E.L. James’s irresistibly salacious novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which morphed from web-published fan fiction into a blockbuster book and movie franchise, is the bestselling book in the U.S. book market over the past decade, according to NPD BookScan… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Fifty Shades of Greys sold 15.2 million copies between 2010 and 2019.

In fact, NPD BookScan reports that the three volumes of E.L. James’s trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), Fifty Shades Darker (2011), and Fifty Shades Free (2012), occupy the top three positions on the top-ten list of the decade’s bestselling books. Altogether the Fifty Shades trilogy has sold nearly 35 million copies in combined print and e-book editions over the past decade.

Other titles on the decade’s top-ten list include Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games at #4 (8.7 million copies sold), and at #5 Kathryn Sockett’s 2009 novel The Help (8.7 million).

NPD reports that over the past decade 6.5 billion print books were sold in comparison to 1.8 billion e-books. And the report cites the continuing growth in the popularity of audiobooks, and notes that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have transformed how people consume books.

The report also said that while fiction represented 80% of the top selling titles in 2010, over the second half of the decade nonfiction reading—including cookbooks, self-help, and politics—had grown significantly, and the fiction share of the top-ten bestsellers had dropped to 32% in 2019. The report also cites the growth in popularity of shorter books, including poetry and self-help titles.

See full post on Publishers Weekly

Dr. Seuss gave us one of the most complex, socially important heist stories ever, according to Olivia Rutigliano from CrimeReads… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The three top-selling Christmas-themed children’s books released for the holiday season in 1957 were all stories of absence, loss, and theft: The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t by humorist Ogden Nash, The Year without a Santa Claus by soon-to-be-Pulitzer winner Phyllis McGinley, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by the beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss (the pen name of political cartoonist Ted Geisel). The three stories are all self-conscious about the precariousness of abundance, reflecting the decade’s newfound culture of plenty—the postwar snowball of American prosperity and the proliferation of the middle class—through the fear that it all might easily get taken away. Nash, McGinley, and Geisel (all born within years of one another in the very beginning of the twentieth century) had already witnessed two world wars, two periods of excessive prosperity, one nationally-traumatic economic nosedive, and the ongoing threat of intercontinental nuclear war—too familiar, by the midcentury, that “having” could, in a flash, become “having not.”

In The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t and The Year without a Santa Claus, Christmas disappears because of varying degrees of bureaucratic malfeasance. In the former, a usurper to a throne imprisons the ruler who officiates the Christmas celebration, thereby ending the holiday. In the latter, Santa Claus’s desire to slack off on his job and take a vacation means that Christmas won’t happen. (In both stories, children are able to fix these respective leadership problems and save the holiday.) In these tales, Christmas is represented as being contingent on the successful operation of a particular administration: it is a production. It must be effectively sanctioned, overseen, and staged by an authority on behalf of the people, and without these formal constructions, it cannot exist.

But How the Grinch Stole Christmas goes down a bit differently—it tells the story of an outsider with no formal power who deliberately connives to swipe Christmas from those who celebrate it, precisely because it bothers him that they do. The Grinch, a crotchety hermit who lives alone on a mountain that overlooks a village, Who-ville, that happily celebrates Christmas annually. He watches them celebrate, year after year, until he figures that if he steals everything from them, they won’t be able to celebrate. But when he makes off with all their decorations, presents, and foodstuffs, he finds that they still celebrate Christmas either way, and do so gratefully and joyfully. This shocks him…

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At the beginning of the 2010s, a generation that had grown up obsessed with Harry Potter and other middle-grade fantasy series decided it wasn’t that interested in adult literary fiction, with its often lackadaisical plotting and downbeat endings, notes Laura Miller from Slate… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

By 2010, Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight had already proven that a multivolume YA franchise with a romantic triangle and lashings of paranormal brooding could be a virtual license to mint money, especially when the inevitable movie deal came along. Then the 2012 film version of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, a series already enormously popular in print, was a hit in theaters, adding dystopian yarns to the roster of blockbuster YA themes. To distinguish themselves in an increasingly crowded field, the genre’s characters sported ever-stranger and even outright gimmicky special powers—the ability to manipulate iron or kill with a touch or turn into a bee—and they wrestled with societies that dictated who they married, segregated them into factions based on temperament, or subjected them to surgery that eradicated their ability to love. Dystopia was a trenchant genre for middle-class kids who grew up heavily surveilled by parents and social media, as well as pressured to vie for their spot in a relentless meritocracy starting from grade school.

But perhaps the most emblematic event in YA during the 2010s was less high-profile: the founding of Full Fathom Five, a “content creation company,” by James Frey, whose bestselling 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces had been exposed as having been substantially fabricated. In a 2010 article for New York magazine, Suzanne Mozes described how Frey recruited her and other graduate writing program students at Columbia to work for Full Fathom Five writing assorted YA series based on highly commercial premises with an eye toward attracting movie producers. In return, the young hopefuls received a flat rate of $250 and the promise of a cut of any future proceeds, along with no rights to their own creations and an Orwellian NDA.

The most successful of these products, 2011’s I Am Number Four, was written by Frey and Jobie Hughes under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore and was adapted by DreamWorks in 2011. At one point, Full Fathom Five employed as many as 28 writers who were cranking out boilerplate YA novels for minimal compensation.

Read full post on Slate

Should you write an inscription, or choose a book to change a loved one’s mind? There’s nothing simple about literary presents says Elle Hunt from The Guardian… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

A man was walking in New York City when he passed a street vendor with books laid out on the pavement. In the $1 pile was a copy of the latest Philip Roth novel, which he’d loved. He picked it up, turned to the first page – to find a very loving inscription, written by himself, to his newly ex-girlfriend.

This is a true story, says rare book dealer and author Rick Gekoski, told to him by a good friend. “He said it was very embarrassing. I said: ‘Did you buy it?’ He said, ‘Of course. Then I threw it in the nearest wastepaper basket.’”

The tale provides excruciating evidence of the pitfalls of buying books as presents – thought to be less personal than jewellery, but far more telling of the giver (and what they think of the recipient) than anything that comes in a turquoise box from Tiffany. Not to mention infinitely more likely to be passed on.

Gekoski shared his friend’s story in support of his two rules on buying books for others. “The first is, always save a receipt” – the reason being, if a book has jumped into your mind as the perfect present for someone, it has doubtless occurred to someone else. When Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves was published in 2003, Gekoski recalls, “everybody got five copies for Christmas” – then tried to regift them to others who already had several copies themselves.

And the second rule? “Never write an inscription in a book, unless you’ve written it yourself.” (He is bemused by authors who do not like to give their own books, lest they be thought of as self-promoting.)

Gekoski suggests people restrict their sentiment to an enclosed card, in part to encourage people to own fewer things, and to extend the life of the book. “A third of everybody’s gifts end up in somebody else’s house, or in Oxfam. No matter how much you love the person, you’re basically defacing the book.”

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Reading can be a wonderful (and healthy) escape from the stress of everyday life, according to an article published by the University of Minnesota… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

It is a proven fact that reading can help reduce stress. Many of us take this simple act for granted, because we have so much “required” reading in our daily lives-the newspaper, traffic signs, emails, and bills. But how often do we read for pleasure?

Reading can be a wonderful (and healthy) escape from the stress of everyday life. Simply by opening a book, you allow yourself to be invited into a literary world that distracts you from your daily stressors. Reading can even relax your body by lowering your heart rate and easing the tension in your muscles. A 2009 study at the University of Sussex found that reading can reduce stress by up to 68%. It works better and faster than other relaxation methods, such as listening to music or drinking a hot cup of tea. This is because your mind is invited into a literary world that is free from the stressors that plague your daily life.

Find a book or magazine that piques your interest-a romantic paperback, gardening magazine, or even a cookbook. Set aside 30 minutes to read every day in a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Here are some tips to help you get started:

• The book you choose doesn’t have to be on any “best-seller” list. The important thing is that the subject matter has captured your interest and will provide a space for your mind to relax in every day.
• Reading only helps reduce your stress if you pick something you enjoy that won’t upset you. Reading the news may not be the best choice if it makes you feel angry or helpless. Pick a novel where you can escape into another world. Or read about an activity that you enjoy– a hobby, travel, cooking.
• Take note of how you feel after your reading break. Have you been able to let go of some of your stressors?

Read full post at UMN.edu

According to Amanda N’Duka at Deadline, Kay Oyegun is tapped to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of “On the Come Up”… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Kay Oyegun, who currently serves as a producer and writer on NBC’s hit drama series, This Is Us, has been tapped to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of On the Come Up, the young adult novel by The Hate U Give author Angie Thomas.

The project, originally set at Fox 2000 who released 2018’s The Hate U Give film starring Amandla Stenberg, moved to Paramount Players earlier this year after the Fox division was shuttered when Disney took over.

Set in the same universe as its predecessor, On the Come Up focuses on Bri, a young rapper and the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died just before making it big. Her father’s legend makes him a hard act to follow, but between Bri being bullied and watching her mother struggle after losing her job, she pours out her frustration into songs that become big viral hits.

Read full post at DeadLine

Neil Gaiman appealed for warm scenes for his poem What You Need to Be Warm – and received ideas from everyone from Ben Stiller to Monica Lewinsky, according to Alison Flood from The Guardian… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Coming up with his latest work was “ridiculously difficult”, Neil Gaiman admits. Last month, the Good Omens and American Gods author, who is also an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), asked his Twitter followers to tell him what reminded them of warmth. After receiving almost 1,000 responses – with Ben Stiller and Monica Lewinsky among those to contribute – Gaiman found himself with a 25,000-word document, from which he has composed his newest written work: a freeform poem to launch UNHCR’s Winter Emergency Appeal for refugees across the Middle East.

What You Need to Be Warm touches on everything from “a baked potato of a winter’s night to wrap your hands around or burn your mouth” to “the tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house”.

“It was very intimidating. The original brief was, ‘Can you do a story with a plot?’, and what I’d figured was, we’d get 100 or so replies, I’d pick one that would somehow call to me, and write a short short story. What I wrote was much more of a reaction to sitting and reading 25,000 words of tweets, one after the other,” said Gaiman.

He described the writing process as “like trying to do the world’s most complicated crossword … It was ridiculously hard to write and especially hard when you know one of the engines of – for want of a better word – public poetry, is that it’s not a good idea,” he said. “Anytime you ever see something produced by a poet laureate about any royal event you think ‘Oh no, no’ … It’s that feeling that you’re doomed, but let’s go down as honestly and meaningfully as you can.”

Other suggestions ranged from “the sound of a cat’s purr” to “Grandma’s kitchen in foggy St Petersburg”; “pots of steaming tea so strong the spoon stands up” to “the smell of wet wool over classroom radiators”.

Read full post and poem on The Guardian