Posted on 02/11/2003 9:49:20 PM PST by Utah Girl
unread bestseller
(UN.red best.sel.ur) n. A book that many people purchase but few read in its entirety.
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, 2002Backgrounder:
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
I read it a year later and loved it. What a satire. That guy has a wry sense of humor.
I read The NAme Of The Rose during Desert Storm on the Red Sea and I was amazed. Blow up Iraqi's by day, Eco at night... what fun! ;)
I read almost EVERYTHING I start. If it is bad, I finish it to see how bad it is. One of the authors I could not get through was John Grisham. The book was "The Pelican Brief" and I hated it very much.
My dad read "A Painted House", and said it was very good. Since you all like it, I guess I might give it a shot but I still can't get rid of the contempt I hold for Grishams writing.
I'll give it a shot though.
War and Peace. If you have one week to live, read this. It will seem like six years.
I would like to recommend a book by Joseph Ellis called "The Founding Brothers".
It is short but very good. A true gem!
You won't be missing anything. I tried to read it as part of my historical interest in WWII.
I think I made it through the first chapter and gave up. BORING!
Hitler was a lousy writer.
"serious novelists" are in trouble and have been for some time.
They will soon "go the way of poetry" (note: this is the only context in which modern poetry is mentioned).
It's interesting to observe what has happened to poetry. Many write, but few read. It's literary karaoke. Yet it exists, not just as a closed community, but as a closed community of individuals who aren't even interested in each other's work. Perhaps it is "going the way of marriage."
The Eli Lilly heiress recently left 100 million bucks to Poetry Magazine, a stunning figure for a publication the size of a fanzine (but still the primo spot for poetry).
LibKill... you might want to try Albert Speers biographical "Inside The Third Reich". Also, the "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is considered by some to be the definative historical account of the Nazis.
For myself, anything by B.H Liddell-Hart is superb. He was not only a soldier in the conflicts he writes about(Pertaining to WW1-WW2. ), he is also a military historian. Perhaps I should say he WAS a great man, but a great man nevertheless.
I dont know if anyone likes Science Fiction but I have a few gems there as well. I read everything, and most of the SF genre is crap but the good stuff can be profound.
For everyone else, I thought "The Hobbit" was cool! I myself cant quite get through "Atlas Shrugged" but I will. I might not like Ayn Rand' writing style so much but some of the foresight in her work is simply amazing. I AM enjoying the story(I am on pp 790 or something like that.),but it is dragging on. Some parts flow, most do not. You have to love the whole idea of the thing though. Well, I know I do.
One book I can recommend is Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda by Khidr Abd Al-Abbas Hamzah, excellent, but scary book. "Hart's War" by John Katzenbach is another book I really liked. Anything by Stephen Ambrose is excellent. 'Ghost Soldiers': The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides is a sobering account.
As far as fiction goes, any book by Frederick Forsyth is well worth the read. A particularly topical one (again) is The Fist of God by Forsyth, he wrote it after the Gulf War, but it is topical right now. I also tend to enjoy reading suspense novels, Jeffrey Deaver (The Bone Collector) is one I really enjoy. That's what I can remember off the top of my head. :)
Sp far, only two people have claimed to have read a dictionary from cover to cover. The first has the handle Lonesome in Massachussets' The second, Old Professer.
Both names fit!
Additionally, many influential conservatives (George Will, for one) have argued his conclusions are wrong, but thats another Thread altogeather.........
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