Forgotten Best Sellers
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
A lot of people I've talked to in the US enjoy specific books, to a large extent, because they are read by lots of other people at the same time. The spectacle gives the reader a sense of affirmation that the choice was a good one, and for a subset of book genres, wide readership is what allows a fandom to coalesce.
In this setting, an old and unpopular book is bad, because no one else is shipping Bjornstjerne Bjornson characters. It's almost as weird as going back to watch old baseball games.
But if that's not how and why you read, yeah, there are thousands upon thousands of wonderful and unusual books that will narrate a corner of human experience that you've never thought about before.
As an anecdote, Raintree County, a 19th-century family saga set in a fictional Southern town, was a cause celebré when it came out in 1948. The movie rights to it were sold before the novel was even published, and the eventual film won the best picture Oscar, beating out Gone with the Wind! Talk about changing tastes!
[1] e.g., https://observer.com/2016/02/the-truth-about-the-new-york-ti...
For example, pretty much everything by Michener is amazing, but nobody cares about him any more. He's dismissed as some kind of trashy or middlebrow post WW-2 writer; maybe he was -but he's also almost always a lot of fun to read, and occasionally incredibly interesting.
The Bjorndal Saga by Trygve Gulbranssen is largely forgotten in the US (maybe less so in Norway), but won all kinds of presidential awards and was a big deal in its day. It's sort of like "The Leopard" which is less forgotten, since they made a decent movie out of it (probably the great Italian novel). Greater novel though, in my opinion.
Another one I picked up because of an interview with Jim Simons; Jan de Hartog's "the Captain" -so far so good; was a big deal back in its day; it's predecessor "Captain Jan" was important enough it figured into Holland's war story. Totally forgotten now in the anglosphere anyway, and I'd have never heard of it if it weren't for a one off statement by an important guy who could hardly remember the name himself.
Dennis Wheatley is another huge best seller from the Ian Fleming era of trash novels; loads of fun to read -vastly better than Fleming. Alas, the movies they made of his books were all "video nasties" rather than James Bond.
None of these are Nobel Prize in Literature tier books, they vary wildly in quality, but they're loads of fun to read now as they were back then. Books don't always need to be an exercise in self improvement.
Mechanically popping the next book off of my self-assigned queue rarely inspires the same sense of reading purely for curiosity or pleasure.
https://annotated.laphamsquarterly.org/page/forgotten-best-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/05/dennis-wheatle...
Spoilers.
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George Boole - who helped start all this with his Boolean Logic had an extraordinary family.
...
But George Boole had another daughter called Ethel. She had an amazing life - which showed that there is another way. Because Ethel believed in the future.
...
Then Reilly deserted her - and went off to Russia where he worked as a secret agent for the British. Ian Fleming is said to have used Reilly as the model for James Bond.
Ethel was heartbroken - and she wrote a novel called The Gadfly which, although she never admitted it, her biographer says is obviously based on the early adventures of Sydney Reilly.
It's the most amazing book. It's an over the top melodrama set in Italy about the hero, Arthur's battle against the church and the corrupt state - and his treacherous family. At the same time it is about his passionate love for an english girl - Gemma. It ends with Arthur being slowly tortured and then condemned to be shot.
Its message though is a revolutionary one. Arthur is sacrificed so that humankind can be redeemed and open the way to a realisation of the future possibilities for the world - once the old oppressive forces have been overthrown.
The Gadfly was published in 1897 in New York - under Ethel's married name, E.L. Voynich. No British publisher would touch it because of its "outrageous and horrible character". But then it was published in Russia and became an astonishing success. One writer describes how all the young Bolsheviks read it and "it virtually became the bible of the revolution".
By the 1960s it was estimated that 250 million Russian teenagers had read the Gadfly in translation. And polls showed that Arthur was consistently the favourite hero of Soviet youth. And in 1955 a film version was made - with a soundtrack by Shostakovich - which won an award at the Cannes film festival.
In 1920 Ethel went back to her husband Wilfred Voynich. He had moved to New York and had become one of the world's greatest expert and dealers in rare books.
His most famous purchase was a mysterious manuscript written in code that has come to be known as The Voynich Manuscript. No one has ever been able to break the code - it seems to have many scientific references, and herbal and astronomical illustrations.
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They have a nice logical structure on their website: I expect all posts on the subject to appear in their /roundtable/ section. So this URL not having an RSS is just sad. It's so simple to do!
And the author seemed to want to focus on forgotten books written by women and Blacks. Ok, that’s fine, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good books. How about focusing on forgotten books that were popular in their day regardless of the author’s race or gender? (Which may and may not include women and Blacks but also Jews, LGBTQ, and even Whites in no particular marginalized group).
https://annotated.laphamsquarterly.org/page/forgotten-best-s...
Many works by people of color and women have been suppressed or deliberately 'forgotten' by racist and sexist publishers and critics, far more than the white men whose demographic dwarfs the contributions of others regardless of quality. This makes those books worthy of special attention by historians even if they had not, as the post clearly states, already shown their merit by being best sellers on (as you request) their own merits.
The books that stick with me that are largely forgotten are the Merlin books from Mary Stewart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stewart_(novelist)#The_Me... and Chaim Potok's books like The Chosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_(Potok_novel), they have a certain nostalgic importance for me while I can still see that they were not especially important otherwise.
One of the most popular books from the 19th century was "Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50115
The parallels between P. T. Barnum and Donald Trump were obvious, but P. T. Barnum's jump into politics was far, far kinder.
Many of them will probably grow into 'classics' in the decades following, and it's a bit rare to see them just fade into obscurity, but it happens.
Yes, I read it :-)
to kill a mockingbird, the hobbit, the catcher in the rye, the lord of the rings, fahrenheit 451, anne of green gables, the lord of the flies, flowers for algernon, dune, the call of the wild, treasure island, and the narnia series.
Yes, I know many books in that category fade away, but only time will tell if hunger games is one of the ones that fade, or one of the ones that lasts