and mercenarism. Reading Tolstoy's essay on art was the final blow, because until then I was only convinced that it was the modern heroes I've seen turn into clowns one by one who were frauds, something I was nudged into thinking about by Tool's song, "Hooker with a Penis", which has nothing to do with the title and a lot to do with this.
>>24794003Follow-up question: are there countries where it's better and people actually regularly read for (non-sexual) pleasure or is it all downhill from the west?
>>24794003>women who read nothing but romantasy and smut and the men who read nothing but self-help financial development slopi wonder how many actually read these things after buying them, or read them properly.
>>24794362Turkey, Iran, France
>>24794425In my experience a lot of stuff normie women buy is for literal display purposes, especially booksI'm not even sure if they actually read the things they read or just use them to LARP in public cause I never managed to talk about the plot of something in depth with a woman. I'm not even trying to skew it out of woman hate like other users here, it really do be like that. Sadly it's just a hard to accept fact of life that women do a lot of what they do as a display, although a lot of men are also doing that lately, see the EDC crowd and other stuff like that. Social media does that.But there are women who read and those read quite a lot. One of my exes was an avid Palaniuk fan and read a lot of fiction on the same lines.
