Posted on 07/08/2014 6:44:44 AM PDT by InvisibleChurch
It's the cultural crime we don't dare admit - starting that big, high-brow book with the best intentions before leaving it half-read down the back of the sofa.
So those who give up on tough reads will be relieved to hear they're not alone.
A mathematics professor has singled out which books are our most 'unread' - and intellectual big-hitters are far and away the worst culprits.
Readers in their droves gave up on Hillary Clinton's memoirs, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century before they were even a tenth of the way through.
Far more bookworms persevered with the light erotica of Fifty Shades of Grey and the teen violence of Catching Fire, part of the Hunger Games series.
The ingeniously simple test was devised by Jordan Ellenberg from the University of Wisconsin, who studied the Popular Highlights feature on Kindle e-readers.
The function allows users to select their favourite sentences from a book, and the results are collected centrally to build up a picture of which phrases are the most popular among the public.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Another interesting factoid about Hugo...he asked for clemency for John Brown.
John Brown the abolitionist???
Oops. Missed that one. I can assure you, I’ve read “Gatsby” at least four or five times, along with everything else Fitzgerald wrote, including “The Last Tycoon.” For a time in college, Fitzgerald was my favorite 20th-century writer.He still rates high on my list.
Yes!
this conjures up another literary work--Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin... i believe John Brown read it several times, and had his children read it... it moved him... our family listened to the unabridged version on audio when we were studying the Civil War...
Cryptonomicon rocks. It’s not light, late-night reading, but it is a worthy tome—this from a math- averse reader. Lol
A good assessment of Hunchback...
“The novel as Epic Theatre: that is what Hugo brought to narrative fiction that wasn’t there before. ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ (Hunchback of Notre Dame) was published in 1831. A giant epic about the history of a whole people, incarnated in the figure of the great cathedral as witness and silent protagonist of that history. The whole idea of time and life as an ongoing, organic panorama centered on dozens of characters caught in the middle of that history! Beggars as protagonists of a novel? Not before Hugo!
‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was the first work of fiction to encompass the whole of life, from the King of France to Paris sewer rats, in a manner later co-opted by Balzac, Flaubert, Proust many others, including Dickens, who certainly knew this novel by heart, so often does he imitate it.”
Tale of Two Cities is largely a set-up to the last 40 pages, where suddenly you find yourself so caught up you can hear your pulse pounding in your ears.
I just finished “The Book Thief” and it is a masterpiece. Highly recommended as a book you won’t be able to put down, and will stay with you for a long time.
sheesh! i will have to give it another shot!
I’ve never read it but my daughter has several editions of Les Miserable. She’s in the middle of “abridging” a copy of it for a friend who doesn’t want to read the whole thing. She’s got copies to read, copies for notes and 4 of the five 2nd printing editions.
I guess she really likes the story.
Not THE BED. It’s a family story.
War and Peace and some of the other longer classics have been difficult to get through until you’ve built up the character in your head. In some it’s just so much going on that it’s hard to grasp, in others the development just takes a while.
Then there are just the poorly written ones. Atlas shrugged was a hard read for me until 150 pages in then it clicked and things moved on till about 3/4 through when it hit a bit of a wall then it picked up again.
I made it through A Brief History of Time just fine. However, Fifty Shades...not so much.
I watched a documentary on Hunter S Thompson. It was stated that he copied/wrote The a Great Gatsby word for word several times so he could learn how Fitzgerald thought and used vocabulary.
I always wanted to read The Spike, but I don’t know how many times I started it and couldn’t get very far. Don’t know why, it just didn’t hold my interest. I thought it would.
Bump
"Well, I'm back," he said.
It obviously didn’t work because where Fitzgerald was a consummate craftsman, Hunter Thompson sucked balls.
I added the DVD to my cart. Thanks for the suggestion.
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