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Mount Greylock Books LLC has published States of the Union: The History of the United States through Presidential Addresses, 1789-2023.   St...

Sunday, January 16, 2022

What the nation is reading

 Looking at Amazon today, I noticed the link for the 100 best-selling books on the site.  I decided to check it out to see what the USA is reading.  I'll confine myself to the top 50--anything more would be too complicated to assess. I have looked at nos. 51-100 and they wouldn't change the pattern significantly.

The top seller on Amazon right now is The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of 21st Century Fascism, by the radio personality Glenn Beck.  Only four of the top 50 deal with current politics, and two of the others are right-wing propaganda: The Real Anthony Fauci (4) by the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and American Marxism by Mark Levin.  (Conservatives can choose between analyses of Democrats as either Communists of Fascists.)  The only liberal book about politics is Unthinkable by Congressman Jamie Raskin (22), which combines the story of his personal trauma with an account of January 6, 2001. Some balance is provided, however, by the only work of political history in the top 50, The 1619 Project, about which I have already said plenty in previous posts. It ranks 39th, even though it ranks at the top of the Times combined nonfiction best-seller list this week.  This list includes just one more work of miscellaneous non-fiction, The Office BFFs, an insider history of the TV show of the same name. 

Second on the overall list is a self-help work by James Clear, Atomic Habits.  It's the first of 14 self-help books in the top 50, including Atlas of the Heart  by Brene Brown (6), The Four  Arguments by Don Miguel Ruiz (7), The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, (10) A Little Closer to Home by ABC weatherwoman Ginger Zee (11), and an earlier classic of the genre, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (47).  

Leading the fiction category at (4) is It Ends With Us, by the extraordinarily popular young adult/romance author Colleen Hoover.  Hoover has five books in the top 50, far and away the most of any single author, and nearly 1/3 of the 17 novels on the list.  The only classic among them is Orwell's 1984.  Ten of the entries are children's books,  led by My Little Golden Book About Betty White (12). Lastly, there are three cookbooks.

I was hoping this weekend to review Flying Blind, a history of the disastrous decline of Boeing--culminating in two fatal crashes--by Peter Robison.  That will have to wait until next week. It's a very important book, showing how the newly dominant trends of corporate America are wrecking the quality of products on which we depend.  It ranks  #10,491 (hardcover) on Amazon.  I have been living with the impact of the same corporate trends on publishing for the last 20 years in particular.  Their impact is clear from the amazon top 50.   Within another 20 years, serious non-fiction will have become a hobby.

1 comment:

Bozon said...

Professor
Great note on the list!
Opens no eyes in this country sadly.

Re next week's post, re "...showing how the newly dominant trends of corporate America are wrecking the quality of products on which we depend....'

I would note, in advance, that such a trend is hardly newly dominant, but rather long endemic.

I wish that had not been the case.

Snake oil peddlers have a long, and venerable, tradition here, and I was properly accused, as a trial lawyer, of dispensing a rhetorical version on occasion.

All the best

All the best