New York Times bestsellers

September 22, 2011 • 9:31 am

Well, this is a bit dispiriting.  Reading the Sunday NYT book section, I find among the 20 paperback bestsellers these three (with relative ranking and the paper’s description):

1.  Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent.  A boy’s encounter with Jesus and the angels.

8.  The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, by Kevin Malarkey [!!] and Alex Malarkey.  After a coma, an incredible story.

17.  90 Minutes in Heaven, by Don Piper with Cecil Murphey.  A minister on the otherworldly experience he had after an accident.

The kicker? These are on the nonfiction list!

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  —Hebrews 11:1

79 thoughts on “New York Times bestsellers”

  2. It’s funny how there are popular trends in the subject matter of these books every few years. Sometimes it’s angels, other times it’s the voice of god, etc. It would be interesting to compare their descriptions of heaven. And I’m sure they would all be a boring place.

  3. nonfiction

    This seems to be the day for that Princess Bride quote.

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    Cheers,

    b&

      1. Ah — ‘twould be my initials.

        The “b” I hope is obvious.

        The glyph for an ampersand is the same basic shape as a treble clef. A treble clef is also known as a “G” clef because you can place it anywhere you like on a staff, and the line that the curlicue circles thereby gets designated as the G above middle C.

        Thus, b (for Ben) & (for Goren).

        Cheers,

        b&

          2. I would venture that you’re more closely related to Shlomo Goren than to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but I could be wrong.

        2. Ah, the pleasant hours I’ve whiled away practicing my open-score sight-reading with Bach chorales notated in their original (moveable) clefs…

          A better, more enjoyable way to spend a Saturday evening I cannot imagine.

          /sarcasm

          2. “All”?

            Three’s pretty good. That’s two more than most singers ever learn. Sometimes three! My sister is a coloratura, and when she took a look at an old edition of a Bach aria (with the “alte schluesseln”) she asked: “What’s this squiggly thing out front where the treble-clef should be?” She is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music.

          4. It was just a matter of practising until it became second nature. Sometimes, the clef would change in the middle of a phrase to save on leger lines, and on rare occasions it would change even in the middle of a bar. After a while it was no longer a problem.

          5. Practicing is on hold for the time being because of work hours, but before it went on hold I had just started working though Blazehevich. Yeah, it’s a mind-bender, but it gets better.

            Cheers,

            b&

          6. Moveable clefs are actually a popular pedagogic technique for transposition.

            As an orchestral trumpeter…I might be playing an instrument pitched in Bb, C, D, Eb, or high A or Bb. And the part might be written in anything from A, Bb, C, D, E, Eb, or F. Technically, you should be equally comfortable with any combination, though most combinations are rare in the real world.

            Commercial players have to be ready to do arbitrary transpositions at the drop of a hat. “The lead singer just got sick, so the backup is in and he doesn’t have the same high range, so let’s take everything down a minor third tonight.” That’s when you discover how many violists stayed awake when learning their moveable clefs….

            Cheers,

            b&

          7. Oh, if I only had one line to transpose. Pity the poor keyboardist!

            (If the piece is completely homophonic or I’m playing from a fake book, then it’s not so bad. But if it’s polyphonic? Ach, weh!)

          8. Bill Reber, the music director of ASU’s Lyric Opera Theatre, will grab a Wagner score off the shelf, plop it on the piano, and play his own on-the-fly reduction of it. Not a piano score or a “C” score, mind you, but a full score with all the instruments written in the same transpositions as the musicians’s parts.

            I never asked him to, but I have a strong hunch he wouldn’t have any trouble transposing it however you please.

            The man…is insane. Brilliant, one of the absolute best conductors I’ve ever played under, one of the very few conductors I’ve not just gotten along with but actually liked both on and off the podium. But he’s nuts.

            In his youth he served in the Air Force in a bunker…as a missileer. As I wrote, the guy’s bonkers.

            Cheers,

            b&

          1. Never did care much for them, and most of the ones I’ve tried were waaaay too heavy on the cultural references. How the Hell should I know who played next to so-and-so in the ’57 movie about such-and-such?

            b&

          2. You might want to try the “cryptic” crossword in the British broadsheet newspapers. In theory, you should be able to complete them with little specialist knowledge. Some years ago, I spent some time honing my skills on the FT crossword and won one of their weekly prizes. Since then, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat.

          4. For example, I just pulled up today’s crossword. There’s a 5 letter clue “Women with passion for cereal”.

            I think the answer is “wheat”. W (the first letter of women) + heat (passion) = Wheat (a cereal).

            It’s an acquired taste, like Brie or retsina.

            1 down, 31 to go.

          6. The Wall Street Journal publishes a generally fun cryptic once a month…see “Loops,” the most recent one (Sept. 9) here:
            http://blogs.wsj.com/puzzle/
            Their other Saturday puzzles frequently have fun twists as well…though often pop culture refs I have to guess at or just google…

          7. Too many (pop) culture references are one problem w most x-words. Using the same tired old words and clues over and over is another.

    1. That chimes with what I noted recently – the popularity of vampire novels (I have a friend who is obsessed by them). There is a fictional series about a succubus as well – cannot recall the author. By the way, I always thought molestation was somewhere a mole got a train.

      1. I have some anecdotal evidence that their popularity may be dropping. With Borders going out of business, they’ve been having huge sales. I went in to the local Borders to browse their sci-fi section to see what deals I could get. The section was completely picked-over. But guess what 90% of the (paltry selection of) books left on the shelf were? Modern vampire…modern witch…modern vampire in love with witch…

        Of course, that may just mean they ordered a boatload more of those than anything else. But I prefer to hope that the age of teen romance novels masquerading as sci-fi/fantasy is finally coming to an end.

        1. It’s hard to say. In the last 6-7 years, they’ve really exploded in content, and like any time you’ve got a sudden influx of authors most of them turn out to be crap.

          I’m hopeful that we’ll start to see a readjustment of the market soon, but the reason you saw so many of them on the shelves is likely because they’re what occupies most of the shelf space right now.

          Personally, I’m hoping that hard scifi will become popular again and we’ll start getting more titles in it, since the current pickings are pretty slim, though these days I’m finding that reading something by Dawkins or Feynman is more entertaining that most of the current fiction lines.

      1. Especially since I recently found ‘malarkey’ in a list of synonyms for fecal matter. I knew it meant nonsense but I didn’t realise it was via ‘shit’.

  6. I’d like to see the book where someone says he visited “heaven” and found that the experience didn’t give his life “meaning.”

    1. I don’t know if it still exists but Heaven was a gay nightclub in Charing Cross in London. Which reminds me of a lyric by The Mighty Lemon Drops – “Where do we go from heaven? I wish I knew.”

  7. What might give a bit more credence to the tales presented in these NYT bestsellers would be presenting an encounter with Jesus and the angels made by a Hindu boy.

    Without that, it’s just little kids explaining a hallucinatory brain state using their dominant cultural language.

    1. Hallucination is a bit strong, as he was unconscious. Usually, a hallucination occurs while you are fully awake and functioning. I saw an article on the WSJ many many years ago about seniors and hallucinations, and it stated some astounding statistic, that 25% percent of people over age 80 had experienced a hallucination.

      These kids in these books had dreams, open and shut. Nothing to see here, let’s move along. I had my tonsils out at five, and was under general anesthesia, and I had quite vivid dreams, including a pre-awakening scenario about my sore and hurting throat, which proceeding into the reality upon waking with a sore and hurting throat.

      Our minds are complex beyond comprehension, including the ability to make excruciating detail a part of our dreams. Detail in dreams does not equate to any sort of test of veracity.

      I have considered the “pull” that these books have on the typical religionist. It gets down to a craving for justice. The real, actual world we live in is an unfair place. No question. People crave justice that goes on and on into infinity. They are willing to set aside any critical examination of such “best sellers” because of an over-riding urgent need for justice “in the end…which, goes on forever”.

      The craving for justice is embodied in that old Biblical admonition that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. Poor? Slave? …your justice will be found in the next life.

  8. At some point I gleaned the information that books can hit the best seller lists because large entities — in this case I would think religious organizations — buy masses of these books. Right-wingers like Limbaugh, Beck and the lady with the perverse crush on Jerry (Ann Coulter) get themselves on the lists in this way. They certainly can afford it.
    And once I learned that in times of large-scale crises masses of people find it reassuring to read “proof” of an afterlife and a god to whom one can make offerings to insure benevolent treatment in the future. This reasoning came up over the remake of the film ‘Heaven Can Wait.’ One thoughtful critic said it wasn’t that successful, i.e., moving, because films about people coming back to earth after death, blah blah, only resonated during wars. People who’d lost family members to the war were comforted by angels, ghosts and whatnot.

    1. One of my late father’s favourite films (it is very good) was A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. That has a famous ‘trial’ scene in heaven, but it is left to us as an audience to decide if it is just a dream under anaesthetic or a real experience. Worth watching though. It came out in 1946.

      1. Yes, I was thinking of this but couldn’t remember the title. In the US, it was released as “Stairway to Heaven”. David Niven was excellent.

  9. I went to heaven once. It was full of Pat Robertsons and Kirk Camerons, so I gtfo. Now, I’m on an all-you-can-sin bender to make sure that shit doesn’t happen again.

  10. thank god (pardon), these are only best-sellers. Doesn’t mean many people will actually read them. They’re probably just bought as gifts for distant relatives…

    1. My grandparents were given a copy of Heaven Is For Real (as well as some other book about a girl who was “taught to paint by God”) over the summer by one of their caregivers.

      I kept meaning to employ it in an appropriate capacity and use it to level a wobbly table or the like, but never got around to it.

      Did report to my dad my concerns about the caregiver’s attempts to proselytize and get my grandmother to contribute to her church’s fundraisers, though, which resulted in a firm dressing down of the caregiver and my dad and aunt keeping an extra cautious eye on my grandparent’s checkbook.

  11. I wouldn’t read too much into this. #2 on the list is by Dick Cheney, and he’s about as popular with the general public as an STD. One of the odd things I’ve found over the years is that the “best-seller lists” very rarely correspond to what I see people actually reading.

    1. I read a review of that & he takes absolutely no responsibility for anything. I find Rumsfeld fascinating though. I wonder how high the Hitch book will rise next week?

  12. And the “sophisticated” theologician Rowan Williams complains Dawkins’ books sell well because atheism is “cool”.
    What a jackass and liar.

  13. On Amazon, there a few more jems including “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived” and “In The Afterlife: A Chronicle Of Our Experiences On The “Other Side”: Direct Personal Life After Death Accounts By Individuals On The “Other Side” via … Open Deep Trance Channel and Spirit Medium” which begs the question, “Why are these people so eager to die and go somewhere else?” How greedy and vain do you have to be to have another life?

    1. As I said above, it is a question of justice, and a perception of final justice in a world filled with unfairness. Xtianity began among the abject poor, and slaves, as a secret society, with a conduct of secrecy so as to ensure that rich people, powerful people, didn’t catch on. Those rich and powerful folk were DOOMED! DOOMED I tell you, because only those who were poor and had nothing received eternal love, happiness, etc. The camel passing through the eye of the needle, and all that. Interestingly, some rich Xtians have attempted to make it much easier for a camel to pass through said eye, by describing said “eye of a needle” as a geographic location!!! Such is a desire for the afterlife of “justice”.

      After doing a selfless good deed I have been told more than once that “You’ll get your reward in heaven” which is curious, as I always felt self-rewarded by the act itself.

        2. Well that’s damn disappointing! I rather liked the ridiculous imagery of trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle.

          1. “It was a large needle, granted. There was a big funnel, and machinery to grind the camel fine.”

            — John Varley, Demon

        3. And here I always thought that it was a mistranslation of “it’s easier to get a needle through the eye of a camel.”

  14. The Sunday Times [UK] this week has the following –
    1 One Day – David Nicholls (romcom)
    2 Heartstone – CJ Sansom (?historical mystery?)
    3 Postcard Killers – James Patterson (Thriller)
    4 Zero Hour – Andy McNab (Thriller)
    5 Worth dying for – Lee Child
    6 A tiny bit marvellous – Dawn French
    7 Stolen – Susan Lewis
    8 The Blackhouse – Peter May (detective in Scotland)
    9 Empire of Silver – Colm Iggulden (historical)
    10 Freedom – Jonathan Franzen
    And ‘General’ –
    1 At Home – Bill Bryson (history of the home)
    2 An Idiot abroad – Karl Pilkington (humour)
    3 How to be a woman – Caitlin Moran
    4 The Secret Life of Bletchley Park – Sinclair McKay (how code-breakers won the war
    5 The Hare with the Amber Eyes – Edmund de Waal (history of an inherited collection charts the family history)
    6 The Grand Design – Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
    7 In the Midst of Life – Jennifer Worth (career of a nurse)
    8 The Fry Chronicles – Stephen Fry (autobiography)
    9 Memoirs of a fruitcake – Chris Evans (Autobiography)
    10 Gypsy Princess – Violet Cannon (Autobiography)

    Nothing terribly whacky but only one scince tome.

    1. 1 At Home – Bill Bryson (history of the home)
      2 An Idiot abroad – Karl Pilkington (humour)

      interesting.

    1. I believe it will happen in one generation. After all, the telephone was considered a “toy” and not commercially viable. People didn’t want to give up horse-drawn carriages, to fill the streets with noisy automobiles.

      The Internet is where religion comes to die. I would speculate that by 2025, belief in the supernatural will be as rare as a horse-drawn car in New York City in 1925, compared to 1911 (and here we are in 2011).

  16. We had a fundraising book sale at work today. This is for the state charitable foundation. And most of the books there were explicitly christian (including “Heaven is For Real”). I looked through the dross and couldn’t help thinking that they must either have a standard selection of books for these things or that the target audience if the middle-aged southern women who make up most of the administrative professional pool. Because I didn’t see a lot of fellow scientists drooling over this pathetic collection. I also couldn’t help but be offended that these books were being sold at a government office. It seems a little iffy to me.

  17. It IS dispiriting.

    But it’s dispiriting because it shows that not only are the religious better at democracy than us (being the only group outside of the elderly to vote in large numbers which is why America and Canada are suffering from far right lunacy right now) but they’re better at book buying than us as well.

    1. Nah. It’s inconsistent with much more precise results from SN1987A. The only excitement will be in finding out where the experiment went wrong.

  19. 1. Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent. A boy’s encounter with Jesus and the angels.

    Because God can’t be bothered to show the truth of His greatness by helping some starving or disease ridden African children. It’s much more convincing to take a 4 year old kid on a tour of the place.

    NONFICTION???? What is the matter with the NY Times Book Review?

    1. I know. Publishers are basically allowed to put whatever label they want on books with no regard, it seems.

      Try going into a Barnes & Nobel and check out the science section- even odds that at least 1/3rd of it will be ID, woo, or 2012 themed crap.

  20. Why does the NY Times Review of books not have a third category “science”, in order to distinguish non-fiction (in the sense of “there exists someone claiming to have had that experience no matter how silly”) from science or pop-science writing.

    From the publisher’s point of yiew, selling this kind of stuff as fiction would be self-defeating, so I do not think we can expect them to change their policy of calling this stuff non-fiction. Scientific evidence, however, is not just testimonial and therefore deserves a third category in the NYTRB.

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