Amazingly enough, 100 Years of Solitude is still steaming along at number 644 on Amazon.
Our next book, Beloved, comes in at 1,177 today.
The mass-market paperback of J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King, by contrast, comes in at 4,849
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 just beats that version of the Tolkien with 4,723.
Jessica Hagedorn's just-published Dream Jungle, which I added to the syllabus, ranks a surprisingly low 38,851.
William T. Vollmann's The Ice-Shirt, which I had wanted to read, but which the publisher says is out of print (though Amazon claims to have copies) come in at 200,671. His Argall, which I'd use as a substitute if it weren't so damned long, staggers in at 646,438.
To put this in perspective, I'll throw some academic press titles into the mix.
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, the most popular scholarly book back in my bookstore days over a decade ago and still one of the best sellers today, comes in at 3,285.
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, the only rival to Anderson back then, comes in at 12,806.
Toni Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire, all the rage after the anti-globalization movement made the headlines in the late 1990s, lags at 17,598.
What does this say about the book market? I know Amazon's figures are somewhat distorted -- though a lot less than they used to be -- because its customers are more tech-friendly than the average reader. But still. When a Judith Butler book from more than a decade ago triples the sales of a brand-new novel that was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, you have to wonder. . .
You're a braver woman than I it was weeks before I could even begin to think about looking at the incisions from my lap. Even now I don't like to touch them.
They're...squishy.
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