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

[Old Professer]

I did my utmost to get through "The Sum of All Fears" but Clancy's military technic minutiae finally did me in. The only "payoff" in the book came when he spent a chapter describing, millisecond by millisecond, what happens when a nuclear weapon detonates.

The way you phrased this reminds of the morning after the night when I ate two Habeneros, a quart of ice cream and finished off half a bottle of Pepto-Bismal.

[Old Professer]

The Dictionary

Every home and office has one. But nobody has read more than a few bits and pieces.

From 1960-1963 I read from front to back Webster's Third International - it was the only book available at my duty station in the U.S.A.F.

[Old Professer]

. I used to dream of being able to paint a picture with words the way he did.

Her auburn tresses-framed eyes entered the room a full three seconds before her graceful legs caressed in passing the soft fur of the lanquishing silky Persian cat which sat silent vigil by the buffet table laden with caviar and canapes.

A white-heat fixed on the tall, handsome hunchback squatting by the fire as those eyes flashed a message - "Take me, oh, Take me!"

[Old Professer]

I've found that the more I grow as a writer, the harder I am to please as a reader. Gets frustrating sometimes because I find myself constantly putting books down unread--books that looked good in the opening pages but didn't hold up--that I would've devoured in years past.

Contest!!!

Write a short-short story that begins:

"Last night, I died..."

[Happygal]

I gave up halfway through Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Thanks for that, I was looking at it in the bookstore yesterday and had made a mental note to buy it over the weekend. I'll not bother now! :-)

[Old Professer]

Lightning can light up the world, but it can't warm up a stove.

[Taliesan]

The Gulag Archipelago

Read the first volume, and it was gripping. Never made it back for the other volumes -- not because of the writing, but never found the time. So many books, so little life.

[mc5cents]

OTOH, his departure from the legal stuff - A Painted House - was AWESOME. He needs to write more of the same.

I couldn't agree more. I loved that book. I am hoping that he writes a sequel because he left a lot of loose ends.

[frodolives]

Hear, hear! I adore Shakespeare, devoured War and Peace, tackled Moby Dick, but "Atlas Shrugged"...shoot, I shrug.

[Taliesan]

Another one I just couldn't stand was 'Tuesdays with Morrie'

Ah, another traveling companion.

Horrid book. By halfway I wanted Morrie to go ahead and die. Skipped the last several Tuesdays.

[Taliesan]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I thought one day "I'm an educated and literate man. I need to be exposed to this magical realism thing."

So I started "The House of the Spirits", Isabel Allende. As I stood in Borders the prose on the first page seemed elegant.

And it was elegant. But after plowing through 200 pages with my head down and my teeth gritted, I looked up and realized I did not care about any of these people, I did not care whether they lived or died.

So there's another big name I just could not finish.

[Pietro]

"Foucault's Pendulum"

I loved Name of the Rose and was really into FP until the end; didn't like the ending.

I started "The island of the day before" but couldn't get more than 10 pages into it before I had to quit.

A great unknown classic I just finished is "the Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov(?). Its the best book I've read in years.

[Utah Girl]

I'm plowing through the Koran, trying to understand the Islam religion. Not working so far...

[Utah Girl]

I love DI, I have to be careful though, I usually end up with taking more stuff home than I donated. :)

[Utah Girl]

One of my employers loved Saul Bellow's and Doris Lessing's books, and let me read her copies. Blech, I could never understand the Nobel prize for Bellow.

[Utah Girl]

I think I had quit the Oprah bookclub by the time she recommended 'Tuesdays with Morrie.' Kingsolver is another author I can't stand, especially after she praised Mumia to the skies in her forward. Our booklist had a HUGE flame war over that dedication, and we were forbidden to talk about Mumia after that. LOL!

[Utah Girl]

When King's books Insomnia came out, I was dating a guy whose favorite author was King. And he bought me a hardback copy of Insomnia. By the end of the book, I was wishing that all those little invisible people would cut the strings of every character in the book. (There were invisible little people who would run around and cut the strings of people, and those people would die. Basically the whole plot of said book.) I never read another King book after that...

[Mamzelle]

re: You are simply not allowed to create characters who are morally good. They must be "complex", which is Hollywood-ese for "screwed up".))

Beware the term "nuanced" also.

[Utah Girl]

A&E's version of Emma is excellent also. I own both versions, as well as Clueless, well, I actually own all of the Austen adaptations.

[redhead]

"The Dictionary"

LOL! I tried and tried to read the dictionary from front to back, and all I did was memorize the first few entries. So I started from the back. Same results, only this time, only one entry still remains: "ZYGOTENE: The synaptic stage of meiosis, in which two chromosomes pair intimately." Whew! Had to look up almost every word in the definition!!