Only two Irish books feature among the hundred best-selling paperbacks from British publishers in 1998 - Marian Keyes's Rachel's Holiday in twenty-seventh place, and Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews's The Craggy Island Parish Magazine in ninety-eighth.
Normally Maeve Binchy would be near the very top of the list, and indeed if it were to feature all paperbacks sold during the year she undoubtedly would be, but it confines itself to paperbacks that were first published during 1998. However, next year, when Tara Road goes into soft covers, she's sure to be in the top ten again.
Books published in January obviously have a greater chance of selling more copies than books published later in the year, and so it proves, with John Grisham's The Partner in first place (a staggering 1,018,428 sales for a gross of £6,100,384) and James Cameron's spin-off book from Titanic in second (628,425 sales for a gross of £9,420,091). However, Dick Francis's 10lb Penalty wasn't published until November and it reaches sixth place with total sales of 523,745.
Patricia Cornwell has two books in the top ten, while Catherine Cookson, though dead, has three in the top twenty and, according to Transworld publishers, has more unpublished manuscripts still to come. Old favourites like Danielle Steel, Wilbur Smith, Sidney Sheldon, Tom Clancy, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett also do well.
Books that might loosely be termed "literature" fare badly, with only ten in the top hundred, notably Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, in third place, which is the highest reached by any Booker winner. Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is in seventeenth place, while Ian McEwen, Dava Sobel, Iain Banks and Carol Shields also make the cut.
But if literature does poorly, non-fiction does even worse, with only five titles in the list - Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods performing best in fourteenth place. However, women writers account for forty-three of the hundred books (the highest to date), while thirty-nine of the authors are American.
The list is compiled by Alex Hamilton of the Guardian, who sees in it a shift away from international thrillers towards the "domestic" ones typified by Patricia Cornwell. He also detects a general sense that readers are "trading up" and that the lower end of the readership market is dropping out into magazines, though I don't see that myself - the overall tenor of the list seems much as it was in previous years.
He also points out that some paperbacks from previous years still dominate the weekly bestseller lists - indeed, Angela's Ashes has now sold 1,278,087 copies in paperback, Bridget Jones's Diary has sold 1,289,087, both Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Notes from a Small Island have topped the 1.5 million mark, while The Little Book of Calm has been bought by almost two million people.
Who said literature is dead?
I've just finished reading John Sutherland's Where Was Rebecca Shot?, which is the third of his immensely entertaining collections of essays examining what he terms "puzzles, curiosities and conundrums in modern fiction".
Among the teasing fictional inconsistencies addressed in this volume are Who moved Molly's piano? (Ulysses), Who killed Owen Taylor? (The Big Sleep), Why does Patrick Bateman wear two ties? (American Psycho), What really happened in 1868? (Possession), Where are the firm's computers? (The Firm), Why hasn't Mr Stevens heard of the Suez crisis? (The Remains of the Day) and Is Jeanette's mother gay? (Oranges Are not the Only [ RO] Fruit).
He's surely wrong when he declares that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall fell in love while making the 1946 movie of The Big Sleep (that happened when they were first paired in the 1944 To Have and Have Not), but in general his analyses add greatly to one's enjoyment of the books whose minor glitches he is discussing.
Anyway, this 1998 Weidenfeld & Nicolson hardback, published at £12.99, is currently on sale at Eason for a mere £3.99. Other notable hardbacks bargains in the store are E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes at £4.99, Larry Baker's The Flamingo Rising at £2.99 and Peter Guralnick's book on Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis, at £5.99.
Patrick Kelly from Killernan Bridge, Co Limerick, gently points out that I may have misled people recently when I stated that Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, was only available in the US.
Using the Internet, Patrick ordered the book through amazon.com.uk on December 13th and received his copy eight days later. Silly of me not to have thought of mentioning that.
Anyway, Patrick thinks it "a wonderful book", and so do I.
And while I'm on the subject of corrections, I mentioned two weeks back that Marian Keyes's forthcoming novel, Last Chance Saloon, is being published by Michael Joseph. Well, Paula Campbell, Poolbeg's sales and marketing manager, whispers in my ear that, as always, Poolbeg are the publishers here. Proper order, too, seeing that they discovered her.