Does Best-Seller Methodology Make the List?
Oscar Season may have finally reached its glittering conclusion, but the natural desire to know what is finally, conclusively, objectively the best spans both season and medium. For literature, there are two measures: major prizes and best-seller lists. While the results of the former may be debated, sometimes bitterly, it is difficult to argue that the prize winners are utterly unqualified. Whatever your literary preference, it is unlikely that you find either Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, or Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which received the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award, to be lacking in merit. This is not the case with best-seller lists, whose methods and results are fiercely contested. The most well known list is published by the New York Times, and divided into various categories by genre—fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and, depressingly, “advice”—and by format—paperback, hardcover, and mass-market. (For the uniniti
