Might it Be Comforting to Disbelieve in the Bestseller List?

I have written at some length about the failings of the bestseller lists as an index of the book market--the ambiguities of their signaling (all they really tell us is that, of the few fastest-selling books they mention at all, these are selling faster than those this particular week), the roundabout and incomplete collection (the publishers don't supply the information), and the "black boxed" nature of the premises on which they collect and classify the data (making it impossible to judge its value for ourselves). And that is all without getting into their constant, quite deliberate, manipulation (as politicians' political action committees, for example, contrive to get the ghostwritten memoirs of those they patronize onto the bestseller list).

Of course, those trying to make sense of that market (myself included) use them anyway for lack of anything better with regard to "the big picture" (as I have when writing about, for example, spy fiction or military techno-thrillers).

Still, as I have also remarked time and again, the content of even the most prestigious list has long been appalling, especially these days, whether one is looking at fiction or nonfiction. As if the often execrable nature of the work is not enough, its particular form of execrable (much of the time, the snivelings and Big Thinks of celebrities who have had cushy lives, and no evidence of anything to think with) is a reminder that now, just as in Balzac's day, the publishers are Dauriat-like vulgarians trafficking in printed paper bearing "famous names" as they pay the claqueurs to applaud the trash they foist on the public.

Naturally it would be pleasant to think that these lists, poorly founded and manipulated as they are, said nothing about the actual tastes of the reading public--but even now I fear they approximate the real pattern of book consumption well enough to make any such thinking desperate escapism.