Hit Lit: One Attempt to Define Bestsellerdom

Laura Miller woke me up early this morning with her "Recipe for a bestselling book," over on Salon.com.  "One writer says he's figured out 12 basic ingredients for a blockbusting title," reads the article's subtitle. "Can the puzzle really be that easy?"

The book is by James Hall.  The title is Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the 20h Century's Biggest Bestsellers. The titillation potential is, well, Come on.  The bottom line (for Hall):  Megabestsellers are all "permutations of one book written again and again for each new generation of readers." The bottom line (for Miller):

True, I, too, would never call (Dan) Brown a “good writer” — yet many very successful novelists are not: Stieg Larsson, for example. A book doesn’t have to be especially well-written, plausible or original to be a bestseller (although it can be). The characters don’t have to be particularly interesting, as John Grisham proves again and again. In fact, if there is one trait that all of the bestsellers Hall considers absolutely share, it’s that a lot of people like them.

Miller isn't being tongue-in-cheek, or coy.  She's just being honest.  She's reflecting on the questions all of us ask—How did that book end up on the bestseller list? Why in the world did book clubs go crazy over that clunker? Doesn't anybody care about the integrity of a sentence?—and she's giving us the answer:  

Publishers can provide a book with the ideal conditions in which to catch on, but only the genuine enthusiasm of the reading public will make it an ongoing hit. Word of mouth — one reader raving to another about how much he or she enjoyed it — is the single determining factor. And you can’t buy that.

No. It is true. You cannot.

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Paul Harding, Tinkers, and Hope for the Soulful

There's a beautiful Motoko Rich story in today's New York Times about Paul Harding, his novel Tinkers, and his path to Pulitzer, which was paved by rejection letters, the assurance (by those in the know) that "nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative, quiet book," a $1,000 advance by Bellevue Literary Press (who has an "empathetic" reader at the helm), a rare blurb by Marilynne Robinson, Indie book store support (I love independent bookstores!!!!!!!!), and smart critics (go Laura Miller, among others). 

Those writing books about heart and soul, about the ways in which the mind and memory work and about the workings of things must, I always say (I tell myself, when things get blue, and oh, they do get blue) keep going.  Paul Harding gives us cause.  Buy Tinkers.

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Laura Miller and The Magician's Book

Laura Miller is a vigorous reader; the reviews and essays she writes—for Salon.com, for New York Times, for New Yorker, those stature zones—speed forward with a sort of exhilarating fury, a faith in books and their significance, and a determination to say precisely what she means. If I haven't always agreed with her (do two people ever see eye to eye on every book?), I've always greatly admired her, and when David Foster Wallace died so tragically a few weeks ago, it was Laura's words to which I turned first; she wouldn't appease, she wouldn't heal, but she might help me understand.

Laura has a new book due out soon, The Magician's Book, and its premise intrigues. It's the story of a woman—Laura herself—who fell deeply in love with the Narnia tales as a child and grew disenchanted as a teen. Finally, she allowed her adult self a rebounded intrigue, allowed herself to return to the land of Narnia. What had C.S. Lewis done with his tales to bring this child in? How had it shaped what and how she would read later? Who else had fallen under Narnia's spell? What in the end makes for a literary reader?

http://www.magiciansbook.com/

All this past week, perhaps even more, I've been talking about The Book Thief with my friend Andra. She read it after I did, we wrote nearly each day of its power. Two nights ago, she turned its final page, and when her husband arrived home, he found her devastated, not wishing to leave the company of the characters she'd met. As I'd lived this, too, as I still have not escaped The Book Thief's spell, I understood. I recognized, in Andra, a kindred heart, a reader who, in Miller's words, pays exuberant attention.

Laura Miller has spent an entire life paying attention to books. I'm betting that we should pay attention to this one.

I'm also wondering what books have seized your heart and have changed who you've become.

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