Word: unread
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...readers may also profit from the Essay, which suggests some rules for vacation reading, warns of the commoner pitfalls, and supplies tips for point scorers, Experience Maximizers and those who simply feel that they are being sealed off from the world by an ever-rising wall of unread tomes...
...result, the Unread Classic has become as much a part of vacation nostalgia as the unvisited museum or the unclaimed laundry. The catchall bookshelf in a rented summer cottage, once the hallowed repository of mildewed National Geographies and Mary Roberts Rinehart, now often runs to Pasternak and Proust, to Galbraith and Gideon's Trumpet. Even in the remotest fishing village, the drugstore often offers a conscience-pricking range of paperback titles. Inevitably, as he scoops up Louis Fischer's Life of Lenin, Camus' The Plague, George Orwell's Essays, and four Ian Flemings for insurance...
...comparative statistics on these matters, and perhaps the native geniuses who made Boston's James T. Fields the most influential American publisher during the middle years of the 19th century were not abnormally fragile. Yet of Fields's list, Holmes, Emerson and Hawthorne are honored but widely unread; Harriet Beecher Stowe is a historical curiosity; the realist William Dean Howells is read chiefly by thesis writers; Longfellow and Whittier are snickered at; and Edwin P. Whipple, Henry Giles, John G. Saxe and a shelfful of others are wholly forgotten. Only Thoreau's reputation is still alive...
...tips his plot upside down like an hourglass. Shortly, Gloria is chatterboxing Ben's ears with lists of suburban conformities: pulling crabgrass, going bowling, bed-hopping around. While they prate of the lack of communication among moderns, each spills a major grievance. Gloria's husband is an unread clod. Ben flunked a French exam that meant getting into college. When Ben and Gloria go to bed together, and then agree to meet weekly for more extracurricular love and French lessons, a double irony is consummated. Her special pride was her fidelity; his was being a self-taught genius...
...medicine. A private income permitted him the luxury of pleasing only himself, and he began to write. His first two novels pleased no one and were not published. His third, The Moviegoer, was warmly praised by a few reviewers, ignored by many others (TIME, May 16, 1961), and widely unread. It was a blow that puffers of giantism accepted with much bad grace when The Moviegoer won last year's National Book Award...