February 6, 2015, - 3:30 pm
Scary: The Decade’s Top 10 Best-Selling Books List & What It Says About America
What’s atop the list of the top 10 best-selling books in America for the last decade? You can probably guess. And it says a lot about how low this country has sunk, culturally and otherwise. We’re a nation of lowlifes and vapidiots. (At least, the women are.) But you knew that.
As you probably also know, earlier this week, author Harper Lee announced that she was releasing her first new book in more than a half-century. In an article about it, the Wall Street Journal published this list, below, of the top 10 best-selling adult fiction novels for the last 11 years. Atop the list was the poorly-written, incredibly stupid, torture sex “novel,” “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Even worse, the two sequels to that book are respectively Numbers Five and Six on the list. Lee’s well-known “To Kill a Mockingbird” is Number Nine on the list.
The list spans from the week ending January 4, 2004 through the week ending January 25, 2015, so it covers just over 11 years. It was compiled from Nielsen’s BookScan’s U.S. Consumer Market Panel. If you look at the list, it might seem inaccurate. For instance, the Fifty Shades books sold a total of 45 million in the United States (and more than 100 million worldwide, including the U.S.). But the list has the total at 15.7 million copies. That’s because this list doesn’t include e-books, and it covers about 85% of the print book market, not the entire market. (The Fifty Shades books were only available as e-books at first and for a long time. They thought women would be embarrassed to be seen reading the trash. No, that’s not today’s America. They have no shame.) Still, it’s a pretty strong indicator of what most Americans are reading in the fiction market and how dumbed-down, depraved and warped they are. Or, rather, how dumbed-down, depraved, and warped American women are.
You see, the American fiction market is 80% female, just 20% male. Women are the ones driving this list. I mean, do you know any American male (straight OR gay) who has admitted to reading these books (other than Rush Limbaugh–he loves cats, too, and you know what I say about men who love cats)?
Most American men don’t read novels or other fiction. They read history, biographies, things of that nature. And when they read fiction, it’s spy novels, thrillers, stuff like that. They don’t read stupid, glorified Harlequin Romance novels about torture room sex that sounds like it came out of the “ISIS Guide to Women and Romance.” It’s trite but true: as the old saying goes, he who forgets his history is doomed to repeat it. But she who doesn’t care about history and pimps her mind on imbecilic fluff is doomed to be a dumbass and a lowlife (and we’ve now got a whole country full o’ those). You don’t have to be a prude to get that. In many ways, you are what you read.
For the record, I don’t read that crap, either, though I did read these dumb, boring “novels” to keep up with pop culture and keep up to date with the typical moronism of American women–read my review of these idiotic books. My large library of mostly used books is 95% history and biographies (and some sports and how-to stuff). The rest is mysteries, thrillers, spy novels, and sci-fi.
Occasionally, I like to read a good guilty pleasure. But that Fifty Shades crap ain’t it. The books were silly, a bore, stupid, and written in fifth-grade-level English (apologies to fifth graders for the comparison). They were full of repetitive “old lady” terms like, “oh, my” and “my sex” for the vaginal canal. Probably because they were “written” by an old lady fat chick. The books were referred to as “mommy porn.” They’re not that. They’re just the disgusting, violent fantasy of unhappy middle-aged women. But American chicks gush and drool over this dung heap because, after all, they’re as reliable as Brian Williams when you need a reality check.
I have no problem with Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” being toward the top of the list, if–as I’m told–the movie hews closely to the book. I found the movie (read my review) to be incredibly moving, powerful, and inspiring. It’s the story of a secular Afghan refugee family. The moderate son of the wealthy father, winds up in America, but he confronts his childhood friend in Afghanistan. The friend has become an Islamic terrorist. It’s a nice fairy tale about how the non-existent moderate American Muslims confront Islamic terrorism. If only it were true in real life. But it rarely is. In fact, though, the Pew Research Center found that most American Muslim youths were far more extreme than their immigrant parents. Still, it’s a good movie that promotes the right message . . . and shows us that the only real “moderates” in Islam are secularists who’ve left it and embraced Western values instead.
I also don’t object to Dan Brown’s thrillers dominating the list. I haven’t read the books, but I understand that they aren’t politically correct. One of the novels, “Angels and Demons,” features an explicitly Muslim assassin, who is basically a terrorist. (As I noted on this site, Hollywood sanitized the bad guy and made him a blond Scandinavian.)
I’m not surprised at all that these silly bondage and S&M sex books topped the list. And you probably aren’t either, because that’s the America we’re in now. An America in which the Kardashians are rich and famous and among the most admired, and applauded for bending over and showing America the inner crevices of what’s between their butt cheeks, as Kim Kardashian and Kendall Jenner just did for Love Magazine. An America in which an Olympic Gold Medalist decathlete who was our symbol of male machismo and athleticism in the 1970s has now announced he’s been taking female hormones for almost a year and will soon chop off his penis and testicles. An America in which our President may have already done those things in the name of Islam. He certainly talks that way as he goes back centuries to invoke Christian crusades in order to excuse Muslims burning a man alive in a cage today. An America in which teen moms are celebrities, and so are young male employees at Target who “look cute” in an Instagram photo.
This is not the America in which I grew up. It’s the America in which Fifty Shades of Grey garbage dominates the cultural and “moral” landscape. Where women think it’s cool and hot and sexy to be tied up and whipped and brag about it.
Next week, the excessively hyped “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie debuts in theaters. In the weeks to come, will it sell more tickets on U.S. soil than “American Sniper”? That will tell us a lot more than the top ten adult fiction novels list.
Sadly, I’m betting American women like torture sex as much as ISIS does.
Sex sells. And even though the mainstream media and pop culture narrative is that men are pigs, the overwhelming success of the Fifty Shades trash shows that . . .
Women are bigger pigs than men. Yay, feminism.
Yay, America.
We’re not number one. But “Fifty Shades of Grey” is.
Check the book list.
I am proud to say that the only book on this list that I’ve read is To Kill a Mockingbird (forced to read it in high school — we can’t be reminded too often what a racist country we are). I am also proud that I haven’t heard of a number of these titles.
While I know little about Dan Brown, I know that many liberals like to read The Da Vinci Code, so I suspect that it is somewhat objectionable.
Not that some of the earlier 20th Century novels were much better. Dreiser, for instance, was a hard-core Communist and anti-semite (as were virtually all the naturalist and realist authors); many 20th century authors glorified or identified with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, and so on.
A few exceptions like Exodus do make this marginally a better period, though.
Another exception was that an important aspect of earlier literary life consisted of some celebrity professors feeling they had an obligation to raise the literary level of the American public. Clifton Fadiman was an example, as was Lionel Trilling. Mortimer Adler became a celebrity by publicizing the Great Books. Cultural criticism, exemplified by Jacques Barzun was miles above what passes for cultural criticism today.
Today, unfortunately, though, I don’t think there are any exceptions. University presses disproportionately publish politically correct garbage, and many ‘popular’ historical books are oversimplified to the point of large-scale inaccuracy.
For mysteries, we have plummeted from Sherlock Holmes to Sue Grafton. Instead of a brilliant deductive detective, we see a woman obsessed with ‘finding herself’.
Little Al on February 6, 2015 at 5:00 pm