Help please

[zanooda2]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "P. Alexis Nguyen"
<alexisnguyen at ...> wrote:


> With the exception of things like Harry Potter, just what is 
> a "pop culture" book?  


Maybe a "pop culture" book is a book that you don't really need to
read to know its contents? This book is talked about so much (whether
it deserves this much attention or not is another question :-)) that
you can't help but to hear at least something about it. For example, I
didn't read "The Da Vinci Code" (and didn't watch the movie), but I
know perfectly well what this book is about, because of all that buzz
around it. It's just harder for books to become this familiar to
everyone, because they don't run trailers for books on TV every five
minutes, like for movies :-).

It's the same thing with books like with TV and movies, I guess. Take
your other examples - I didn't watch neither the last "Indiana Jones",
nor "Sex and the City", but I know who plays the villainess (Cate
Blanchette, right?) and the four "Sex and the City" girls - and I
didn't even watch the TV show! I may not be able to name other movies
with the "Iron Man" main actor, but at least I know who he is, and
without ever seeing the movie! 

OK, maybe "Lost" is a not a good example here, because I actually
watch it, but I can answer general questions about some other TV shows
of which I didn't watch one single episode, because they are so much
talked about. Maybe this is pop culture - something that the most
people know about even without actually reading or watching. But I
suppose there are much less books than movies that can be included in
the "pop-culture" category, you are right about that :-).


zanooda