What forum users are reading: from Machiavelli to the Horus Heresy

What forum users are reading: from Machiavelli to the Horus Heresy

What do people read when no one is watching? Not what they admit to at the office dinner. A tally of current reads shared on a forum leaves a strange map: Machiavelli, the Horus Heresy of Warhammer 40,000, the biography of Elon Musk, the Jerusalem Bible and an air fryer manual. The question isn't which book, but what the mix says about us.

The menu is so broad it throws off any survey. One person claims to be juggling seven titles at once —Ideas of the 20th Century, by Peter Watson, alongside The Cyberiad, by Stanisław Lem, and All the Gospels— and admits to beating their own record. Another reads Balzac and Diary of a Skinhead, by Antonio Salas. A third laughs at himself: he's on the "basket cleaning" page of the air fryer manual. For these readers, literature is this.

Political essays rule the bedside table

There's one block that never fails: essays with an ideological charge. The Prince, by Machiavelli, appears alongside the Dialogues of Anti-Democratic Doctrine, by Antonio José de Brito, and The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker, which one reader calls "a great book for demolishing the pogre myth that we are a tabula rasa." Genetics, he says, matters. And he says it without flinching.

On the same shelf sits Sapiens, by Harari, with a scathing review from a reader: "cheap globalist propaganda and an unreadable pamphlet." Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, provokes something worse in another: "if I run into Eco in the street I'll make him eat it." There are books you abandon and books that get their revenge.

History, biography and Thibon's zinger

Modern Spanish history has its champion: one reader crowns a book about Alfonso XIII as "the best book of modern Spanish history written by the best historian specialising in Spain," and adds: "Alfonso XIII was the worst Spanish monarch along with Ferdinand VII." Also circulating are Slobo. An Unauthorised Biography, by Francisco Veiga, and the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson.

The curiosity of the month comes from Gustave Thibon in Men of the Eternal, lectures from 1973. There, word for word, the modern panic over an epidemic is anticipated: "let us imagine into what state of atrocious panic modern man would sink if... an epidemic like the Black Death were to arise." One reader celebrates it: "Like putting a zinger in a time capsule made of paper."

Fiction: from Rulfo to Warhammer

The novel holds up. Pedro Páramo and The Burning Plain, by Juan Rulfo, share a table with Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann, and with the Neapolitan Novels saga, by Elena Ferrante, which one reader dismisses with an "I just don't read women" and another corrects: "you're the only one who's read them." The irony serves itself.

The geek corner has its place: Warhammer 40,000: The Horus Heresy. "The Imperium of Man is a fictional military society based on the Roman legions and the Crusades in a dark futuristic world," summarises someone who admits to having abandoned the saga out of boredom. Mickey7, by Edward Ashton, also appears, "entertaining with no further pretensions."

The Bible, the gospels and the murky Old Testament

The Jerusalem Bible is read "little by little" and surprises "by the number of murky things they recount as if nothing." The reply is not long in coming: "There's a reason there's a New Testament." Another reader adds context: Matthew was aimed at the Jews; Mark, at the Romans. Religious reading, here, is done with a map.

The detail that throws you off

Among so many titles, one reader closes the circle with The 48 Laws of Power: "To attain power you have to be a ing psychopath." And another rereads The Count of Monte Cristo to deliver the verdict: "Modern literature is shit." With this menu, who needs surveys.