Over at the Guardian, Mark Lawson ponders the UK bestsellers. Anthony Lane did this with the American list once or twice for the New Yorker years ago, and frankly was much better at it, but then he’s Anthony Lane, after all. Here, the analysis basically extends itself to observe that summer books can be rather hefty, and there’s a genre called “female psychological” broad enough to cover Jodi Picoult’s Perfect Match, “in which an American lawyer who takes paedophile cases discovers that her own young son has been abused,” and Dorothy Koomson’s My Best Friend’s Girl, wherein “a woman who became pregnant by her friend’s lover finds that she is terminally ill and begs her estranged chum to bring up the child who resulted from the double betrayal.”
This being England, Richard & Judy come under scrutiny for their role in shaping the list, too, as Lawson chides them for “encourag[ing] more people to read books of the kind that many people are already encouraging publishers to print.” Apparently, people encourage publishers to print depressing stories: “This year’s holidaymakers are not taking away a suitcase of laughs,” Lawson declares. “At least 80% of the top 10 reads are sombre and intense, depicting crises and miseries.” And that’s because, let’s say it all together now, 9/11 changed everything.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Sarah Schmelling wonders if she should change her name if she wants to crack our charts. “Look at any best-seller list and tell me there isn’t something unifying in the ease of articulation among the Browns and Kings, the Higgins Clarks and the McCall Smiths,” she says; also, Schmelling sounds funny in real life. But then—I kid you not, this is how the article plays out—she gets engaged to a guy with an even goofier surname, and all of a sudden family pride starts to kick in. You think Dorothy Koomson spent any time worrying about this sort of silliness?