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

[stands2reason]

I thought I'd like it because I recently read Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and liked it a lot.

Finished it last week. For a good medieval book try Byzantium by Stephen Lawhead. It's set about 8-900 (early middle ages) and started me on a historical fiction kick. I think I enjoyed it more than the Follett.

[stands2reason]

Sam! Have you read The 13th Warrior by that guy who wrote Jurassic Park (whatz-his-face) Set late 1st millenium as well. Also a good read.

[SamAdams76]

Thanks for the recommendation. Just added it to my Amazon wish list. I'll definitely order and get to it eventually. So many books, so little time...

[stands2reason]

I coudn't finish it. All I recall is "poor me, my parents died, nothing like this has ever happened to a slacker before"...blah,blah,blah...

[Capitalism2003]

Ugh..if you stopped halfway through Atlas Shrugged, you gotta start all over, or you won't get the full effect...and won't understand the awesome ending! It's golden rule #2!

[stylin19a]

LOL.......I don't think I'll go back there.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

No, but my wife, quite by coincidence, gave me a book titled, "445 Fascinating Word Origins" for Valentine's Day, which fell after this thread started. The book meets your standard of being “so-called origins of certain words...all of them completely ridiculous and refutable by a glance at a dictionary”. May be not all of them. But the explanations generally strain credulity, seem at best speculative. (E.g., the idea that “jailbird” comes from a medieval continental custom of displaying female convicts publicly suspended cages.) And the author offers no footnotes or documentation.

I liked my 1979 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which has an Indo-European dictionary in the back, and traces many roots to Sanskrit, Germanic, Latin, Greek and hence to English.

There was an article about 10 years ago in the Atlantic about a new theory that all virtually languages can be traced to a common root. It was intriguing, but I do have not been following the story. I recall, that Hittite and Indo-European have been "traced" to a common ancestor and Indo-Hittite has a common ancestor with Semitic. Wish I had more time to investigate.

[VadeRetro]

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney (trans.)

The trick to this book is that you have to be as curious about Anglo-Saxon, the language, as you are about that silly story. That's why they offer it in parallel text.

[VadeRetro]

Speeches are definitely not one of Rand's strongpoints as a writer.

My reaction was just the opposite. I felt that she writes a magnificent speech, although all her "good-guy" characters are suspiciously similar in their oratory. She has a lot of trouble stumbling through the simple telling of a story.

She also doesn't know beans about the second law of thermodynamics. (John Galt's big invention is in serious violation.)

[dogbrain]

Don't read sci-fi.
Well, I have read 'Sirens of Titan' by Vonnegut several times (three, I think).
It could be called science fiction.
Most of his stuff is pretty far out there.
I guess that's why I like it.....

Oh yeah; "classics" I never finished:

'Don Quixote' - Cervantes
finished the first part, couldn't take any more.

'The Brothers Karamazov' - Dostoevsky
those Russians really ARE messed up.

'Resurrection' - Tolstoy
actually, I finished it, then immediately wondered why.

[Roscoe]

Niven's Inferno, loosely based on Dante's Inferno, has a scene in the Circle of Heretics where Kurt Vonnegut's tomb is lit up with a flashing neon sign proclaiming "SO IT GOES".

[benjaminthomas]

Gates was an old Detroit Tiger who played on the '68 World Series champions. Ex-con, I think, and a big local hero in Detroit. Lau was the hitting coach, most famous for his tutelage of George Brett. :-)

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Old? He played in the 1970's. That's like yesterday. I recently (like last year) saw him on a Red Sox broadcast. Apparently, he's still connected to the Tigers in some way.

They (the Cryptoquote monopoly) do a series on hitting, in early spring some years. The Charlie Lau quote goes something like: "There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works."

[benjaminthomas]

Well, he's certainly old compared to your general manager! LOL. Actually, I'd like to see the Sox do well because I'm a big Bill James fan, and it would be neat to see him get some validation. But mainly I'm a Cub fan, waiting even longer than you for a World Series victory ....

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Well, he's certainly old compared to your general manager!

That would be "veteran baseball man" Theo Epstein to you.