New York Times Bestsellers, October 26, 2008

I decided to look at the New York Times bestseller list in late October of 2008, because I wanted to see what people were reading during the run-up to the last presidential election. I was expecting Obama's two books and those ghost-written for McCain to top the non-fiction bestseller lists, but that wasn't the case. The best-selling non-fiction hardcover was Alex Schroeder's book about Warren Buffet, The Snowball, and the best-selling non-fiction paperback was the - since discredited - Three Cups of Tea. Obama's two books are ranked third and fourth respectively on the paperback non-fiction list, and none of McCain's books appear anywhere. I was going to suggest that the absence of McCain's books' from the list was due to the fact that conservatives don't read, but I then noticed that Bill O'Reilly's memoir "A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity" held the fourth place in Hard-Cover Non-Fiction, and Lynn Cheney's "We the People" was fourth in Children's Picture Books.

The names on the fiction lists still frequently appear on the fiction lists. Nicholas Sparks' novel "The Lucky One" was number one in Hardcover Fiction, and novels by John LeCarre and Candace Bushnell were four and five. The big "literary" event of that season, "The Story of Edgard Sawtelle," (also an Oprah pick) was ranked second. Topping fiction trade paperbacks was the Christian-fiction mega-hit "The Shack," followed by "The Secret Life of Bees," which had just been turned into a film, followed by a Ken Follet historical thriller. Junot Diaz's Pulitzer-Prize Winner "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was ranked fifth.

It was interesting to me that the only subject-specific list at the time was "Advice and Misc." Ranked second in the Hardcover Advice and Misc. list was a book titled, "What in the World is Going On?" and I must admit, I found myself asking the same question. That the New York Times chose to give only advice-books their own list suggests that a large number of the Americans still reading were turning to books to help them change their lives - which suggests that many of them were deeply dissatisfied. Now that the various global political, economic, and ecological crises have all gotten still worse, I fear what books I would find on the Times' bestseller lists this week.