Books of the decade
Here’s a bit of joyous end-of-the-decade news for those who write books, read books, love books, help bring books into the world (yes you, Heather Jackson):
According to the global information company, The NPD Group, 6.5 billion print books were sold this decade. (Add to that 1.8 billion e-books.) You may remember that e-books were supposed to wipe out print books? Didn’t happen. I love everything about physical books but really I don’t care HOW people read books. I care that they read.
And I care WHAT they read.
About that. I am sorry to report that these were top ten bestsellers of the decade.
1. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James: 15.2 million copies
2. Fifty Shades Darker, by E. L. James: 10.4 million copies
3. Fifty Shades Freed, by E. L. James: 9.3 million copies
4. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins: 8.7 million copies
5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett: 8.7 million copies
6. The Girl on The Train, by Paula Hawkins: 8.2 million copies
7. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn: 8.1 million copies
8. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green: 8 million copies
9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson: 7.9 million copies
10. Divergent, by Veronica Roth: 6.6 million copies
What occurred to you as you scanned that list? Here’s what occurred to me:
Wow. These books were all movies. Hollywood’s effect on book sales is EXTRAORDINARY and out of proportion.
Wow. I read many many books, and I’ve read only ONE of these decade bestsellers (The Help). I did, however, see 4 of the movies—although not the movie made from the book I read.
Wow. Apparently tens of millions of readers are attracted to dystopian visions of the future. But we are currently LIVING a dystopian vision, so I am spectacularly uninterested in (and right now downright averse to) steeping myself in this genre. (I’m glad I read The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 when I didn’t feel the world was as poisonous as it now feels to me.)
Wow. Not to be overly judgmental about it…well, okay, why not be as judgmental as I want to be…but Fifty Shades? Really? Such unadulterated (ha, almost a pun in there somewhere) crap. A nubile girl-woman. A privileged asshole of a rich man. BDSM. Aren’t we capable of having better quality fantasies than this?
Wow. These books are all fiction. But nonfiction is a much, much MUCH bigger category—both in numbers of books published and in total revenue. For example, adult non-fiction revenue totaled $6.18 billion across the publishing industry in 2017, while adult fiction revenues reached $4.3 billion, according to data from Association of American Publishers (AAP), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Bookscan.
So much for the past decade. What’s on your welcome-to-the-new decade reading list?
6 comments
I surely hope we have better quality and more imaginative fantasies!
I’m starting with The Water Dancer and Overstory.
i read both the water dancer and overstory. both fantastic. enjoy.
I too have only read The Help, but the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the only movie I saw (the Scandinavian one) on that list.
It’s a sad list but if it were different we’d have a different world, I think.
And a better one…
oops, you wanted what I’m going to be reading in 2020–Olga Tokarczuk–I can’t pronounce her name but I love her writing. Her Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was made into a movie too :>) I’m about to start House of Day, House of Night. Water Dancer, Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers and Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House are coming soon.
I re-read Handmaid’s Tale in preparation for The Testaments. It was just as compelling as I remembered it being, but I didn’t remember it at all. I was a disappointed in The Testaments even though it was interesting.
I didn’t want to read Testaments because Handmaid’s Tale was such an important book for me, so powerful and meaningful, such a big part of my development as a feminist. An odd reason I guess. Also, as I wrote in the post: We are downing in dystopia right now. I don’t want any more!!
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