Tim Adams from the Guardian Observer, spent last week reading the ten novels that top England’s Best Seller list. A glutton for punishment, apparently.
To try to maintain my bearings as I ploughed on I kept little running totals of what seemed like useful statistics in a notebook. The final tallies looked like this. Number of pages: 3,891; murders: 54 (of which, throats cut: 17); orgasms: 24 (of which, simultaneous: 8); books using the word ‘raghead’ to denote an Arab: 3; good-looking villains: 1; central women characters who did not talk about needing a man: 0; pistol whippings: 5; gasps over unexpected proportions of lover’s manhood: 3; uses of the phrase ‘all hell broke loose’: 2; uses of the phrase ‘you do the math’: 4; times I went to sleep halfway through a paragraph describing the night sky: 2; times I smiled at an authorial joke: 4; times I laughed out loud (when supposed to): 0. (One of the things we seem to want from our bestselling books is a straight face. One of the things they demand from us, almost without exception, is to be taken seriously.)
Reminds me of acquaintances who slavishly see every blockbuster on opening weekend, then whine about the shoddy quality of “movies these days.” It’s a question of taste, really, which Adams gladly acknowledges and demonstrates. A fun read.