Books and the Reading Readers Who Read Them

Last Friday I picked up Al Franken's latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. It's very funny, as you'd expect, and a haymaker takedown of the disinformation barrage from the Mighty Wurlitzer. The six-year-old junior apostropher was looking at the cover and asked me what "the Right" meant, so I gave him a quick thumbnail sketch of American politics and the relative positions of right-wingers, left-wingers, and centrists. That seemed to satisfy him and we moved on to other topics, like Sponge Bob Squarepants.

Then two days ago, he was sitting on the couch and out of the blue announced, "I hope I grow up to be a left-winger." Heh heh. That's an achievable goal, little buddy. And a worthwhile one if you'd like to stay in the will. Anyhow, I noticed that this week's New York Times non-fiction best-seller list has five overtly political books in the Top Ten. Ann Coulter's Treason (which, by all rights, should be on the fiction list) is at #5, while Franken takes the #1 spot, Hillary Clinton's Living History takes the #4 spot, Joe Conason's Big Lies comes in at #8, and Jim Hightower's Thieves in High Places rounds out the list at #9.

I guess either the country isn't as conservative as the conservatives like to claim, or liberals are wildly overrepresented in the subpopulation of Americans who can read.