Top Ten

Top ten bestsellers, January-early March 2010:

1. Food Rules: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

2. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, by Gabor Mate

3. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, trans. Peavar and Volokhonsky

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

5. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris

6. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

7. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

8. Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

9. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

10. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Surprise #1: Michael Pollan and David Sedaris have a pretty firm lock on 50% of the list.

Surprise #2: no women writers on the list, though we do carry plenty of books by and about women. Some recent favorites: Zadie Smith's terrific essay collection Changing My Mind; Zoe Heller's just-released-in-paperback The Believers; Kelly Link's collections of short fantastic stories, which we specially imported from the US after discovering that no one in town seemed to have ever heard of her; and Nicole Krauss' breakthrough novel The History of Love, which just sells and sells and sells, new or used, has been read by at least half a dozen local book clubs, and is definitely one of the bestselling books in the shop's history.

Top Ten

We started ordering new books for customers in 2005, and for shelf stock in mid-2007. As of this morning, we have around 1400 different new titles on the shelves. All our new books are 20% off Canadian cover price, and are a mix of books that we get asked for every day, books that we've read and liked ourselves or that friends of the store have recommended to us, or books that looked really appealing in a publisher's catalog.

Just for fun, here's our current top ten best sellers of all time:

1. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
2. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
3. Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
4. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
6. Post Office, by Charles Bukowski
7. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson
8. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
9. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks
10. Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts