Word: unreaders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...moving fellow commuter who mumbles his way through a Leon Uris novel is someone to be regarded with awe. The nonreading executive often feels like an Edgar Allan Poe character who is slowly but surely being sealed off from the rest of the world by a wall of unread books. At the wall's foundation are the Pickwick Papers, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, Plato's Dialogues, Henry James, Boswell's Johnson, and countless other classics. At eye level are Paul Tillich and Samuel Eliot Morison, Barbara Tuchman and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, O'Hara, Mailer, Roth, Updike...
...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...