October 24, 2004
TBRInside the List
By DWIGHT GARNER| NOTE This column refers to the best-sellers list dated October 24. On the Web, the lists are available one week ahead of the print edition of the Book Review. |
OST-BUFFY: The best-seller list, like the produce at a farmers' market, changes with the seasons. Mary Higgins Clark tends to publish her books on Mother's Day. Tom Clancy prefers to drop his Jack Ryan novels in August, when the tomatoes are coming in. But what if your novel is about a randy post-Buffy vampire hunter who lives in St. Louis, has world-class sex with a wereleopard and is investigating the murders of strippers? You publish around Halloween. That strategy is working for Laurell K. Hamilton, whose novel ''Incubus Dreams'' is at No. 6 on the fiction list. The book is the 12th in Hamilton's increasingly popular ''Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter'' series, and the third of those books to appear on this list. Hamilton makes frequent public appearances, but her Web site includes this caveat: ''We appreciate that everyone would like to have Laurell at Halloween but for the foreseeable future that is not possible. We are not saying don't ask, it is just unlikely.''
PRE-IMUS: Bob Dylan's surprisingly noncryptic memoir, ''Chronicles: Volume One,'' enters at No. 3 on the nonfiction list this week. It's a book that includes a fair amount of ad-hoc literary criticism. (James Joyce, Dylan observes, ''had both his eyes wide open and great faculty of speech, but what he say, I knew not what'' -- a jolly line that might easily have applied to Dylan's own ''Tarantula.'') Dylan has not appeared on this list before, but like a proto-Oprah or Don Imus, his seal of approval could bring eyeballs into bookstores. The definitive edition of ''The I Ching,'' translated by Cary Baynes from Richard Wilhelm's German, first appeared in this country in 1950. But readers largely ignored it until the mid-60's, when Dylan called it ''a great book to believe in'' and ''very fantastic poetry.'' This edition, from the Princeton University Press, still sells about 10,000 copies a year.
ABUSE THIS BOOK: The 1,040-page ''Gourmet Cookbook,'' edited by Ruth Reichl, slips off the Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list this week, though it does land at No. 7 on the extended list (available on the Web). This book, with its lemony-fresh cover and postmodern updates on classic recipes (Beef Wellington with cilantro!) is miles away from the two-volume 50's-era Gourmet cookbook, twin slabs of text in forbidding brown leather binding. The reviews of this new edition have been mixed. But since the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, hopes it will become a must-own culinary bible along the lines of ''The Joy of Cooking,'' the real test may be: In two years, will your copy be as crisp as it is now, or will it look as braised as if Mario Batali had strapped it nightly to his apron at Babbo? Houghton Mifflin hopes readers have an appetite for destruction.