1991

US Fiction

1. Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind," Alexandra Ripley 994 copies on LT

2. The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy 1,661 copies

3. Needful Things, Stephen King 2,146 copies

4. No Greater Love, Danielle Steel 138 copies

5. Heartbeat, Danielle Steel 120 copies

6. The Doomsday Conspiracy, Sidney Sheldon 239 copies

7. The Firm, John Grisham 2,861 copies

8. Night Over Water, Ken Follet 400 copies

9. Remember, Barbara Taylor Bradford 59 copies

10. Loves Music, Loves to Dance, Mary Higgins Clark 417 copies

N O N F I C T I O N

1. Me: Stories of My Life, Katharine Hepburn 407 copies

2. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, Kitty Kelley 62 copies

3. Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door, Robert Fulghum 306 copies

4. Under Fire: An American Story, Oliver North with William Novak 85 copies

5. Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, Derek Humphry 114 copies

6. When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home, Erma Bombeck 121 copies

7. More Wealth Without Risk, Charles J. Givens 47 copies

8. Den of Thieves, James B. Stewart 255 copies

9. Childhood, Bill Cosby 36 copies

10. Financial Self-Defense, Charles J. Givens
46 copies

I was waiting at the doors of the bookstore, early in the morning, to get Scarlett on the day it was released.

The Sum of All Fears is the only one of these I've even looked at.

I wonder what I was doing in 1991 ~ it sure wasn't reading bestsellers! ;) I haven't even heard of some of these.

Tried to read the Clancy...failed. Red October was so much better.

Read Needful Things and loved it. Still my favorite King.

Read The Firm and just about barfed at the idiotic ending. Gak. Went with one more Grisham and gagged over that one too. No more for me.

Apart from Scarlett I haven't read a single one of these books. Most of them I haven't even heard of. And Scarlett was pretty awful so 1991's not turning out too great really.

I've not read any of these either and had no desire to. It does seem that in more recent decades, at least the last 30-40 years, reading tastes have declined to the lowest possible denominator. Some of the earlier years had real classics, but these are mostly stinkers that people forget by the next day. Was it the spread of television and other new media or what?

If you have not read any, I hardly think you are in a position to judge.

#8
We are always in a position to judge whether we want to read them or not.

Mighty pious of you.

I certainly didn't mean to insult anyone's reading tastes. People enjoy what they enjoy. My taste is not someone else's. I'm merely trying to engender some discussion. Could a Thornton Wilder or Hemingway make it to the top of the charts in this day? There are certainly authors of that caliber out there, but they seldom shoot to the top of the charts.

Here's a depressing thought: Danielle Steele and John Grisham, and Stephen King, and Sidney Sheldon, and Tom Clancy are the Hemingway's and the Wilder's of our time.

To get me over that thought I went trolling through a used bookstore today and picked up some Hemingway, Frances Parkinson Keyes and Robertson Davies. Guess I'm just not with it these days.

That is indeed a depressing thought, geneg, and I'm putting it right out of my head, along with all the bestsellers of 1991!

The firm and needful things

varielle, just last week on the New York Times bestseller list, the #1 fiction hardcover bestseller was Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a book of literary short stories, and I found it rather startling for Lahiri to outsell everything else, even for a single week. It really is a marvelous book though.

I have read Needful Things about three times. After the first time I left it on the shelf and at times it entered my mind, but somehow I did not feel I had "got" it.

It seemed to me that I must have missed something, as I was not "satisfied" with my memory of the story.

So I read it again, looking for the depth I felt ought to have been there.

Maybe I took it too seriously?
Too lightly?

It was like Chinese food and digested away on me; and left me hungry.

It could have been so great!

So, I read it again. I still don't know?

Nothing for me, here.

Scarlett it was given to me, I didn't buy it, Loves Music, Loves to dance ditto - I'm not a big enough mary Higgins Clark fan to buy her books for myself and, of course, Needful Things. Also The Firm, although I got that second hand years later.