The New York Times Worst Sellers 1-20
How Boring!
I find The New York Times top twenty paperback fiction sellers to be a modern day tragedy. What this country considers “literature” or “a great work of art literature” is horribly inaccurate I am afraid. Does anyone else see this? Do I suffer alone?
I found a way to make this tragedy less tragic for me. I have re-written The New York Times best sellers paperback fiction top twenty. It is called “This country has no idea what great literature is” or “Popular art in this country is trash” or “What have we been reduced to?!” or “I wish I lived in the days of old when literature was REALLY literature” or simply “The New York Times Worst Sellers 1-20″:
- THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, by Audrey Niffenegger. (Harvest/Harcourt, $14.95.) Life with a boring librarian who travels back and forth through time. A great science-fiction cliche!
- THE SHACK, by William P. Young. (Windblown Media, $14.99.) A boring man whose boring daughter was abducted receives an invitation to a boringly isolated shack, apparently from boring God. How Boring!
- THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson. (Vintage, $14.95.) A boring hacker and a boring journalist investigate the disappearance of a boring Swedish heiress. The most hackneyed piece of garbage ever written!
- THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE, by Heather Gudenkauf. (Mira, $13.95.) When a selectively boring girl and her boring best friend vanish, boring family secrets come to the fore. Very trite and wonderfully horrible!
- THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. (Dial, $14.) A boring journalist meets the island’s old boring Nazi-resisters. A terrible and banal work of shit!
- OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout. (Random House, $14.) A boring seventh-grade math teacher is the boring link in boring 13 stories set on the boring Maine coast; unfortunately a 2009 Pulitzer winner but, then again, what can we come to expect in these days of artistic drudgery.
- THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, by Garth Stein. (Harper Paperbacks, $14.99.) A boringly insightful boring Lab-terrier mix helps his boring owner, a boring and struggling race car driver. Utterly shallow and lacking insight!!!
- THE LUCKY ONE, by Nicholas Sparks. (Grand Central, $13.99.) A boring Marine returning home sets out to track down the boring woman whose ugly photo he found in Iraq. A masterpiece worthy of the Garbage 2009 Prize!
- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. (Quirk, $12.95.) The classic story, retold with modern “boring ultraviolent zombie mayhem.” Very inventive!!!
- THE ALCHEMIST, by Paulo Coelho. (HarperOne, $13.95.) A boring Spanish shepherd boy travels to Egypt in a boring search of boring treasure. Treasure? How imaginative!
- SARAH’S KEY, by Tatiana de Rosnay. (St. Martin’s Griffin, $13.95.) A boring contemporary American journalist investigates what happened to a boring little girl and her boring family during the roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942. Blah!
- THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99.) A boring girl looks down from boring heaven as she describes the boring aftermath of her boring murder. Wow! An Einstein of a book!
- THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG, by Muriel Barbery. (Europa, $15.) A boring young girl and a boring widowed concierge, both boring closet intellectuals, become, very boringly, friends. Closet intellectuals? What?! Rubbish!!
- THE KITE RUNNER, by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $15.95 and $14.) A boring Afghan-American returns to boring Kabul to learn how a boring childhood friend has fared. When attending college, I had to endure this blah-ish book for my literature class. If you are a true professor of English NEVER make your students read this!!! And to think this book still haunts the top twenty….evolution?
- THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED, by Wally Lamb. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A boring couple flee to a boring Connecticut farm after the boring trauma of the Columbine shootings. A delightful bowl of piss!!!!
- UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Vintage Contemporaries, $15.) Boring stories about the boring anxiety and boring transformation experienced by boring Bengali parents and their boring American children. Humdrum! Lifeless! Vapid!
- IN THE WOODS, by Tana French. (Penguin, $14.) A boring Irish detective investigating the boring murder of a boring 12-year-old girl returns to the boring scene of his own boring and terrible ordeal. Bummer!!! Uninteresting!! Crap!!
- THE LIKENESS, by Tana French. (Penguin, $15.) Boring detective Cassie Maddox is drawn into a boring murder case in which the boring victim looks just like her. Another detective story, how exciting!!! Tiresome!!! Stale!!
- THE OTHER QUEEN, by Philippa Gregory. (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $16.) The boring captivity of boring Mary, Queen of Scots, at the boring hands of boring Queen Elizabeth I. How old-story!!! Amazing plot!! More crap!!!
….And last but not least…
- A MERCY, by Toni Morrison. (Vintage International, $15.) In boring 17th-century America, a boring slave mother urges a boring Northern farmer to buy her boring daughter so the boring girl can have a boring life. Thank-you Toni! we really need more like you!
Alas, my review ends. Let us not forget the tragedy of the best selling Hardcover fiction and mass-market fiction, but I just cannot fill my whole day with tragedy for personal reasons that involve my sanity. G’day folks!
-OSun
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I find this article to be ridiculous and “boring!”. So why don’t you give us a list of what you think the Top 20 bestsellers should be?
Or do you even read?
Wow chakliuk, you read until the end? It was BORING from the start. Please, find a new word.
I do agree that much of today\’s \’literature\’ falls far short of some of the magnificent books of the past. However, the author of this article makes the fatal mistakes of assuming 1) we care what he thinks, 2) that \’old\’ apparently equals \’good\’ (have you read some of those \’classics\’? BORING!), 3) boredom is the worst attribute any book can have (slovenly writing is far worse, sir)!
Have you read The Time Traveler’s Wife? I loved it.