Unread Bestsellers (what bestseller can you not get through?)

The Word Spy ^ | Jan, 2003

[Utah Girl]

unread bestseller

(UN.red best.sel.ur) n. A book that many people purchase but few read in its entirety.

Example Citation:

There's the National Book Critics Circle Awards, another nice "high-culture" opportunity for Jonathan Franzen, author of jumbo unread bestseller The Corrections. —Alexandra Jacobs, "The Eight-Day Week," New York Observer, March 11, 2002

Backgrounder:
Here's my all-time Top 10 unread bestsellers list:

The Bible
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein
The End of History, Francis Fukuyama
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney (trans.)

Earliest Citation:

A 500-page novel set in a 14th-century monastery and written by an Italian professor of semiotics is hardly the stuff of conventional best sellers. But "The Name of the Rose," by Umberto Eco, has proven to be just that. ...

A few cynical observers suspect that snob appeal has played a considerable role in the book's rise. Says Howard Kaminsky, president of Warner Books, which bought the paperback rights for $550,000: "Every year there is one great unread best seller. A lot of people who will buy the book will never read it." It serves, he has said, as a "passport" to intellectual respectability. "It doesn't hurt to be seen carrying a copy at the Museum of Modern Art. It hints you've got something more in your mind than getting picked up."
~~~—Alexandre Still, "Miracle of the Rose," Newsweek, September 26, 1983

[redhead]

"The Gulag Archipelago being on the best seller list for months, and I doubt that many of those who bought it read it all the way through."

Yep. Finished it. I remember being stunned at the depth of the evil of the Soviet government. Life in those gulags was so dismal that I am sure the Soviets sent those people there to die. Then they could claim that the regime was compassionate. I also read several others of Solshenyzin's: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" sticks out, for some reason. "The Cancer Ward" was also very good.

[T Minus Four]

I used to love Steven King until I got to "The Dark Tower". I couldn't even get through the first chapter, and I can read almost anything. I always skip the first two chapters of anything by James Michener, tho.

I also tried to read a paperback edition of the Koran, but I now consider it reference material.

[Lurking Libertarian]

I'm sure many Freepers have read Solzhenitsyn[sp?], but I doubt that many of the people who put The Gulag Archipelago on the New York Times bestseller list got through it.

[Ciexyz]

Mine would have to be The Hobbit.

Yes! I tried several times to get thru that book (in my college days) and couldn't.

[T Minus Four]

[insider Utah reference]

The DI is a treasure-trove of $2 hardbacks.

[Ciexyz]

I really enjoyed The Name of the Rose. It was a good murder mystery.

I enjoyed it, too. And they made a decent movie out of it, starring Sean Connery, Christian Slater and F. Murray Abraham.

[TontoKowalski]

I, too, love Faulkner. Not all the classics have an appeal for me, though. I tried to make it through Joyce's Ulysses, finally got the Cliffs Notes to help me through, then quit the book and just tried reading the Cliffs Notes, and then just quit everything. Today, I couldn't begin to tell you who the novel is about, or what he is doing.

I enjoy Dickens, some Shakespeare, and can appreciate the wit of Austen, although she's not one of my favorites. I do enjoy P. G. Wodehouse. The Jeeves stories are incredible, and if you run across his golf stories, featuring the Oldest Member, pay anything that is asked for them.

No one has mentioned a more recent artsy-fartsy author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I could tolerate One Hundred Years of Solitude, but could never make it through anything else. The General in his Labyrinth was particularly bad. He and Saul Bellow (whom I dislike intensely) sealed the deal with me as far as the Nobel Prize for Literature being an accurate predictor of quality.

[Travis McGee]

He has been to the legal well a few too many times.

This often happens to writers who become stars with star contracts for unproduced work.

"Damn! It's December already! I better start writing!"

[Ciexyz]

Kudos to another reader of Solzhenitsyn's classics: The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward. I read them all -- in college.

I'm looking forward to my retirement days when I'll have time to begin reading good literature again.

[vikingchick]

Kingsolving -- I could not finish The Bean Trees, try as I might. And it wasn't that it was a difficult read, it was just oozing with distracting touchy-feelyness.

[vikingchick]

Another one I just couldn't stand was 'Tuesdays with Morrie', an Oprah recommendation, I believe. Simply awful, to the point of being laughable.

Read it aloud to a loved one to exude groans of protest until they beg you to stop! lol

[beckett]

Moby Dick would certainly not make it onto the "most unread" list of anybody I know. The poster who named it must have extremely idiosyncratic literary taste. The book is not included in the list that heads the thread, by the way.

How anyone can fault Melville's prose and plot in that magnificent masterpiece is a mystery to me.

[A_perfect_lady]

I never did make it through Stephen King's THE STAND when I was in my 20s. Now I'm past the age where I can muster any interest in Stephen King at all.

[bonfire]

The Stand was great......the ending stunk.

[beckett]

...and there's another Ann who I've forgotten and who deserves to be.

Ann Rice, perchance?

[A_perfect_lady]

I loved ATLAS SHRUGGED too, and devoured it over a 4 day period... (it was Christmas vacation) But I agree with you... the John Galt speech is not only too long, it's practically unnecessary. We understand by that point what the deal is, she doesn't need to spell it out. I kind of skipped over the speech too.

[FreedomCalls]

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabby Marquez. Nobel Prize winner at that. Unreadable.

[Old Professer]

Tom Clancey's "Executive Orders." His Olympian arrogance has turned him into an ultra-bore. I enjoyed a few of his earlier works.

I agree; well over half of that book is like the air at the top of a bag of potato chips - serves no purpose.

My all-time gripe about hard-reading will remain Raintree County by John Locklear, assigned in Literature class, hated it - prof. said Locklear committed suicide shortly after finishing it while still in galley form, don't know the truth of that, however it seeems fitting.

[A_perfect_lady]

Don't give up Austen quite yet. I have found that audio tapes of Austen are very enjoyable--the highfalutin' language becomes a bit ironic when read aloud, and you begin to fall into her pacing and storytelling. They are novels of morals, manners and attitudes. Also, the movies made of her books are suprisingly true to them and are fun and worthwhile.

I'm with you... but the film adaptation of MANSFIELD PARK is an affront and a monstrosity. Still, the BBC production of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is a winner, as is Gwyneth Paltrow's EMMA and as you mentioned, Ang Lee's S&S.

[Old Professer]

Jim Fixx dying of a heart attack after writing about how running would make us live forever was kind of a bummer.

Fixx was running away from death; his father died of a heart attack and his doctor advised him that he too would suffer the same fate if he persisted in exhausting himself - in the end Fixx met death headon, in midstride.