Tom Shone, in Intelligent Life’s Summer 2008 issue, laments bestsellers lists in the UK and the U.S. The NYT bestsellers list looks pretty erudite compared with the UK’s top sellers, which consist mostly of books by celebrities and reality-show has-beens, until we realise that the NYT shunted off the self-help and advice books to another more than 20 years ago. When those are merged back in, the U.S. non-fiction bestsellers list is littered with books such as Stop Whining Start Living, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?, How Come That Idiot’s Rich and I’m Not?, and books with “you” in the title, such as Become a Better You, You: Staying Young: The Owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty, Are You Ready! To Take Charge, Lose Weight, Get in Shape and Change Your Life Forever. Then there’s the wildly popular The Secret, whose main message is to think positively. (”To those who object that they have been thinking positively ever since Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, you haven’t really been trying. Really concentrate: ‘Look at the back of your hands, right now. Really look at the back of your hands: the colour of your skin, the freckles, the blood vessels, the rings, the fingernails. Take in all those details. Right before you close your eyes, see those hands, your fingers, wrapping around the steering wheel of your brand new car…’”)
(This article was written a couple of months ago. Now topping the U.S. bestsellers lists are two books decrying presidential candidate Barack Obama as an extreme leftist, at least three books decrying the Bush Administration, a book about actress Tori Spelling by Tori Spelling, a book about Madonna, a John Grisham book, another “you” book — Just Who Will You Be? by celebrity Maria Shriver, and of course, The Secret.)
Noting the celebrity-heavy UK list, Shone suggests that narrative fiction can no longer hold a candle to reality and the squalid details of real life. He speaks of “the weakened power of fictional story lines to hold the public’s attention,” contrasting story and storybook characters with the punch-power of in-your-face life and death: “Say what you like about someone whose first instinct on seeing her dead grandmother is to whip out her camera-phone and take a picture of her in the casket, she certainly registers more vividly than the wan lawyers and downy movie stars who troop through the fiction of John Grisham and Danielle Steele.” For those of us who get lost in some works of fiction, I’m not sure this is true.