General group talk

Just wanted to say, this group is a great idea.

Now a question. Comparing the bestsellers from recent years with the bestsellers from unrecent ones. Do you think the quality has gone up over time, or gone down, or stayed about the same?

It seems the most popular lists also include a fair amount of garbage in any year. Even in recent years the ones that will endure tend to separate themselves after only a few years. So, I really think it's remained about the same. Popular tastes seldom favor a classic, but when they do they are in the race forever.

Does anyone know if there's lists of UK bestsellers anywhere? Being in the UK, I'd be more interested in that, and it would also be interesting to see how they compare to the US bestseller lists.

EDIT: I have been looking on the web, and haven't found anything yet, but I did find this Guardian article:

What makes a book a bestseller - and what do Britain's bestsellers say about us? Tim Adams read every novel in last week's top 10 list to see if there's quality as well as quantity in their 3,891 pages.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,996923,00.html

I started this group partially to see how books stand the test of time. I thought that bessellers might have a better chance of it then mor obscure books. Obviously the older the year, the less likely a book is to survive. But there are classic authors who did get on the bestseller lists, like Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. We don't seem to be remembering people from the turn of the century. In the last thirty years, I don't know who will stand the test of time. Maybe a couple books each from Stephen King and John Grisham will remain on people's minds.

The there is the problem of genre fiction (mystery, science fictions, westerns, etc). These books usually don't appear on the bestseller lists. I can't imagine Agatha Christie's detective (mystery) novels not seeling well when they came out. Around 2000/1, the compilers of these lists decided to take the Harry Potter books off of them, relegating them to a children's category whose data only appears infrequently.

One thing I did find is that about 25% of the books or author in any year I did needed to have some cleaning up either in the author or the works page. This is combining and separating.

I've thought about posting a thread on a 10 year recap of bestsellers found in USA Today, 1993-2003, and it does include most of the HP books.

Dwight Garner's blog papercuts.com is always a must-read for me, but Dwight also writes a weekly column for the NYT Book Review highlighting the ups-and-downs of their weekly bestseller list, and here's his header from this weekend's edition:

"There are not a lot of surprises, week in and week out, at the upper reaches of the Times fiction bestseller list. But occasionally a comet lands and flattens the forest, sending the usual critters running. That happens this week as Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth makes its debut at No. 1. It's hard to remember the last serious, well-written work of fiction, particularly a book of stories, that leapt straight to No. 1; it's a powerful demonstration of Lahiri's newfound commercial clout. The critics, of course, have been with her since the beginning. (Lahiri's first collection, Interpreter of Maladies won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000.)

Unaccustomed Earth was reviewed on our cover a few weeks ago, though it's possible Lahiri never saw it. She recently told an online interviewer for The Atlantic Monthly that whenever she has a new book out, her husband secretly throws away the Times Book Review section lest she stumble upon the review. When her first book was published, she said, "I read everything. It was like the first baby - you take a million pictures and each moment is so special." These days, she said, "I feel more vulnerable. With this book I decided not to look at anything at all."

vpfluke, thank you for the interesting information.

NPR ran an interesting story about reading tastes during the Great Depression as reflected in Publisher's Weekly... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105350224

Thanks for the link.

My reading of best-sellers is not much these days.

Varielle: I think between you and me we covered almost every year of the 20th century, but I haven't really checked. Some of the threads have gone "dormant."

4> But did Agatha Christie's novels sell well enough to hit the top ten, or were they only major in aggregate? There's a several long-running series that are major as series and big enough to show up at places with some small space for books, like Wal-Mart, but don't usually hit the top ten.

I took a quick look through US bestsellers for 50 years and couldn't find Agatha Christie. Also found that the British didn't do best sellers lists until 1979 (Times of London), so there may have been a bias against British books on the lists. I think Christie died in 1976, but one wold think she should have been on the lists. But one must realize that only the first 2-3 Harry Potter books made the regular best-seller lists, as the later ones were shoved into the chapter books category.

9: I'd guess Agatha Christie was probably a bigger seller in paperback, as well. I've done some looking at the New York Times bestseller lists, and there was a good 25 years when no single Christie book sold well enough to get on the list.

In my youth mysteries, and books in some other genres, were not included on best seller lists. More than one excluded them, but I am thinking specifically of the New York Times.

Robert

The writing is far less ornate and there can be a lot more explicit sex and violence now but when you factor those out I suspect there isn't much difference left over.

What happened to 1943?

1943 is dormant, but here is the link to it: http://www.librarything.com/topic/26242

Aluminum pennies?

steel and zinc

Here are some bestseller lists I just came across via Twitter:

http://www.caderbooks.com/bestintro.html

Here's a link to 3 different early lists. http://gnupooh.org/bestsellers.html

Do we want to try to put in the "Victorian" bestsellers?

I'm so interested in this whole group that I've missed my afternoon tea! Thank you!

I am not familiar with how best seller lists are made: are they simply the sales totals? Does that include libraries, schools and University purchases and are they simply hardcovers on your lists? I've never thought much about the lists. Most people wouldn't be able to buy hardcovers, would they? Wouldn't that affect sales? Is there such a thing as lists of best sellers combining hardcovers AND softcovers? Wouldn't that be more fair?

If those lists are only hardcovers, that would explain why I don't like many best sellers - because people and institutions who can buy a lot of hardcovers will have different outlooks from mine.

Do I make sense with this?

I am glad you like these lists.

My guess is that the lists include sales to institutions, the most current lists will sometimes indicate a book with group sales.

However, they are almost always hardcovers. The New York Times has done paperback lists in the last 10-15 years. However, lists from USA Today do include paperbacks.

The lists mostly represent USA reading habits. Old lists from other nations are very difficult to find. I think the 'Victorian' list from 1862-3 are British.

The lists do not include Evergreens (books that are continuing to sell well year after year (Bible, Shakespeare, dictionaries, etc.). Also, see my comments at Message 4.

Regarding paperback lists: some distinguish between trade and mass-market.

Thanks vpfluke! There must be lists of best selling authors, I wonder if I can find something on the web. That might be interesting too. But maybe I can guess at who might be at the top end. I guess that's not too hard to figure out.

Of course, LibraryThing's Zeitgeist page ( http://www.librarything.com/zeitgeist ) kind of represents bestsellers for LTers. Harry Potter and J K Rowling are a the top of the works and author list, but Twilight is the most reviewed.

My dream is to learn a lot about the 1950s or 60s or 70s by reading as much mediocre fiction as possible from those days. Not even the top 10 bestsellers. What is there that I could learn about society by only reading the bottom 10 books of the top 20 list that I couldn't learn from reading the top 10? Maybe nothing. But I have a stash of paperbacks that I bought in the late 1970s that I am re-reading and I am sure that there are some differences from then to the same kind of book now. All I have to do is figure out what the difference is, and then I will post it. (How about no cell-phones, and the pre-apocalyptic mood of people not even knowing that 9/11 would be coming.)

I just want to make a minor comment on the idea of apocalyptic mood. In the 1950's, the U.S. wondered a lot whether the country might be attacked by nuclear weapons. I had a teacher who had escaped from the Hungarian uprsing in 1956, and we wondered whether the Eastern Europe situation was hopeless. But crime in the cities was far less. Fortune published a book named The Exploding Metropolis in 1958 and only devoted a page or two to crime, so with all the problems associated with growth and the need for renewal, their falling apart due to crime and racial problems hadn't really ben noticed.

I wonder how the fiction of the time related to this.

I took a look at some early 1960's fiction, and came across two novels that did reflect the times:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is certainly well known, and reflects the racial tensions.

The other is Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel, which I didn't read, but it seems to reflect kind of an apocalyptic feeling coming out of the Cold War.

Yes, I completely forgot about the nuclear issues of those times. I was born in 1962 and naturally was too young to have any idea about the Bay of Pigs, The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. I have no memory of my parents discussing any of these earlier events. What I want to do is not read books about the specific historical events, but instead read everyday stories of average people, and see how those events impact their lives. What did someone at the laundromat or the little league game or the church meeting have to say about the news of the day. Then I can just skip the newscast and the political analysis.

libraryhermit, I really like your idea. It's one of the reasons I like to read older and often relatively obscure fiction, myself. I also like reading histories and memoirs written long ago for the same reason. You get the history of the period being written about, and you often get a look into the attitudes of the time the history was written by the author's comments and editorializations.

My sixth grade teacher read us a book about the aftermath of an atomic attack, i.e. radiation burns, people evaporated, etc.. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it absolutely scared us to death.

>31 varielle:

Hiroshima?

No, it was a fiction work about an attack on the US.

It might have been Pat Frank's 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, a classic post-nuclear holocaust story, which is set in Florida.

That's it!

Here's an interesting story about a guy who decided to read the #1 book of the year for the last 100 years. He's up to Valley of the Dolls, not one of his favs. ;) http://www.salon.com/2014/04/02/lessons_from_stephen_king_and_valley_of_the_doll... And here's a link to his blog where he reviews them all. http://www.kahnscorner.com/2013/02/100-years-94-books.html

>36 varielle:, that mission sounded painful, but after reading a few entries from his blog I see it's more of a hit-and-miss experience. He also does an excellent job with his reviews of each book. Thanks for the link!

I'm surprised he doesn't substitute something else for the 1982 (E.T. storybook - awful!) and 1983 (Return of the Jedi storybook- meh) entries, as he explains he's done with Harry Potter. And the poor guy, when he gets to John Grisham ....

PS - I've started a new topic in Book Talk, I think this is worth wider sharing.

I recently read the result of a slightly similar though much less masochistic project: http://www.anagrambooks.com/the-best-american-book-of-the-20th-century. Interesting in several ways so it was. Occasionally wonderful juxtapositions, occasionally dumb-striking stupidity.

Did you know there was such a thing as a best seller-o-meter? http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160812-the-secret-code-to-writing-a-bestselle...

Here's a link to a new article about the best selling FICTION books of the last 100 years and the books with staying power that weren't necessarily best sellers when they came out. https://lithub.com/here-are-the-biggest-fiction-bestsellers-of-the-last-100-year...

>40 varielle:, Just via spot checks, the early years at least looks pretty consistent with the lists published in this group for each year. Didn't really check the more recent ones. Who doesn't cringe to see the Fifty Shades of Grey debacle? Won't that make people smirk in a hundred years ...

It proves any illiterate can make money with the right marketing.

It’s just been announced that the bestseller for our soon to be over decade was Fifty Shades of Grey. Heaven help us.

>43 varielle: How disappointing.

I just heard a story that up until WWII the way best sellers were calculated was by the NYT sending around to the book shops around town and asking what they sold the most of. 😳Hardly representative but I guess that was the best they could do.