By "famous" I mean "most likely that a random person you stop on the street will have heard of this book."
The Catcher in the Rye is the obvious example here; others that come to mind include Blood Meridian, A Confederacy of Dunces, and One Hundred Years of Solitude–but I'm not sure if any of those three are famous enough to be readily familiar to the average person.
What do you think?
by doodlebytes
14 Comments
The entire Bible
One Hundred Years of Solitude was made into a tv series on Netflix.
The entire Bible
Mao’s Little Red Book
The Prince
If you’re only looking for novels, it’s probably Catcher in the Rye
Infinite Jest
Middlemarch has to be up there, although it has been made into a TV show
Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces would make an excellent movie. I’m suddenly a little sad it doesn’t exist.
Hyperion? The wheel of time(unless the tv show counts)? The Bible or the Koran?
Definitely A wizard of Earthsea and The left hand of darkness. Brave new world is famous but never got a movie.
Mein Kampf (for very good reasons).
In sci-fi, I’d guess it would be The Left Hand of Darkness, maybe Ringworld?
In fantasy, it’s gotta be The Silmarillion.
Most non-fiction books haven’t been made into movies, like Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”, Euklid’s “Elements” or Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”.
Confederacy of Dunces was a play! I saw it in Boston, starring Nick Offerman. It was 11 years ago so I don’t remember it all that well but I enjoyed it.
I would love to see Blood Meridian get adapted with a director like Eggers
I always found it strange that none of Brandon Sanderson’s books was adapted. He is such a big name in Fantasy and has sold options multiple times but only now things seem to get serious for a TV series.
The first one I can think of is Stranger in A Strange Land. Lots of people have heard of it I don’t know how many have actually read it. I don’t really know how a story about a human raised by Martians starting a sex cult would really go over with the general public.