Seth had this discussion where he quoted Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan book, to which someone commented that Taleb’s books are “unreadable,” to which Seth responded:
If The Black Swan is “so unreadable” why has it been so popular?
Now this is an interesting question. Not so much about The Black Swan (which I liked) but about the more general question of whether a bestseller must be readable. Obviously, readability helps, but are popular books “readable”? I can think of two issues:
1. Books such as “A Brief History of Time” or, to take Michael Kinsley’s famous example, “Deadly Gambits,” which people buy but never get around to reading.
2. Books which seem supremely readable when they come out but don’t age well. A lot of bestsellers are like that, I imagine. If you go back to a bestseller list from decades ago, I think you’d see books that would not be so easy to read today. What I’m getting at is that “readability” is not just a property of the book, it also depends a lot on the reader.
The point is rather that Mangan DID NOT READ the Black Swan. He even mistakes it for a book on investment advice. SO perhaps we need another post about people making statements about books they did not read.
As of this writing, the Vintage Paperback edition of Joyce's _Ulysses_ has an Amazon sales rank of #2,475, which puts it around the top 0.1% of their catalog.
Disclaimer: I stopped reading Ulysses somewhere around chapter 3, at which point I decided that it's completely unreadable and people read it only so they can tell everybody else they did.
I read brief history of time before I started college. I must be an outlier.
Jeremiah –
I read A Brief History of Time before college; actually I read the entire thing in one night while helping my mom whelp a litter of puppies. I wasn't about to go to sleep, I wanted something to read, and a copy was lying around.
Probably helped that we were covering a lot of the same material (to the drawing) from it in the physics class I was taking at the time:)
'Course, both statisticians and non-statisticians consider me an outlier, so you're probably right.
I think the biggest best-seller of all time is pretty much unreadable. How many people do you know that have actually read the whole Bible? And compared to people who have read Ulysses, did they notice what it was saying in a higher or lower proportion of the chapters?
A corollary to item two on your list are best sellers that belabor a concept that has since, because of the book or otherwise, become an understood part of the culture.
ESR's The Cathedral and The Bazaar today reads like a historical manifesto, and it is not that old. Science and technology texts are destined to this end, to their credit.
I've read the whole bible, but agree that parts are either unreadable or (to modern ears) irrelevant and unintelligible. Examples include Relevation/Apocalypse, Leviticus, large portions of the prophets.
I can't compare to Ulysses because I've never met someone who's read it all the way through. I'd hate to show them up by being the first ;) Even those who read a fair part of it didn't seem to like it much.
Another example of a best seller that probably wasn't well understood is Hernstein's "Godel, Escher and Bach" from the 1970's. But even if you didn't really quite get his point, there were great pictures and the best soundtrack of any best-seller ever. [The book was best read while listening to Bach.]
I hear another best-seller, the Koran, has similar difficulties to the Bible, which is why it is seldom translated. Perhaps someone else could comment on this.
Add me to the young "Brief History of Time" readers club, i read it whilst pretending to be ill so I could skip school. I think it's a book which has a reputation for being difficult but it's actually extremely accessible.
Douglas R Hofstadter wrote "Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".
I wrote "a best seller that probably wasn't well understood is Hernstein's 'Godel, Escher and Bach'"
Nick Cox correctly noted 'Douglas R Hofstadter wrote "Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'".
Thus, Nick provides more evidence for my point that this was a best seller that wasn't well understood. ;)
A few popular — or at least celebrated — books that might be thought unreadable:
The collections of Richard Feynman stories: I've found them very entertaining but someone I respect them found nauseatingly immodest and repetitious and so unreadable behind the first few.
Tolkien: It's your thing or it isn't. If it isn't, it's hard to see how you could get far, or even want to try it. Same goes for most sci fi/fantasy.
Proust, Dante: Defeated me more than once.
War and Peace: I wouldn't want to read it for the first time. You have to have a sense of the whole story before you can really appreciate it. Same goes for most long 19th century novels, including writers not often thought of as especially difficult (Dickens, George Eliot, etc.).
I don’t think readability is the underlying factor behind successful books. If you look at most best-sellers, their popularity can be broken down to a few fundamental basics:
1)Either they set the reader on an adventure,
2)They have a revolutionary or at least interestingly original idea.
3)Usually about a way of life/life changing culture.
4)Or they are endorsed by Oprah.
For a forum on statistics the above comments are remarkably shallow or ironic.
To say that Fooled by Randomness was devoid of content or significance implies that the subtleties of Talebs arguments were missed.
It may have been obvious to some that the statistical architecture of economics was laid on an erroneous foundation (black scholes etc) but who else put it on paper?
Taleb might be construed as arrogant and opinionated but a degree of confidence is required to point out the lack of attire on the emperors of financial theory so emphatically.
To those who dislike his writing and demean what he says then feel free to write your enlightening book in more palatable prose and you can highlight his errors for us less incisive intellects.
For those who have never met anyone who has read Ulysses – your sample size is too limited to draw any meaningful inferences – probably doesn't contain enough individuals who have read serious literature of any sort.