The Graveyard: Are the Great the Lucky?
by Court Merrigan
Put your birthday into the Birthday Bestsellers search engine to see a list of New York Times bestsellers the week you were born. Here’s mine:
Are all of these Top 10 books from February 1976 exemplars of fine literature? Surely not. Are at least a couple? Almost certainly. How to know?
As for me, I recognize some of the names – Tennessee Williams, Agatha Christie, Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley, E.L. Doctrow. I’ve read some of their books, but none of these. That includes Humboldt’s Gift, which was part of the oeuvre that got Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize, or that American classic Ragtime. Sadly, the work with which I am most “familiar” is Shogun – at least as it appeared as a TV miniseries years later.
And these are just the lucky 10 books that made the list, for one week during the disco era. Thousands of others– some vastly superior, no doubt – remain totally unknown to me, because the search engine limits my enquiry to bestsellers only.
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