Like Twitter, Harry Potter and dumb TV shows, that book is a sign of the dumbing-down of people today. I saw a test for young kids a hundred years ago, in mathematics, geography, history etc, with questions far more difficult than most kids could answer today. Back then it was natural.
The hippie leftists from the 1960s and 1970s became teachers, those of them who were capable of studying, in order to change people. Get to the children while they are young. First thing they did was declare that discipline is fascist. Reading long texts requires discipline and should not be done. Their ideal was a vision of children sitting in the grass in a ring, talking with the teacher as a "guide". Free thought, man. But only in the direction these teachers wanted, of course.
Destroying discipline in school leads to the hard-working students being constantly bullied by the bad kids, who know they can get away with anything. It leads to worse and worse results, to the point where there are not enough students who know the basic math required to fill hard-science programs in college - the kind of jobs that hold up everyone else in a modern society. No wonder engineering jobs are shipped off to China and India, where they know to study valuable subjects instead of crap. Instead of "finding themselves" which means to take the easy way out and hope someone else does the things that actually have to be done.
In the past people were capable of reading the classics that tied people together, and taught them something valuable. Today that is too boring. Most people are only capable of reading short bursts of texts, preferably shaped like slogans they have already heard through the media, so they don't have to think. When they do read a book it has to be two-dimensional and vapid.
I heard a guy declare just the other week that there should be no classic literature taught in schools, because it was all written by "white men", which sounded like it was automatically evil. He declared that Harry Potter was just as good as anything else. There was nothing people needed to be taught. (I just waited for him to say that teaching harder texts is "fascist", but he kept that for the hard-core believers.)
Perhaps it was inevitable. Most people have a two-digit IQ. With politicians telling them how great and fantastic they are in order to win their votes, they started thinking they didn't have to make an effort. Making an effort is too hard for the dumb and lazy. It used to be that there was some sort of elite in every society - didn't have to be nobility, it was arranged in different ways - holding up the rest, being culture bearers, but we don't have that anymore.
Instead we have junk literature and Twitter. The perfect expression of today's mindset, no wonder it is so popular. When everyone is forced to write only 140 characters, no one can make a case longer than yours, so your lack of knowledge and effort doesn't show.
