Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Michael Korda's Making the List

I spent part of the day today browsing through Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999, by Michael Korda, a fun if shallow decade-by-decade trip through exactly what the title says: one hundred years of the Publisher's Weekly list of bestselling books. There's some interesting stuff in the raw data (Korda reproduces each year's list in its entirety), such as the split of the list into three during World War I: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and War Books. However, the short essays that introduce each decade are disappointingly shallow, overall. Korda's thesis is that the reading preferences of Americans haven't changed that much, so he likes to make comparisions between the romance novels of, say the 1910s and the romance novels of the 1980s, and that's about as deep as his analysis gets. He tends to be more descriptive than analytical, and offers few of the kinds of insights I had hoped for from a writer who has been the editor and the author of many bestsellers. At times, he seems almost touchingly naive, as when he writes that the high sales for Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time meant that readers were "more venturesome in buying nonfiction and certainly more receptive to new, challenging, or difficult ideas" (173). When I read A Brief History, I formulated a different hypothesis, and I would have liked to hear Korda's inside dirt on a phenomenon I suspect Hawking's book exemplifies: the book almost everyone buys but practically nobody reads.