The Best-Seller Shelves

There are very few occasions when a walk on the mall seems more appealing to me than a day spent at the park benches with friends. Mostly, I only go there because of my monthly ritual: watch a movie, eat something at Macdonald’s and check out the new stuff on the bookstore. Yeah, no wonder I’m a chubby! Anyway, during that one day in the month I actually spend some time scooping around the best-seller shelves, something I enjoy avoiding during the other days. I cannot avoid them all the time because, after all, you’ve got to know what everybody else is reading about; I can’t stand to be lost in the middle of a conversation because people are talking about some new “greatest-thing-since-bread-came-sliced” book of the month and, specially, because I take so much pleasure in criticizing such literature fast-foods. Still, once in a month is more than enough since there’s never something actually new there.

Try spending some time checking the brand new best-sellers around and you’ll come to the conclusion that they’re always a variation of last month’s fever. It begins with the self-help books. I’ve never really seen one that helped people, and, still, they’re always best-sellers; the authors are, generally, PhD.s who managed to loose all respect of their fellow scientists and probably been living as mediocre professionals, until some publisher offers to use their title as a booster for selling books. There are those who have already been selling their bullshit advices on tv or radio, but maybe those are in the celebrity category. Also, every health guru and every “alternative therapist” wants a piece of that pie, exploiting the desperation of people who are actually suffering from very real problems and that, most of the time, aren’t getting relief from the real therapists. Depression, anxiety, attention disorder and any other illness that is on the headlines lately will be unscrupulously used as a teaser somewhere in the cover.

Near those books, in the next shelf, you will find another kind of self-help books that is even more disgusting, although it doesn’t portray danger to the reader (which, I’m very convinced, the health ones do): The executive self-motivation books! Something about them really makes my stomach ache, and scooping around those is the hardest part of my monthly adventure. The covers are usually bright and feature some incredibly happy person holding a lot of money, or sometimes there’s just the money itself. Yeah, like there’s money inside the book! Sometimes, again, the cover is just childish, to give us a preview of the content inside, which is full of pictures and illustrations so that the reader (probably some 7yr old owner of a lemon-juice stand) doesn’t get bored.

Then, there’s the “authors of the year” novels, featuring the works of all those who have suddenly become rich and interesting, writing one best-seller after the other. These guys usually disappear after a decade or so. A few one-hit authors are also on that shelf, along with some dinosaurs that have been around for longer, but nobody can really understand why. And, of course, no best-seller’s categories list is complete without the celebrity authors! Yay! It’s usually just somebody’s self-biography, or, to be more accurate, a drama based on that celebrity’s life. These people never had a normal life… it was a hell of suffering and disgrace all the way, until, of course, success came along. Sometimes hell goes on even after success. You see, success comes to rescue this poor people from a miserable life; oh! the torments of having a day-job! I cry myself to sleep reading those stories (smirk).

The best thing about a blog like this is that I’m at no risk of actually offending someone, after all, people who can digest such readings as described above would rarely have the taste to circle around pseudo-intellectual blogs such as my own. Anyway, remember a category I haven’t written about? Comment!

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P.S.: Why the hell is “Achmed’s” video so much better than everything else people ain’t reading here? Damn puppet!