Books You Haven't Read (Maybe)

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle blog (http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/08/secret-sellers-books-that-just-keep.html) lists ten best-sellers you have probably never heard of or read. Here's the list with sales or in-print figures:

1. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. (614,000 copies sold)
2. Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. (325,000 in print)
3. Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (close to 600,000 in print)
4. Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (83,000 sold)
5. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (over 200,000 in print)
6. How the Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland (over 50,000 in print)
7. Best Friends. by Martha Moody (over 500,000 in print)
8. I Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (130,000 sold)
9. The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl (782,000 paperbacks in print)
10. Interventions, by Noam Chomsky (nearly 25,000 in print)11. Honky, by Dalton Conley (90,000 in print)

A couple of the authors are familiar. But what’s fascinating about the list is what it says, or doesn’t say, about American culture. The Best Seller lists are in themselves interesting indicators, but at the same time the books that make it there are (somewhat) understandable. The authors are famous; the titles are provocative; the buzz has been generated and we salivate and buy. But the ten books in the NBCC list are just weird.

What are these books doing here? What does it mean that the biggest seller is a first book mystery story (The Dante Club) about a group of nineteenth-century Bostonians, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who gather to translate the Inferno and find themselves on the trail of a serial killer? Who are these 700,000+ readers?

Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a memoir by a Hmong immigrant—and is one of the most-often assigned books in freshman college courses. Did you know that?

Take a look at the other books. Read about them on Amazon.com. One of the fascinating aspects of this list is how intelligent most of these these books are, unlike so much of what is normally on the best-seller lists. Rigoberto Menchu? I remember when this book came out—and I also recall that it was later thought to be a fraud, not written by the presumed author at all. (I don't know if that was ever proved or not.) It’s a radical critique of colonial US culture. Best Friends is another first novel, this one about college chums.

What’s my point here? (I'm trying to find one.) Those of us who are interested in contemporary culture and what makes it go find helpful direction in the book world. What are people buying and reading? (Why was Mary Gordon's book about her mother and Roman Catholicism reveiwed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review yesterday?) Does it mean anything that people are buying these ten books and not ten others of perhaps equal value? (Maybe they are and those books are on someone else's list.) What about the fact that many of these titles were initially reviewed tepidly or even negatively. Pearl’s was recommended only for the largest library collections by Library Journal—ie, too dense for most people. In publishing we used to say that a negative review is just as helpful as a positive review.

There are no books with “religious” themes here. The list is obviously eclectic, however--not at all "scientific" or representative. It is not meant to reflect any particular reality except that of the blogger who thought this was an interesting collection of best-sellers most of us haven’t heard of. We know that The Left Behind series of books outsells everything, except maybe The Purpose Driven Life and the Harry Potter books.

We also know the Holy Bible outsells everything. The Koran anyone?

Well, I thought you might find this list as interesting as I did. If you are still looking for something to read this summer, maybe one of these books will attract your attention.

I'm not reading any of them. Right now, my leisure reading of choice is Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s, in the Library of America series. I'm halfway through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich from that collection. Dick is one of those writers being recovered by American readers. All of a sudden. Who knows why? It's kind of like this list of books.

Professionally, I'm reading Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. It definitively takes apart the Intelligent Design argument, but it also raises some pretty serious questions about the whole idea of a created universe for those who think of themselves as Christian and evolutionists. Really? Have you thought that through? Can you explain how the Creator God who is interested in us personally also made/makes the universe and all of its suffering so that we might worship him/her/it?

Ok, I've slipped from frivolous end-of-August space filling to something serious. Sorry. Go back to reading Danielle Steele.