Obsessed

Obsessed. This is the unscientific conclusion of my unscientific analysis of today’s 100 bestselling books on Amazon. As we sit on our lard butts punching the 1-click button, we are obsessed with shedding said butt (10 percent of titles) by merely switching what we eat (diet change, also 10 percent), more specifically, by eating like cavemen, aka as the “paleo” diet. (Excuse me a second here while I chase one of my mini crumb donuts—it’s rolling toward the edge of my desk.) When I was growing up, paleo grub meant anything that was conked on the head, dragged home, and consumed raw while dancing around a bonfire. Nowadays paleo means sleek, toned, and sexy, according to the covers of these ubiquitous books, which is nothing like the image of the hairy, grunting hunter-gatherer we associate with ancient civilization. According to the dictionary, paleo means ancient—or at least it used to.

We are evenly split between nonfiction and fiction titles, running about 36 books in each category. In the nonfiction category, we are focused, very focused on self-improvement—again, 10 titles. Three of the nonfiction titles contain claims of seeing or experiencing Heaven, though we are silent about Hell, a telling statement about American spirituality and surely the wellspring of a good sermon. Especially, ahem, when the same number of titles are devoted to BDSM.

Eleven titles are expressly devoted to self-improvement (a few imply it). We know we need to do something about the lard butt, credit card debt, relationship messes, and perennial sloth, but 11 percent of us are content to just read about a solution. Three books (three!) are devoted to helping us perform better on college entrance exams. Are we that devoted to excellence in education? Nah. Probably we are just trying to make up for 12 years of partying.

Ten books are aimed at children, two of which are aimed at “young” girls, specifically the care of young girls’ bodies, which suspiciously sounds like a slippery segue into the top 20 books (paragraph one) that she’ll be reading in just a few years.

You can draw all kinds of conclusions from these numbers, but what I want to know is, why are numbers 45 and 48 even on the list? #45: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, American Psychiatric Association; and #48, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th Edition. Required reading? Or maybe there are a whole lot more people than we think who need help. We all know somebody who needs these books, probably someone who works right in your office…. psychiatrists and psychologists everywhere seem to think so too.

But what really got my attention is book #2, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 773 days in the top 100, 1,995 reviews of a book with an overall four-star rating. I say “overall” because just over 11 percent (227 readers) gave it a punishing one or two stars; 198, almost 10 percent, gave it three stars, which ain’t exactly complimentary. These miserable statistics make you wonder why this nihilistic, hope-draining book appears on every high school reading list in America. Maybe it’s all about the high drama of multiple adulterous relationships, but Gatsby never rang any bells for me. I’ll take the earthy, frank simplicity of being chased by the GEICO caveman over an afternoon with Nick.