“Give an example of a book that 99% will loathe.”
Silmarillion.
Make 100 random people read it, maybe 1 will actually do so.
A great book, just far beyond most of the population.
Well it was the source of the name of one of my favorite bands....Marillion.
Maybe but it’s not remotely a standard literary text.
That’s a great example of exactly my point. Being an SF&F nerd and a player of D&D in my youth I was of course a Tolkien nut, tried to read Silmarillion a number of times but it was just way to dense for my teenage brain. Gave up on it multiple times. Finally when the movies came out I decided it was time not only to reread the Tolkien I’d successfully read in the past but to hammer my way through Silmarillion. and I did, because I was in my 30s and finally had the attention span to be able to remember how those paragraphs started when I got to the end. Can’t say I actually enjoyed the book, but it did add some enjoyable knowledge to the other books for me, and I finished the damn thing.