Beth Foxwell has found a great resource if you're interest in what people have been reading for the past 100 years or so.
The Bunburyist: "I stumbled on a fascinating online resource from a 2006 class taught by John Unsworth, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It's a database of twentieth-century U.S. bestsellers, organized by author, with entries by his students. The entries include physical descriptions of the particular work, publication history, analysis of sales (if information is available), and quotes from reviews."
9 comments:
Just looking at the 1970s lists alone is pretty engaging...what a range from utter tripe (Segal's LOVE STORY, Robbins's THE BETSY, Richard Bach's books...I suspect the glowing blurb by Ray Bradbury is why my folks picked up the paperback of SEAGULL for the 7 or 8yo me) through the solid but ungreat (such as some of Vonnegut's lesser novels) to a few genuinely worthwhile books. I have to wonder how jiggered the PW lists were in that decade, given the Official Rewriting the NYT lists have traditionally undergone...also amused that they choose to list THE SEVER PER CENT SOLUTION as by Watson, even if that was the conceit on the cover.
And it's odd, the things you remember. For example Greil Marcus's review of Fools Die in, I think, Rolling Stone: "And fools buy."
Indeed. One always wonders how high the unread ratio on bestsellers is, or the partially-read (I never have made it through WATERSHIP DOWN the novel). Never have managed more than a few pages of Puzo...or Blatty, for that matter.
Of course, getting epigrammatic with one's reviews can lead to payback in kind...particularly when it's deserved...someone should've noted that lipstick traces, as with Marcus's wildly overpraised LIPSTICK TRACES, are usually found on utterly disposable paper...
Yes, I never managed to get into that one. I liked his early books on rock and roll, though.
I did, to some extent, as well...though preferring such folks as Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh, among those who were primarily rock music critics. Marcus, like some other pop culture academics, was going were few of his colleagues had bothered to tread, and was therefore woefully unchallenged. His post-TRACES collection of odds and ends, such as his take on Bikini Kill, is even worse and in the same sorts of ways as LT.
"Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"
Go Illini!
I'm glad I didn't have to put that Student Information Plan together.
Where's RYAN RIDES BACK?
Somehow I never get into those databases.
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