Inside the best-seller list

By GREGORY COWLES - New York Times - Published: January 13, 2012

THUNDERING TYPHOONS: Growing up, my brothers and I passed many happy days working our way through the “Tintin” comic books, sprawled on our floors with no concern for the stories’ literary or cultural status. We weren’t hipsters; we were kids. But we were also, apparently, in some kind of vanguard. Now that the Belgian Tintin is having a genuine American moment — a Spielberg movie; a newly translated biography of his creator, Hergé (reviewed next week); a place atop The New York Times’s graphic books best-seller list — we’re hearing that nobody but the elect was in on the secret back then. “Though beloved in most parts of the world,” Charles McGrath wrote in The Times recently, Tintin “is practically unknown in the United States.” Huh. It’s a little weird, finding out you were every bit as out of touch as you feared. While I wouldn’t go as far as the British critic Nicholas Lezard, who compared Spielberg’s film adaptation to a rape, it is disconcerting to see the icons of your youth being pawed at by the mainstream. Next thing you know, they’ll make a movie of the Smurfs.

THINK PINK: The appeal of Cook’s Illustrated magazine — and the related “Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook,” which drops off the hardcover advice list after four weeks — is all in the tone: brisk confidence in the scientific method, grounded in the hours the editors spend in their test kitchen adjusting and re­adjusting recipes like nervous potions students in Severus Snape’s lab. (In a telling phrase, The Orange County Register last month referred to the book’s “formula” for chocolate chip cookies, not its recipe.) The resulting write-ups can be as smugly self-assured as those in Consumer Reports. Where most cookbooks introduce recipes with an artful description of the end result, Cook’s Illustrated cuts to the chase with “Why This Recipe Works.” The editors also display a tart humor about their own superiority. One sidebar in the cookbook, for instance, warns of the tendency to overcook pork. “In the test kitchen,” it smirks, “we steer clear of dishes like Parchingly Dry Pork Chops and No-Pink Pork Loin.” For the record, cooking pork to an internal temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit — instead of the 190 degrees many recipes suggest — is more than enough to kill trichinosis, and will still leave your meat “slightly rosy in the center and juicy.” You’re welcome.

CRIME SPREE: In general, it’s risky to view the best-seller list as a snapshot of society at large: why assume book sales reveal any more about us than box-office receipts, or TV ratings, or Google searches? But it does seem notable that 13 out of 16 books on this week’s fiction list — including all four newcomers — are mysteries or thrillers. (The exceptions are Stephen King’s time travel novel, “11/22/63”; Nicholas Sparks’s romance, “The Best of Me”; and George R. R. Martin’s fantasy, “A Dance With Dragons.”) It wasn’t always thus. Thirty years ago, on Jan. 24, 1982, just two books on the list could be considered mysteries or thrillers — good ones, too: Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” at No. 13 and Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon” hot on its heels at No. 14. Instead, the list favored sweeping travelogues like James Clavell’s “Noble House” (No. 3) and Bette Bao Lord’s “Spring Moon” (No. 5), both about China, and family epics like Cynthia Freeman’s “No Time for Tears” (No. 4) and Howard Fast’s “Legacy” (No. 10). There were even a couple of literary novels: John Irving’s “Hotel New Hampshire” at No. 2 and John Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich” at No. 6. The one name on both lists? Stephen King, whose “Cujo” was at No. 8 back then.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 22, 2012, on page BR26 of the Sunday Book Review.