The best sellers on the January 4, 2004 list were produced by the usual suspects for an American bestseller list: previously best-selling novelists and politicians (current and former). This week’s list in fiction is topped by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code for the 40th week, and the phenomenon certainly reached me: I recall that the spring of 2004 was when I myself broke down and read the page-turner in all of three sittings on a few bus trips. Brown, who was following up on his 2000 best seller, Angels and Demons, is not the only novelist on the list who had enjoyed previous success: James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, John Grisham, P.D. James, Tom Clancy, and Nicholas Sparks, among others, are also on the list. The fiction list also features entrees from writers who had previously made their names in nonfiction: Mitch Albom and Jimmy Carter. To the reading public, whatever they write, it seems, is worth a look.
The nonfiction list is similarly dominated by recognizable names, either as author or as subject. A book about Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill is at #6, a biography Benjamin Franklin is at #7, and books authored by Lance Armstrong, Ellen DeGeneres, Hillary Clinton, Sting, and Barbara Bush also make the list. Most striking about this second set of names is that none of them were first known as writers: only after achieving fame in another arena did they decided to set pen to paper. The authors topping the list share the same characteristic -- Bill O’Reilly (#1), Al Franken (#3), and Michael Moore (#4) -- though their books are of most interest as entries into the brawling of highly public liberal/conservative polemics, which seemed to have barely abated since the midterm elections two months earlier:
The only “writerly” writer on either the fiction or the nonfiction list, in fact, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose autobiography (the first of three volumes) sat at #16 after only three weeks, and seems destined to fall of the list on January 11.
Finally, and mercifully, the list only includes three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and children’s paperback. The children’s list, created specifically in response to the popularity of the Harry Potter series, is unsurprisingly dominated by that series in four of the top six spots. Apparently, I missed the phenomenon that was Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, whose two parts held spots #2 and #4, respectively.
FYI: I uploaded the list on scribd here: http://tinyurl.com/44r8xxk.
No comments:
Post a Comment