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 copies2. Fifty Shades Darker, by E. L. James: 10.4 million copies3. Fifty Shades Freed, by E. L. James: 9.3 million copies4. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins: 8.7 million copies5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett: 8.7 million copies6. The Girl on The Train, by Paula Hawkins: 8.2 million copies7. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn: 8.1 million copies8. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green: 8 million copies9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson: 7.9 million copies10. 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?