Harris Poll - America's Favourite book...

[Child of the 7th Age]

Thanks, Davem. Kind of interesting that I match up fairly well with the "post grad" crowd, since LotR and Mockingbird are two books that do mean a lot to me.

the Jewish voter certainly would only choose the Torah (without, of course, any mention of the New Testament)

Hmm... Not the Torah only (the first five books), but perhaps the entire Tanakh (equivalent to the OT)

It's also interesting and not surprising how many of the authors in this list are "Americans".

To me, the critical question is this. How many of the people who cited the Bible as their first choice actually read and/or studied it in any depth? Or did they list it because they "feel" it should be their first choice, even if their particular exposure to the scriptures (whatever version they prefer) is more limited? Undoubtedly, some respondents fall in the first group and some in the latter, and I would hesitate to put numbers or percentages on either subset.

Perhaps a more interesting angle is how JRRT would have responded to a question of this type. Most likely, he would have growled at the asker and asked him to take a hike, pointing out that any query framed in such vague terms was clearly of dubious value.

First, exactly what is a "book"? Would JRRT's beloved medieval texts be excluded or included in such a framework? Would the author have listed the Bible as his first choice, given the fact that he was a devout Catholic? Then again, as a Catholic, he surely would want to consider the Bible not as an isolated piece but in the context of other important Catholic works and annals of church history. Or would JRRT have made a neat list of favorite novels that were relatively current and just left it at that? Somehow, I do not think that these particular titles would have been on his list.