30 June 2008
Summer Books: What Americans Read for Fun
A memoir by a journalist leads best-seller list in summer of 2008
Washington -- When summer comes, many Americans head for the beaches or their backyard hammocks to enjoy one of their greatest pleasures: reading. Closed for a few months are school textbooks that teach chemistry, mathematics and grammar.
The number-one best-selling book this summer is Audition, the memoir by celebrated broadcast journalist Barbara Walters.
"By the time you finish reading Audition, Walters has won you over, and you suspect she might be pleasantly surprised,” writes a reviewer in The Washington Post.
Walters' memoir is packed with insights gleaned from interviewing some of the biggest names in politics and show business during the past half-century -- Judy Garland, Princess Grace of Monaco, the Shah of Iran, Golda Meir, Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, the Dalai Lama, Cher.
She also recounts the heartbreak of three failed marriages and several miscarriages as well as her struggle to raise her adopted daughter, Jackie, who fell into drug use and ran away from home as a teenager. Walters writes that her ultimately successful effort to raise her daughter into a happy adult will "give hope to other parents who are struggling with their own adolescents' hard-to-understand emotions and rebellion."
At the top of the summer fiction list is The Host, by Stephanie Meyer, who earlier achieved fame as a writer of young adult novels about vampires. "Those were insanely popular," said Kevin Howell of Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine that tracks the publishing industry. He added that the vampire books were the most popular young adult novels since the Harry Potter series.
In The Host, Meyer describes a future Earth that has been taken over by an alien species. The infiltration is slow and undetected until it is too late. Now these aliens, known as Souls, live inside human bodies, which act as hosts for the invading parasites. Usually when a Soul is placed in a new host it is able to take full control of the body, pushing aside any remnant of the human consciousness that once lived inside.
"This is her first adult novel. The publisher was real excited to get that out. That book has been the number-one seller for several weeks," Howell said.
James Patterson, the most prolific American author these days, has just come out with a new thriller, Sail, the story of a widow taking her three troubled children on a sailing vacation in a last-ditch effort to save her family.
"A few months back we figured that he had five new books in six months; the only month that he did not have a new book was May," Howell observed. "It's been 44 days since the release of his last novel, Sundays at Tiffany's. He writes them by himself, [or] with other authors. He's just a writing machine."
Patterson's next thriller, The Dangerous Days of Daniel X, is due out in late July, in time to catch the August vacation surge. By the end of 2008, he will have published seven novels.
Stephen King, the most prolific writer in the United States a decade or so ago, has come out with an audio book this summer, The Gingerbread Girl, which was originally a short story published in 2006.
The story is about a woman who leaves her husband and goes to live on a beach in Florida after the sudden loss of her child. While there, she stumbles across a grisly murder and ends up in a chase with the murderer. Audio books are a popular literary form because they can be listened to while lying on a beach or while driving.
Albert N. Greco, senior researcher at the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, says there is less excitement in the publishing industry these days than a few years ago, when the Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code were raging best-sellers. Nevertheless, Greco predicts the industry will grow by 3-4 percent through 2011.
"The hits will keep doing well, but other books will have troubles," he said.
He added that the sales of mass-market paperbacks will continue to drop as readers from the so-called "baby boomer" generation (born between 1946 and 1964) turn to books with larger print, while sales in other categories will expand.
