The greatest book you never read

Abstract

There are books that everybody has heard of but few have actually read. Some are out of date, others are timeless; some are utter nonsense, others are profound. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776); Marx's The Communist Manifesto (1848); Dante's Divine Comedy ( circa 1321); Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605); De Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835): the list is a long one. High up on the list, perhaps right at the top, is a book that was published 150 years ago this November, and took two decades to write: The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin. Admit it: you have never read it, have you? I hadn't, until last year. I finally decided that I could not call myself a biologist without having at least dipped into it and, once I did, I found it a fascinating read. Although not a modern stylist—he sometimes uses words that seem to us peculiar in their context, and his sentence structure can be convoluted—Darwin writes clearly enough and his logic is impeccable. So why isn't the book …