It then went on to confuse things by saying that doesn't include self published books which according to UNESCO, is about 2.2 million books every year so if we say the minimum is around 150 million then that kind of feels underwhelming for 600 years of publishing but writing a book is hard work so it must be even more annoying for an author to slave over a quill/pen/typewriter/computer for months on end to then only have the thing you created misunderstood.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that of his novel The Great Gatsby, no-one had the slightest idea what the book was about because where he was writing about the decadent downside of the American dream and the class system, the main thing people seemed to take away from it was the parties in the Roaring 20's were cool.
When he wrote Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's idea was for it to show how the television boom was destroying interest in culture and literature but he was often told no it wasn't, it was all about government censorship.
The heavyweight Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nitzsche had been used by Mussolini and Hitler to justify the idea of Superhumans but he was very anti the idea and his tome was a rallying cry against the very idea and on his death it was his sister who edited his work to mean the opposite and she happened to be a big fat Nazi.
Machiavelli's The Prince has many fans amongst tyrants and dictators but he was actually mocking them and their methods and Jack Kerouac's On the Road was a big hit with the Beatnik generation who took his travels across America as a life style instead of the unpleasant warning against an empty, hedonistic lifestyle as he planned leading to him to say that the Beatniks had turned his novel into something unrecognisable.
The Shining by Stephen King was about the dangers of alcoholism and Oedipus Rex by Sophocles is less about Oedipus wanting to sleep with his mother and kill his father and more about how he tried to evade a prophecy about his mother and father but ending up accidently killing him and marrying her anyway as fate decreed.
The most misunderstood book has to be Frankenstein by Mary Shelly which is a moral story about how men shouldn’t consider themselves Gods and how the monster who was actually a nice helpful and caring chap is hated and feared for being different and finally turns on the people he has been trying to form an attachment with, that and how everyone calls the Monster Frankenstein when it is actually the scientist who created him, the monster is just called Monster.
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