You Owe it to yourself #8: Keeping up to date

Over the past two months I've said a lot about reading your current favourite genre; focusing on award winners, classics, and trying to define exactly what your favourite genre are. This week I'm going to switch from the old to the new. I'm talking about the currently best selling books in your genre.

If you are well known among your friends and co-workers as "The Fantasy Guy" or "The Comic Book Guy" or even "The Non-Fiction Guy" it wouldn't hurt for you to keep an eye on one of the many best-sellers lists available on line for books you should be reading.

Being a Canadian, my first stop is The Globe & Mail best-sellers list. As I run a small library I like to think that I keep up-to-date on what my fellow Canadians are reading. Next I go to The New York Times best-sellers list. I like the fact that my neighbours to the South also keep track of the best-selling graphic novels each week. For a more specific comic list I check out the best-sellers at Diamond Distributors.

I'm not saying that you should limit yourself to only reading best-sellers, just like you shouldn't limit yourself to only reading one author or one genre; what I am saying is that you should be aware of the current big stuff in your genre of choice. I'm a huge horror fan, it would be silly for my friends to think I was unaware of the entire Saw series or the Twilight books - actually I didn't like either of them - I like my horror movies with less torture-porn and my vampire books with more, you know, VAMPIRES in them.

Basically, if your friends and co-workers are reading about your genre in the paper or online, you owe it to yourself to know what they are talking about, even if the stuff isn't exactly your favourite part of the genre. Otherwise you quickly fall out of the loop and are no longer seen as "The Horror Guy" and are instead simply seen as "That guy who says he likes horror but doesn't even know what Twilight is about."

Check out my actual blog at http://wisdomofbookmonkey.blogspot.com

First, has anyone ever claimed Twilight was horror? Seriously? "Vampire" used to mean it was a horror story but that's no longer the case.

Anyway, I'm a librarian, and a sizeable percentage of the books I read are because a lot of other people are reading them and I know I'm going to be asked to discuss them. If I can't read the book, I have to at least be conversant with it or I'm pretty much being a bad librarian.

I kind of view the whole thing as the difference between a person who likes to read and a person who has read a few books they liked. Someone might have read a few romances they liked, but they're not really a romance fan unless they're conversant with the whole genre.

Hmm, I don’t think anyone’s ever called Twilight horror, and I think any self-respecting horror fan would call that an insult to the genre.

ITO keeping up to date: I considered this important when I was working a bookshop, but not anymore. I don’t think a love of books requires good knowledge of the bestsellers since they’re very seldom the best books (or even good books). I’d rather spend that time reading about the books I love and looking for others that will interest me. Since I also read a variety of genres (and books that traverse genres or can’t really be classified), I wouldn’t say that I’m especially well-read in any of them. But that’s fine – it’s more important to me to be able to speak about the books I’ve read than the genre(s) they fall into (although, of course, being able to talk about both is awesome).

On the other hand, I don’t personally know many people who give a crap about what I read. It’s one reason I love LT so much – it’s a community of like-minded people that I can’t really find where I live, and I can choose the discussions that interest me most. A few people I know like to read, but we don’t share the same tastes and they don’t have my voracious appetite for books. Nor do they seem to ever read reviews. I’m never under pressure to say anything about bestsellers, but I don’t care about them anyway. If they interest me I’ll read them, but most of them just don’t.

What I would find very interesting though, is an article/essay on why certain books are bestsellers – what is it about them that hooks people? I know bestseller status has a lot to do with marketing and author status, but I’d also like to know what it is about the stories themselves that get them flying off the shelves. And what does it say about the people who buy them?

I have to completely disagree with this. I personally can't be bothered to read whatever the current trend is. I could care less whether everyone else is reading Dan Brown or The Time Traveler's Wife right now. There are to many good books out there to worry about what the New York Time's or Oprah tells you to read. People should just read what they want and not worry about what the media is selling.

That's not to say that reading best-sellers is bad in any way, but I don't think people should feel encouraged to read those books just because everyone else is.

Also, I agrere with Inkspot's last paragraph in post 3. Usually a movie means an automatic best-seller (mostly because everyone wants to read it before they see the movie....) Also, being on a best-seller lists turns you into a best-seller in a sense...because everyone buys whats on the best-seller list. It all kind of feeds upon itself.

4, it just depends on how social you want your reading to be. The more popular a book is, the more people want to/are able to discuss it. I love obscure books just as much, but when I start reading one I know beforehand that nobody's going to want to talk about it with me.

But you can always join a book group for discussion.

Though book groups have a tendency to choose popular books...which kind of defeats the purpose I guess.

If you join a book group, you have to read what they're reading! You can discuss it with them, but it won't help you if you have a burning desire to hash out the intricacies of Random Out-of-Print Book from Nowhere.

Some book groups have particular focuses, so in theory it's stuff you want to read, or maybe you want to broaden your horizons or whatever, but personally I just don't have time for the books already on Mt. TBR, much less new ones.

Anyway, as you say, book groups in general tend to choose popular books. :)

If you want to discuss an obscure book with someone, you can always try to persuade your friends to read it!

Telling my colleagues about the books I was reading led to us setting up an impromptu book group to discuss books in the lunchbreak: being rather small and flexible, we can pick very obscure titles, always provided that there are enough copies available for us to have one each...

#5

Just because I might like to discuss The Quiet War by Paul McAuley doesn't mean I would like to discuss (or even read) Twilight or Dan Brown's latest or the new book in the Dune gravy-train. I read and discuss books that I like and/or find interesting. I don't tend to discuss books that are just ordinary or even uninteresting. I don't read books just because a lot of other people are reading them - I know I am unlikely to find much of interest in a lot of the best-sellers.

7: If you join a book group, you have to read what they're reading!

But if you read best-sellers, then you have to read what everyone else is reading too. =P

10, I didn't quite mean it like that. :) I just meant I like to read whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment, and even if it was a very no-pressure book group I'd feel bad if I didn't read it.

I'm not really arguing that everyone should read bestsellers all the time, here. On average, I like nonbestsellers better. Like I said, being a librarian is a lot of the reason I read certain popular books, and I expect if I didn't NEED to read them I wouldn't. I just wouldn't ever get around to it.

What I AM saying is that the social aspect of bestseller status is a big reason why those books are popular. Everyone else is buying them and reading them, either in the publicity or in fact, so why not the generic me?

I also agree with the OP in that if you're going to say you're a fantasy fan, for instance, you should at least be familiar with The Lord of the Rings and Dragonlance, even if you didn't like them, only skimmed them, or whatever.

I completely agree with #11, being familiar with the current/popular titles is important in whatever genre you love even if it is only so you can say why your favourites are better.

I do run a library, so people do seem to assume I'm up to date, both on the specific subjects my library focuses on and new books in general. In some case I simply read the new book - I read The Lost Symbol just last week because I was tired of people asking me what I thought of it. This doesn't mean I would read every new book, but some big sellers are bigger than others, if you know what I mean.

This is why the anarchist book club i joined never worked out. Everyone read a different book.

On the other hand, the totalitarian book club wasn't much better. Sure, we all read the same book - whatever book the leader selected. But everyone also had to agree with the opinion the club leader had of the book. Any dissension was dealt with... harshly.

There's something that's just fantastic about the phrase "anarchist book club!" Is it nice elderly people calling themselves anarchists? Is it fiery revolutionaries who like to read plotting to overthrow the goverment? Is it people reading books about anarchy? Who knows!

I can see a group of elderly women sitting in a circle of rocking chairs, discussing Neuromancer while the husband throws a few more flags on the fire to keep the room toasty.

Overthrowing the system - one book at a time ;-)

In the book club I moderate, we switch to a new genre every month and twice a year we have "member's choice" so that people have lots of chances to get books in they like. So far I've been doing it for three years and everyone who has come has got to pick at least a couple. I think that like with any club, you need to tailor how the club is run to its membership. Find a good fit and you can have a great time!