Book Shop Al Fresco

Rob sends along this unscientific look at the bestsellers of the NY street corner book stall scene. I guess it's not too surprising that the top titles are a good deal more highbrow than last year's top selling books nationwide, which I won't mention because they're too depressing and predictable. If you've seen the John Cusack film Serendipity then you know how life-changing a used copy of Love In The Time Of Cholera can be. I'm amused to see it on the list of top selling book stall titles. (More Intelligent Life)

After I had tallied all the stalls, a weekend spent in the company of Microsoft Excel transformed my notes into a spreadsheet of the most abundant titles and authors. The results appeared to back up my earlier suspicions, with “The Great Gatsby”, “The Grapes of Wrath” and two Hemingway novels all featuring in the top ten titles. But the top spots went to authors who were neither American nor dead: at number one was Ian McEwan’s “Atonement”, with Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” and Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” in hot pursuit. When I made a chart of authors as well as one of individual books, more prolific writers came to the fore. Boosted by the stalls on Sixth Avenue, which were less literary than the rest, Stephen King and John Grisham sneaked into the top ten. At number one was an author who could do thrills as well as literature: Graham Greene.