Bestsellers for the Week Ending January 1st, a Semi-Regular Feature

This is the week when you find out what people really want. Though many folks give shopping lists for Christmas presents, what people buy with their gift cards doesn't always correspond to the pre-holiday rush.

In hardcover, the clear winner of the week was Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra, and I suspect this to continue as the award noms roll in. Not that I'm saying she'll be nominated for everything, but certainly for something. Oh, and we did run out of a few things in the week after Christmas, and that can have an effect on these lists. "The King's Speech" has given us some nice extra traffic, and UPS not delivering on Friday 12/31 threw us off a bit.

Let's just say that I had been responsible for restocking and ordering, we would have been out of way more stuff. Jason did an amazing job chasing down many titles, most notably The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Just yesterday a customer asked for the book and when I showed her where it was, she exclaimed, "You have it? But everyone's out of it!"

Hardcover Noniction for the week ending January 1st

1. Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff
2. The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

3. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

4. Life, by Keith Richards

5. Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morgan

6. The Food Matters Cookbook, by Mark Bittman

7. Radioactive, by Lauren Redniss

8. At Home, by Bill Bryson

9. Simple Times, by Amy Sedaris

10. I Remember Nothing, by Nora Ephron

See? We did get Radioactive back in stock.

I had a vision last night. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter will be nominated for an Edgar in the best novel category, which is being announced soon. Oh, it's not really that hard, seeing it was on both Stephen King's and Carole E. Barrowman's top tens. If I'm wrong, just file me away with Jeanne Dixon.

Hardcover Fiction

1. An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin

2. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

3. Selected Stories, by William Trevor

4. Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon

5. The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall*

6. Room, by Emma Donoghue

7. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson

8. The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer

9. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin

10. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

*The pop is hardly from my year-end rec, but because of its #1 status on Entertainment Weekly. We also had a customer come in (well, at least one, as she told us) to by The Invisible Bridge because it was Jason's #1 book for the year. If you haven't guessed, my #1 was Frederick Reiken's Day for Night. But what was #2?

You can't tell from the rankings but our sale on Patti Smith was about 60% higher than our #1 fiction title, Cutting for Stone, which in turn was about 50% higher than the #2 book on either list.

Paperback Nonfiction

1. Just Kids, by Patti Smith

2. Wordcatcher, by Phil Cousineau

3. What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell

4. Inside of a Dog, by Alexandra Horowitz

5. The King's Speech, by Mark Logue

Paperback Fiction

1. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

2. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson

3. Tinkers, by Paul Harding

4. The Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
5. Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Wall