Inside the Best Seller List

By GREGORY COWLES - The New York Times Sunday Book review

Published: May 10, 2013

RESETTING THE CLOCK: What current best seller has been on the list the longest? At 287 weeks, the winner is “Percy Jackson & the Olympians,” by Rick Riordan, which you’ll find on the children’s series list at No. 8. Second place goes to “The Devil in the White City,” by Erik Larson, at No. 18 on the paperback nonfiction list after 267 weeks, while another children’s series, Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” (at No. 3 on that list), has stuck around for 225 weeks.

Rick Riordan

As impressive as those runs are, though, these titles pale next to the book that would have claimed the championship a month ago: in the April 21 issue of the Book Review, Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel’s pregnancy guide “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” logged its 607th week on the paperback advice, how-to and miscellaneous list. That’s almost 12 years, and longer than Riordan and Larson combined. People are still buying it, too. This week, “What to Expect” is at No. 17 on the advice list — but now it’s only in its fourth week. What happened? On April 28, we consolidated the hardcover and paperback advice lists into a single new list, which includes e-book sales as well, and as a result reset the clock to zero for all of the books that appear there.

ITALIAN DAYS: “Waiting to Be Heard,” Amanda Knox’s account of her tabloid-ready Italian murder trial, makes its debut on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 3. Opinions about “Foxy Knoxy,” as she was known, were all over the map during her trial, and, judging from reactions to the book, they still are. Writing in the daily New York Times last month, Michiko Kakutani praised Knox’s “ability to convey her emotions with considerable visceral power,” noting that she “seems to have developed sharp powers of observation during her years in confinement, mapping out the emotional geometry at work among prisoners and guards, and the mental arithmetic she would perform in her head to get through each day.” In the British edition of GQ magazine, meanwhile, Olivia Cole started her review with this arch verdict: “Much has been made of Amanda Knox not only as beautiful but also highly intelligent, a fact that’s altogether less clear after wading through 500 pages of ‘Waiting to Be Heard.’ ” Knox, Cole continued, comes across as “not ‘Foxy Knoxy’ after all, but ‘Annoying Amanda.’ . . . ‘Waiting to Be Heard’ is either a slightly stupid book or a very clever one that knows simplicity is the best defense.”

HIS FATHER’S SON: The horror writer Joe Hill, whose vampire novel “NOS4A2” enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 5, no longer tries to hide the fact that his father is Stephen King. But early in his career, Hill — whose full name is Joseph Hillstrom King — went to some lengths to protect his identity, intent on letting his work speak for itself. “As soon as I started to do public appearances,” he told CNN a couple of years ago, “people started to say, ‘Doesn’t he kinda look like, you know?’ and the hard-core Stephen King fans remembered that ‘The Shining’ was dedicated to Joe Hill King. So people started to blog about it and write on message boards about it, and I would contact people directly, and I would say: ‘You’re right. That’s who my dad is, but could you take that off your blog?’ People were delighted to. They loved being in on the secret. They were trying to help me, but once it started to creep out on the Internet, I knew my time was numbered.” The title of Hill’s new novel comes from the villain’s vanity license plate; read aloud, it sounds like “Nosferatu.”