Top 25 Best Selling Books of All Time

That the reliability of articles and statistics found on Wikipedia are a bit questionable will be our starting point, the "given" of this little exercise.  That said, I think some interesting "truths" can be gleaned from the site's list of all-time bestselling books.

Do keep in mind that the list makes a distinction between "most published and distributed" and "best selling."  That eliminates contenders like the Bible, the Qur'an, and Quotations from Chairman Mao.  Too, sales figures for individual Harry Potter and Twilight books are, for some reason, said to be so unreliable that they are not included in the list (although the Potter series is estimated to have sold more than 450 million copies in total, and the Twilight series, some 116 million copies).

If we accept these standards, the best selling single-volume books of all-time are said to be:

1. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - 1859 - 200 million copies +
2. Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery - 1943 - 200 million
3. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien - 1954-1955 - 150 million
4. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien - 1937 - 100 million
5. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xuequin - 1754 - 100 million
6. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie - 1939 - 100 million
7. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis - 1950 - 85 million
8. She - H. Rider Haggard - 1887 - 83 million
9. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - 2003 - 80 million
10. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill - 1937 - 70 million
11. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger - 1951 - 65 million
12. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho - 1988 - 65 million
13. Steps to Christ - Ellen G. White - 1892 - 60 million
14. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - 1955 - 60 million
15. Heidi's Years of Wandering and Learning - Johanna Spyri - 1955 - 50 million
16. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care - Dr. Benjamin Spock - 50 million
17. Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maude Montgomery - 1908 - 50 million
18. Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse - Anna Sewell - 50 million
19. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco - 1980 - 50 million
20. The Eagle Has Landed - Jack Higgins - 1975 - 50 million
21. Watership Down - Richard Adams - 1973 - 50 million
22. The Hite Report - Shere Hite - 1976 - 48 million
23. Charlotte's Web - E. B. White - 1952 - 45 million
24. The Ginger Man - J. P. Donleavy - 1955 - 45 million
25. The Tale of Peter Rabbit - Beatrix Potter - 1902 - 45 million

A few things immediately jump out at me:

1. Being originally published in the English language is a huge advantage (as 20 of the top 25 were),
2. But one book each in French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese cracked the top 25,
3. Children and YA books are quite well represented,
4. Quality is not required for a book to become a massive bestseller (as in, The Da Vinci Code and She),
5. Dr. Spock and Shere Hite made the list with "medical" books,
6. The only religious book to make the list was published way back in 1892, and
7. I doubt that some of these books are being much read at all these days.

Interestingly, just out of the top 25 are books like: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Angels and Demons, and Valley of the Dolls (God, help us, I kid you not on these three) and War and Peace and To Kill a Mockingbird.

As you can see from the ballpark-sized rounding off of these numbers, lots of books are grouped together and are really impossible to rank.  But I do suspect that the rankings shown are relatively correct.

Any thoughts?

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, a nine-story collection, is the author’s follow-up to his 2008 Pulitzer-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Seven of the stories were first published in The New Yorker between February 1998 and July 2012, one in Glimmer Train in 1998, and another in Story in 1999.

Reading these stories in the order in which they are presented here, one after the other, will be a greatly different experience than that had by those who read them over the fourteen-year period during which they first appeared in print.  This Is How You Lose Her, in fact, reads more like a novel than it does a short story collection.  This is because all of the stories, although they flip back and forth between segments of his life, feature the same central character already familiar to readers of Díaz’s two previous books.  Yunior, a young Dominican, along with his mother and older brother, came to the United States when he was just a boy, and these stories, in addition to telling how Yunior got here, detail what happened to him once he did.   

Be forewarned that these stories, insightful as they often are, are written in a raw, sometimes outrageous, style.  Díaz writes in a Hispanic street vernacular that sees him often mixing Spanish words into his sentences.  And, even though entire sentences are sometimes presented in Spanish, Díaz leaves it up to non-Spanish speaking readers to figure out what he is saying based on the context of the rest of the paragraph.  But that is the least of it.

Junot Diaz

Yunior is a womanizer, and he comes by it naturally.  His father, although not a constant in Yunior’s life, set the pattern for that lifestyle early on, leaving Yunior to learn all the moves by watching his older brother in action.  His is the kind of macho culture in which women are primarily objects to be sexually exploited, and Yunior describes in explicit terms what he gets from the women who briefly pass through his life. 

Some might find Yunior’s language offensive, but it is exactly this style and language that make Díaz’s stories as powerful and effective as they are.  However, one does begin to wonder how long such a distinctive style can be mined before it goes stale for the reader.  Even though this is my first experience with Junot Díaz’s work, I already wonder how much more of it I can read before the style becomes tiresome.  Díaz is definitely on my radar now, but I am more likely to wait for something new from him written in a different voice than I am to seek out either of his two earlier books.

This Is How You Lose Her is a book about heartbreak – and the very macho central character, surprisingly enough, suffers much of it himself.

In Between Days

Although he is already a prize-winning short story writer (a 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction and a story included in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology), In Between Days is Andrew Porter’s first novel.  I was originally drawn to the novel because of its Houston setting but, frankly, setting is not the book’s strong suit.  Other than dropping a few street names, restaurants, and the like into the mix, Porter really does not create much of a sense of what the city is like - In Between Days might be happening in any large American city. 

Porter’s plot, though, is an interesting one.  Part character study, part coming-of-age novel, it is the story of the four-member Harding family, a family stretched to its breaking point long before the event that finally threatened to shatter it once and for all.  As the book’s opening sentence reveals, Elson and Cadence Harding have recently divorced, a status to which neither of them have adapted particularly well.  Elson, once one of Houston’s hottest young architects, has become a disappointment both to himself and to his employers.  Cadence, struggling to find new direction, is taking college business classes and sleeping with one of her professors. 

Andrew Porter

Their son, already a college graduate, is still living at home with his mother and working a dead end coffee shop job while he considers his future.  His father did not react well to the recent disclosure that Richard is homosexual, and their relationship has been severely strained ever since Richard broke the news.  Chloe, Richard’s younger sister, was attending an east coast college when she learned that her parents had separated.  Now she has been kicked out of school, and is accused of being part of something so serious that she refuses to discuss it with her parents.  Only when private detectives show up at her Houston home, do Chloe’s parents begin to realize what kind of trouble she really might be in.

In Between Days is a story about relationships, trust, and the difficulty of ever going home again once a certain emotional line has been crossed.  The Hardings are in a “between times” period during which the courses of the rest of their individual lives will be determined.  They are somewhere between being the strong family they once were and forever splintering into four very separate lives, and all bets are off as to where each will end up as they struggle with the thought of a future that scares them to death.

Is a happy ending in store for them?  Depends on whom you ask, but I’m not certain that even the Hardings are sure how to answer that one.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

I've been dipping every so often into the new Oxford Book of American Short Stories (second edition) ever since I got my hands on an early copy a few weeks ago, and I continue to find one gem after the other.  This is a massive paperback of 873 pages and 60 short stories written by the early masters of the genre and those who have carried the tradition on into this century.  Lovecraft, Poe, Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway are in the mix alongside writers like Updike, Malamud, Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates.  Throw in writers like King, Erdrich, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Diaz and you can watch the American short story evolve over more than two centuries.

Fans of Joyce Carol Oates, among whom I count myself, will be pleased to see that Ms. Oates has contributed both a short story and an introduction to this edition of the collection.  And, as she puts it in that introduction:

"Though it is hardly necessary, I suggest that the reader read this volume as it is assembled, more or less chronologically.  A tale will unfold, by way of numerous tales, that is uniquely and wonderfully American."

Mostly because I've so much enjoyed reading the writers in the collection least familiar to me, I haven't followed her advice so far.  However, a quick look at the table of contents makes it easier to understand what Oates is saying.  The stories are presented in the order of each author's birth year, from oldest to most contemporary - in this instance, from Washington Irving in 1783 through Junot Diaz in 1968.   Readers making their way through all sixty stories in near-chronological order this way will gain a new perspective on the evolution of American culture over the last two centuries.

This evening I read Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey" and Bernard Malamud's "My Son the Murderer," two very different voices from different eras whose stories happened not all that far from each other.    I have no idea where I'll go next...and, for me, that's half the fun.  It is obvious that Oates put a lot of thought into choosing these stories, none of which will be found in the first edition of American Short Stories.  Some are familiar "classics," some have largely been forgotten for decades, and others are being introduced for the first time to the larger audience they deserve.
 

Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth is one of those deceiving novels in which, for page after page, nothing much seems to be happening until enough small pieces suddenly fit together to reveal another segment of the puzzle.   And, in the meantime, the main players are, bit by bit, turning into real flesh and blood people whose lives outside the pages of the books are easily imagined.  Serena Frome, who supplies the narrative voice of Sweet Tooth, is one such character.

It is 1972 and Serena, bright as she is, knows that even her superior Cambridge education will not guarantee her a spot on a career path she deserves.  The corporate and academic worlds of 1972 Britain are, after all, still very much dominated by men, so her employment options are limited.  But during this Cold War period, British Intelligence sees Cambridge as an important source of new recruits to the service and, when she is “tapped on the shoulder” by a professor/lover who identifies candidates for MI5, Serena accepts the resulting job offer.  

She has no idea what to expect next, or even an inkling of how drastically this one decision will impact the rest of her life.  Now, after the passage of almost four decades, she begins her story in the book’s opening paragraph this way:

            “My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service.  I didn’t return safely.  Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.” 

In the last sentences of the first chapter, speaking of her lover, Serena offers another hint of what is to follow:

            “His case was more complex and sadder than anyone knew.  He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return.  If I know so little about him even now, it’s because I accompanied him only a very small part of the way.”  

Photo Credit: Annalena McAfee

Serena Frome, as it turns out, is as finely crafted a fictional character as one could hope to find.  She is certainly not easy to like, but she is easy to understand; she can be frustratingly boring one moment, and be taking stupid chances with her future the next; and she is as likely to let her innate intelligence be neutralized by her equally innate naiveté as the other way around.  She is, in other words, human. 

Above all else, however, readers will probably remember Sweet Tooth because of its ending, one likely either to infuriate them or to leave them smiling in admiration – one or the other.  Sweet Tooth is so much more than the sum of its parts that, as I expected from already being a fan of McEwan’s previous novels, I find myself in the “smiling with admiration” camp.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Open Yale Courses - "The American Novel Since 1945"

I've long dreamed of living in some university town where I would be within walking distance of a school that encouraged people like me to monitor lectures and classes that appealed to them.  In my case, these would most often be in the areas of  world literature and American history.  Houston is home to several good schools (Rice University, The University of Houston, St. Thomas University, among them) but none of them are easy for me to get to  - nor, as far as I know, do they allow casual monitoring of even their largest classes.  So, no joy there.

But guess what?  I have discovered that lecturers from the best universities in the world are willing to come to my house to deliver personal lectures free of charge.  No travel expenses, no college fees, and, of course, no college credit.  Materials are suggested, but whether you purchase them is entirely up to you.  Sounds perfect to me because, at this point, I'm not after a degree.  I'm simply looking to have some fun by learning strictly for the sake of learning.

This, for example, is a lecture series from "Open Yale Courses" that I plan to start soon on "The American Novel Since 1945."  This screen shot provides a course overview and shows the first five lectures of a series of twenty-six.

Click on this screen shot to see a more readable version

Think about this for a minute...twenty-six lectures totaling almost 21 hours of clock-time.  Can you imagine what this would have cost you just a few years ago, or what it would still cost if you took such a class on-campus?  Here's a link to the complete page for those who want to take a closer look - please do let me know if you decide to listen to some of the lectures and what you think of them.

This is just the smallest tip of a very large free learning iceberg.