Forthcoming Fall Books, Part II- junk food over gourmet items

Thank you, gather members, for your kind responses to my book picks from the Fall publishing season. I have to admit that it really was just reprocessed Publisher's Weekly news with my opinion added- so the credit really belongs to them.

BUT- my comments today are going to be more in the critical line.  I am leafing through the May 7 issue of Publisher's Weekly, and I am feeling cranky. Why? Because I am noticing that the stuff that I am planning to read has much smaller print runs than the stuff that I consider to be basically junk.

Okay, the three novels that interest me the most are:

             "Bridge of Sighs" by Richard Russo, 200,000 copies; "Run" by Ann Patchett, 200,000 copies; and "The Abstinence Teacher" by Tom Perrotta, 200,000 copies.

  If I am feeling particularly anti-Bush this Fall (seems likely) I may try Susan Faludi's "The terror dream: Fear and Fantasy in post-9/11 America"- at only 125,000 copies.

For a little contrast, here are two titles that have initial print runs set at a whopping 1.5 million!-

       "The Choice" by Nicholas Sparks

       "Book of the Dead" by Patricial Cornwell.

Hey what's up with that? Okay, so this is probably not very graceful of me, but really, if you plan to read either of those books, don't you already they are going to contain? Unpredictable they ain't. Sparks is always schmaltzy and teary-eyed, and Cornwell is always about diabolically violent serial murderers. There, now you don't need to spend the money reading those two.

Okay, here are a few others with high number print runs:

"I am America (and so can you)" by Stephen Colbert- 500,000.

"If Democrats had any brains, they'd be Republicans" by Ann Coulter- 600,000

(well, that's a shame-Colbert is twice as funny as Coulter)

"Home to Holly Springs" by Jan Karon- 750,000

"The Almost Moon" by Alice Sebold- 750,000

"American Creations: Triumphs and tragedies at the founding of the Republic" by Joseph Ellis- 650,000

Hmm. I am not reading any more Karon, too many happy endings. Sebold, as I said before, gave me mixed feelings with "The Lovely Bones". I would read the nonfiction title about the founders, as Ellis' book about George Washington got good reviews.

I know that I am being elitist here, but don't you think that we as readers are sometimes too willing to throw time and money at a known quantity? Isn't it more fun to be surprised? I just have this feeling that we are dumbing down the publishing process by being lazy. Sure, this has happened before. Herman Melville died penniless and everybody thought "Moby Dick" was crap at the time. We can all think of authors, actually, who were ahead of their time and died penniless. Poe's another good example. But do we need to rely on Oprah and Al Roker to tell us what is good out there, and then generally ignore them anyway? We have the 'net, why can't we use it?

 I guess I have adequately vented at this point. Try something new, people!