The mention of Joyce and Proust in another thread got me thinking, what is the author - or specific work - that is referred to far more than it is actually read?
For example, I recall reading that Proust’s ROTP/ISOLT was the author/book most often cited in the Chicago Trib over the course of a recent year. But I bet I don’t know 5 people who have even read part of it.
Similarly, how many people refer to Joyce, even using “Joycean” as an adjective, who have never read anything by him?
Or has any book been bought more and read less than Hawking’s Brief History of Time?
I would bet that most people who use the phrase, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” have not read a single page of Voltaire.
I may well be wrong, but my understanding was that tho this is often attributed to Voltaire, it does not actually appear in his writings.
Which, upon re-reading, does not necessarily run against anything in pl’s post. For example, I’ll bet most people who say “Would you like fries with that” have not read Voltaire either.
(smacks self on forehead)
What an idiot I am! I went ahead and read Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Divine Comedy (OK, it was a college assignment, but I read it). I shoulda just faked reading them!
Well, I’ve read Swann’s Way from ROTP. I think it was Harlin Ellison who said, or least he was quoting someone else, “You have to be over forty to enjoy Proust.” I was thirty-five or –six, but I can nonetheless highly recommend it. If you’ve read all the volumes, then that is quite an achievement. I know nobody who has done it.
As for Joyce, I’ve read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and * Ulysses*. * Finnegans Wake* is more problematic. Who knows if I’ll ever attempt it. A Brief History of Time is rather easy to understand for all the complex issues it deals with. It was written for the non-physicist, after all.
I haven’t done so well with the Bible. Genesis, Amos, and Ecclesiastes for the OT. Just John for the NT.
Are you excluding * Candide?* Isn’t that still a standard?
:eek:
I’ve cracked the cover in Borders once, then put it back on the shelf.
For a little light reading, I think there are two heavy-duty German novels that not many folk read:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. (Actually, I read the first 60 or 80 pages of MWOQ before setting it aside.)
Hmm, I’m not sure if this is what you’re after, but I think Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I see references to it in many scholarly-type articles, but I know only a very few people that have ever finished the whole thing.
Much higher quality? Well, I don’t know about that. Higher quality, certainly, although I don’t know that we can say that much about Mandragola (we’ll start a new thread for the debate over whether Machiavelli is to be mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare and Molière, yes?).
I will say (and I don’t think that this idea is original to me) that it helps if we think of The Prince as a very long footnote to the The Discourses that (for Machiavelli’s own reasons) got published separately.
I imagine few people who use the expressions “Too err is human, to forgive divine” and “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” have even the remotest clue where they come from. Most would probably attribute them to Shakespeare.
Great story that Mike Kinsley, the old New Republic editor once told: around 1986 or 1987, when Allan Bloom’s “The CLosing of the American Mind” was a #1 best seller, he went to a bookstore and inserted his business card in numerous copies of that book, with a quick note promising a cash reward to whomever called him. Kinsley says he did the same thing to several other books that, he suspected, everybody was buying, and everybody was talking about, but nobody was really reading!
As it turned out, he never got a single call. I’m not surprised- I’m one of the few people who read Bloom’s book cover to cover. A LOT of it is mighty dull stuff… and my hunch is, as soon as Bloom STOPPED talking about how much he hated rock music and moral relativism, and STARTED talking about Heidegger and Wittgenstein, most people just tuned out.
Other people who are much quoted but little read?
SANTAYANA tops the list. Everybody goes around saying “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but how many know ANYTHING more about Santayana? How many could name anything he wrote?
GERTRUDE STEIN. Everybody can misquote “a rose is a rose is a rose,” or say “there’s no there there.” But how many people have actually read any Gertrude Stein?
ADAM SMITH. My fellow conservatives praise this book constantly, but I’d wager few have read it. And I don’t blame them! This is a long, dry, dull, boring read. (I HAD to read it in college, and while I agreed with virtually everything Smith said, he got awfully tiresome in a hurry.)
