Battlefield Earth

Towards my goal of building a personal library I recently picked up a book I felt was literarily and culturally important: Battlefield Earth. Written in 1980 by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, I thought it might shed some light on his philosophies and perhaps even be a thrilling tale. The fact that the movie based on the book is consistently rated one of the worst movies of all time merely intrigued me. 200 pages into the 1000 page tome I took a nearly unprecedented step. I quit. It was just too terrible. The characters were punishingly flat and the plot dragged along a predictable and unimaginative path. How did this become a best seller? I did some reading and numerous ex-scientologists have come forward and said they were told to buy the book. Some were even given large budgets to purchase hundreds of books. Nice work Mr. Hubbard.