03-18-2013, 08:43 PM | #31 |
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I see your Star Wars, and raise you signed E.E. Smith PH.D Lensman and Skylark books...
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03-18-2013, 08:46 PM | #32 | |
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03-18-2013, 08:50 PM | #33 |
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One thing I'm struck by is how many of the uber-bestsellers on the OP list are not available as eBooks. I'd already noticed that National Book Award and Putlizer Prize titles often aren't available as eBooks, but it seems like even the super-bestsellers are not.
I don't see American literary culture as declining, although I read too little current fiction to know if it was. More prosaically, what may be declining is the backlist. When you visit a physical bookstore, the backlist is hard to avoid. On Amazon, even though the number of backlist titles is enormous, you have to look for them. Even in public library Overdrive collections, new books are more in your face than they'd be in the physical library. To give credit where due, Mike Shatzkin said something like this recently. He had thought the enormous Amazon selection would help the backlist, but it hasn't. P.S. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what literary culture is. It seems obvious that Germany has it more than the US. But how do you really define it? It is measurable? Or is that a silly question? |
03-18-2013, 08:59 PM | #34 |
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It is a very good question I would love to see addressed. Perhaps it deserves its own thread.
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03-18-2013, 09:07 PM | #35 |
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http://www.unz.org/Pub/LiteraryDiges...feb06-00019a02
The Literary Digest, February 6, 1932: "Best-Seller Lists Mislead" |
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03-18-2013, 09:08 PM | #36 |
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03-19-2013, 05:35 AM | #37 |
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The Great Gatsby was a best-seller in the 20's. Was it considered high literature? And Stephen King has a genius ability in writing. I'm not a King fan but I'm working through the Long Walk, and I'm sure it's better than what a lot of those 'literary' writers produced.
Incidentally, Tolkien was South African-British, not American. It's funny the OP begins the thread with that marker. |
03-19-2013, 11:42 AM | #38 | |
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The more things change... |
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03-19-2013, 05:44 PM | #39 |
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03-19-2013, 07:51 PM | #40 |
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03-19-2013, 08:30 PM | #41 |
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Rather than make their reporting of book sales more accurate, the New York Post, in 1932, dropped it.
There was a depression going on, and they may not have had the resources to do a good job. But this isn't totally different from if they had declined to cover the USSR on grounds that Potemkin villages made accurate reporting difficult. |
03-19-2013, 08:48 PM | #42 | |
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Wow. I've been checking in at unz.org for years, waiting for it to go live... I did a substantial portion of the scanning and other processing for the books there. |
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03-20-2013, 11:47 PM | #43 |
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I started buying paperback books in the late '60's-early '70's because that's when my local candy store put in a rack of paperback books and I discovered Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer. Prior to that, I could only get hardcover books from the library; there was no dedicated bookstore in my town. I read either library books or comic books. My school system didn't assign any of the so-called literary classics until I reached high school. My parents liked to read, but once the kids started coming along, they really didn't have the free time to read much more than the daily newspapers.
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03-21-2013, 10:52 PM | #44 | |
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But I don't read the title as claiming that these authors were all American - Pasternak wasn't, nor was Remarque - rather, it's about literary culture in America. But this made me wonder whether there was a change in foreign authors being popular in the US since '77 (or some other date). But it looks like that's not really the case; even in the last ten years you get Khaled Hosseini (okay, he's American, but he moved here when he was 15) and Stieg Larsson, whose book was popular in translation. (And of course you can't judge American literary culture on books that happen to be bestsellers in one particular year - I wonder whether E.T. ('82) or Return of the Jedi ('83) are even in print. And of course (as others have mentioned) there are many books which have sold consistently over the years, even though they weren't the most popular book in any particular year (i.e. Lord of the Rings).) |
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03-22-2013, 11:04 AM | #45 | |
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Lots of books though and music. My grandparents did have an outhouse and pumped water manually but again many books. I believe I read most of them and there must have been a thousand or so, classics, westerns, and readers digest magazines and condensed books and possibly every National geographic ever published. Must have used up a fair amount of disposable income, but a necessity for them it seems and I feel the same. |
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