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

[bonfire]

"Cold Mountain"


Keep reading. It gets better.

[Guillermo]

Can't get past the first couple of pages of "Heart of Darkness".

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Oh, and listened to "Atlas Shrugged" in audio. Seriously doubt I would have gotten through it by reading. I second the freeper who said that audio books is a way to get through otherwise unreadable books. I do think we've sort of lost the art of reading to others and being read to. Probably how our ancestors experienced a lot of books and now that is almost not done anymore except with respect to audio books.

[Puddleglum]

I'm slogging through John Dos Passo's "Midcentury" right now. From what I gather it was a bestseller in the 60's. I love a lot of his other work but for some reason this one is tough sledding. I'm on page 235 or so out of 400+. I think folks wanted to embrace it because it was a return to his "kaleidescopic" style, but I much prefer USA and Adventures of a Young Man so far.

PS - I have read it before, but that was a while back.

[Xenalyte]

Has anyone brought up any Oprah books or similar? They're all about women who were abused and misused, yet somehow triumph over all the dirt in their lives and become strong and independent. (Of men, usually.)

Xena's Mom kindly loaned me White Oleander, and I despised it. Abused daughter of unbalanced homicidal mother gets put in foster care, must learn to love and trust again.

Another great example: She's Come Undone. Blech. Abused daughter of unbalanced mother gets raped, gets fat, must learn to love and trust again.

[Xenalyte]

Beowulf was of course a fantastic bore from the beginning. It has bored the soul out of generations of students.

However, for an adult, Beowulf is a helluva read. I mean, how many heroes rip the arms off their adversaries and beat 'em to death with the bloody stump?

The poetry is a bit off-putting, but get yerself a good prose translation, and I promise you'll like it better.

[Xenalyte]

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

Grisham writes prose that's so elementary, Hemingway would be ashamed of it.

[ofMagog]

Our prof was a master of Melville. Had us get into all the Biblical symbolisms in Moby Dick. That was TOUGH as most characters and ships in the novel had to do with the Bible. Billy Budd is one of the world's classics.

[CharacterCounts]

The Dictionary

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

[Xenalyte]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Charles Palliser. He's written several books, and I've read three - The Quincunx, Betrayals, and The Unburied. They're quite Dickensian in plot and structure, and I had great trouble putting them down.

But then, I'm a Dickens junkie.

[Xenalyte]

How did you get through the 40-some pages of "the whiteness of the whale"? That's an instant insomnia cure for me.

[mountainfolk]

I kept drifting off to sleep when reading ATLAS SHRUGGED. Since we frequently listen to recorded books when travelling, I got the library audio, about 35 tapes, and have only 6 more to listen to. Made all the difference and it is amazing how descriptive the book is of the process of socializing and communizing the United States and the consequences thereof. Could have been written today. The book is thought provoking and sometimes the story line actually surfaces thru the speechifying. Keeping in mind Ayn Rands personal life at the time she wrote it, ATLAS is also a rationalization and justification for her own adultry and rather unusual life style. For a mirror image of today's political mindset and bureauacracy run amok there is no better textbook than ATLAS Shrugged.

[Travis McGee]

I've heard of him, but not that other guy. Not yet.

[Snowy]

I read "Paradise" by Toni Morrison on the recommendation of Oprah. I even bought the hard cover. The book sucked eggs. I kept waiting for it to make sense and get good, but then I finished it.

[Xenalyte]

Ugh. Don't even go near Song of Solomon. I was required to teach that my last year, and "hideous" doesn't even begin to describe it.

[ofMagog]

Merely scanned much of it and belonged to an excelled study group, plus access to large test file system belonging to a group of vets and Tri Delts.

[Travis McGee]

I "read" one of Clancy's novels once; I got through it by skipping ahead to the scenes involving the primary characters, and skipping the dozen extraneous plot lines that added nothing and went nowhere.

[HoustonCurmudgeon]

War and Peace

I have tried it FIVE times. I can't for the life of me keep the damn names straight as everyone has a (different) pet name for everyone else!

[Mr. Jeeves]

Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People". I had heard that it was written without a lot of liberal bias, but even so his writing style couldn't keep me interested. In fact, I found Samuel Eliot Morrison's older history of America to be much more engaging.

[RobFromGa]

re: Atlas Shrugged

The abridged audio cassettes clock in at about 15 hours and they capture much of the essence of the book. I highly recommend the tapes to anyone who is having difficulty with the novel. I've read it three times in my life, and listened to it a couple more. It is a great book.