Books by Rushdie, Clinton and Beckham among those most often left unfinished

[BurtWorm]

The great unread: DBC Pierre, Harry Potter ... oh yes, and David Blunkett


http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2031646,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1

Paul Lewis and John Ezard
Monday March 12, 2007
The Guardian

It's the literary club no author wants to belong to, but boasts the likes of Salman Rushdie, Bill Clinton, Paulo Coelho and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A survey out today of the books Britons own but do not finish shows a surprising lack of appetite for many of the nation's most popular titles.

The bestselling book that topped the poll, DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, has been lauded the world over - ironically, for its explosive denouement. But 35% of respondents who bought or borrowed the Man Booker-winning satire about a Texan schoolboy in a death row reality TV show failed to get to the end.

And while few can dispute the crazed popularity of JK Rowling's books amid the under 16s, the survey of 4,000 adults found 32% were not particularly fussed about the fourth in the series. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire beat James Joyce's 1912 novel Ulysses - running to more than 1,000 notoriously laborious pages - into second place.

Other surprise "winners" in the online survey include Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the Louis De Bernières novel that has sold more than 2 million since 1994, and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist.

Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them. Rachel Cugnoni, from the publisher Vintage, said the apparent unpopularity of tough literary texts like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - all voted in the top 10 - suggests readers are purchasing "intellectual credibility for the bookshelf" rather than books they actually want to read....

[T_i_B]

1. I'm qute suprised that Harry Potter is there

I for one find those books very readable indeed. Mind you, I can totally understand people not fisnishing Salman Rushdie's books. :boring:

[BurtWorm]

2. I've never read Harry Potter, I confess.

My daughter ripped through books 1-4, but 5 slowed her down--although she did eventually get through it. She's in no rush to read book 6. It seems to me that when you start reading Harry Potter or any serial, you're tacitly signing on to read every book in the series, and that is intimidating to some people. I would think that if it starts to drag midway through, you wonder if you're going to have to put up with draggy reading for another several hundred pages.

[T_i_B]

3. Oh, the worst books for that...

...are proper fantasy books such as those by George RR Martin. They always seem to come in trilogies at the very least for some reason. In fact I honestly can't think of any fantasy books that are not part of a series in some way or other.

I do think that it is possible to enjoy a Harry Potter book without having read the previous ones in the series though.

[BurtWorm]

6. Serialization has become de rigueur in children's books as well.

There's nothing more dispiriting to me when I'm looking for books for my daughter than to see "Book 1" embossed on the spine of a brand new book. But that's just me. I think kids love series.

[ChickMagic]

4. Maybe she's dreading the final book

/armchair psychology/ I know I am. After July, there will be no more Potter books. She's just slowing it down by reading slower. /armchair psychology/

[BurtWorm]

5. Could be.

It's kind of strange that people are talking about Harry dying in the last one, even though, obviously, no one has read it yet. That would take the steam out of my sails if I were in the middle of the series.

[Solo_in_MD]

7. Potter fan fiction has been better than the last couple of books

so maybe she is going to kill him off to end her embarassment

[SmokingJacket]

8. Half the people buy books for decoration???

That is seriously weird.

[Catherine Vincent]

9. I confess. I'm one of those that have not finished reading Bill Clinton's "My Life"

I even brought it with me on a cruise but never picked it up. I will get around to it someday. I guess I wanted to buy it to have a piece of Clinton. (no pun). :evilgrin:

[Skinner]

10. I couldn't finish the Alchemist.

Which I guess is kind of embarrassing, since it's such a thin book.

But I just thought it was lame.

[niyad]

11. I bought "the satanic verses" when the whole mess was going on--thought rushdie was an overrated

hack--I barely slogged my way through the first chapter and gave it up as a lost cause-- but worth keeping the freedom to exchange ideas, even bad ones, alive.