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

[beckett]

I would say Joyce's Ulysses is unfinished by many who buy it, though they may start into it with the best of intentions.

[B-Chan]

Gravity's Rainbow for me, too. After my fifth or sixth time reading about the damned banana breakfast it occurred to me that my time might be more profitably spent eating pancakes than reading about them. What is it with Pynchon, anyway?

I made it through Atlas Shrugged, but I felt stupid later.

On the other hand, one shouldn't walk out on a book just because it starts slow; a generation reared on Mac Bolan's "The Executioner" series and assorted Star Trek novelizations can expect a steeper learning curve when it comes to the Real Thing. Take Dostoyevsky for example: the first fifty pages were like eating cold caviar with no vodka, but once I figured out where old Fyodor was coming from the pages flew by, and now it's one of my favorite reads. (The Brothers Karamazov is proving to be a bit stiffer.)

And of course there's always good old Charlie Dickens...

But getting back to Pynchon: does anybody out there actually read his books?

(I'm betting he's really J.D. Salinger playing a gigantic practical joke.)

[martin_fierro]

How about John Grisham's new novel, More Lawyer Crap?

Soon to be followed by the sequel, "Even More Lawyer Crap, Where The Protagonist Ends Up Living Happily Ever After On A Carribbean Island"

[Travis McGee]

How about Thomas Harris' new novel "More Cannibal Crap?"

[altair]

A children's book? That begins to make some sense. I had a friend in high school who was a big fan of those books and insisted that I just had to read them because they were so good. He was very disappointed with my reaction.

[ConservativeLawyer]

McLean's early works were the tightest, tautest action thrillers I've ever read. But after the Hollywood success of "Ice Station Zebra" and a couple of others, he went completely to hell.

I agree with you.

[LibWhacker]

Finnegans Wake and Moby Dick. Better'n sleeping pills.

[ConservativeLawyer]

How about John Grisham's new novel, "More Lawyer Crap"?

ROTFLMAO! So TRUE!!

I hate all that lawyer crap, too. We all get enough lawyer crap in real life, and I get the distinct pleasure of living it on a daily basis.

[altair]

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

It's more ironic than that. He wrote a definitely non-bestselling book before he took up running called Games for the Super-intelligent. In that book he wrote of a dieting scheme involving drinking Scotch on the Rocks and doing an elaborate calculation on how much energy was expended in melting the scotch and the ice inside the stomach to prove that it would work. Of course, he was confusing the calories of Physics with the calories on food labels which are really kilocalories ... a very stupid mistake for a book with that kind of a title.

[Travis McGee]

No quotation marks around "distinct pleasure?"

[ConservativeLawyer]

Anything by Clancy.

Wow, and I thought I was the only one. All these years of shame and guilt, and now I find out that there are others. What a relief!

I like Clancy's plots, and his subject matter, I just can't get through his writing style or something. I'm not sure what it is. Although, I must admit, I liked "The Hunt for Red October."

[altair]

Shakespeare too published almost nothing in his lifetime.

It's a mistake to judge Shakespeare by his writing. His work was meant to be performed and watched. It's similar to reading the script of an action movie and thinking you're getting the whole experience.

[ConservativeLawyer]

No quotation marks around "distinct pleasure?"

I'm trying to conserve quotation marks per the request of the Department of Homeland Security. We're at Orange Alert, you know.

[Travis McGee]

Clancy has the bad habit of taking good 400 page plots and using 900 pages to tell them.

And I don't need to know the R&D history of every weapon system described in page after page of techno babble.

Plus, the always-perfect heroes get tedious. I prefer protagonists who stumble and doubt along the way.

Check out Brit author Gerald Seymour, who writes terrific thrillers where the characters are not from comic books.

[x]

Try recorded books on tape or CD if you want to get through something (I've heard it's also increasingly possible to download these directly off the Internet). I don't know how the experience compares with actual reading. It's easy to miss things listening, but that's also true of reading. Listening is more of a passive experience, but the big disadvantage of listening is with shorter works, rather than with longer ones.

I don't think the distinction is so much between listening to books and reading them as between classics and new books. Most new books -- or old books -- aren't as gripping as true classics. Maybe it's because we're too close in time to contemporary novelists. Some people would say that in fifty years or a century, people will look on Franzen as a classic, but I really doubt it. Contemporary writers go over the same ground time and time again and crowd each other out. Characters are less distinct, less unique, and less well defined today. The moral landscape is flatter and less compelling, too.

The average "serious" writer today is much more skilled technically and aesthetically than, say, Cooper or Scott, but it doesn't seem to matter. Perhaps it's because the world comes to us through television, the Internet and other media, rather than through literature. This affects our response to novels, but it has also changed the position of writers and the nature of the characters in books. Earlier generations believed that books could capture life. Our age is convinced that the world or life or the spirit of the age is elsewhere and not to be captured in prose fiction. Stephen King can still write page turners that millions read, but "serious novelists" are in trouble and have been for some time.

[altair]

I just can't get through his writing style or something.

He develops his plots very slowly. It seems as if he is writing a 100 page book, but deliberately pads it out to a 1000 pages so he gets paid more. The way he threads a dozen subplots with only one or two of them interesting gets irritating after awhile too.

The only Clancy book I don't like at all is SSN (the one based on a submarine battle computer game). All action (and mostly boiler plate at that), little plot and no character development. Booooring.

[ConservativeLawyer]

Check out Brit author Gerald Seymour, who writes terrific thrillers where the characters are not from comic books.

Thanks. I will.

Right after I check out this new author who goes by the name Travis McGee. Heard of him?

[bethelgrad]

I am a seminary student. As difficult as parts of the Bible can be to read, the required reading for some of my classes are even worse. Go figure. Here will be the sum of my seminary experience: Read lots of incredibly difficult books in order to understand a the Bible--an incredibly difficult book.

[stands2reason]

Has anyone ever finished Remembrance of things past by Proust?

Ditto on the Pynchon.

My unreadable Eco was The Island of the Day Before. I knew better to not even attempt Name of the Rose...

[MHT]

I read both of those. I struggled with Corrections and felt as if evil were happening in my life the entire time I read it--but it got good around pg. 504 and the last 67 pages did resolve much of the earlier stress. Instance of the Fingerpost is a great book for a long plane ride or hospital stay. Really. It is interesting, especially if you can remember what each character records in his mini-book. It is definitely a thematic cousin of the Name of the Rose, one of the top unread's.

I truly hated The Sparrow--strange science fiction with really self-righteous liberal characters. I delighted when bad stuff happened to them and realized I could care less if they did get killed by space aliens. Yuck of a book.

Anything by Toni Morrison should be added to the unread list. With her, it's impossible to tell if it's real, a dream sequence, the past, etc. Why fight it when you can't figure out who have the people are, if they are real or ghosts or figments of imagination, if something really happened or was imagined, etc.?