I once knew a man who refused point blank to believe in the truth of the weekly music charts as formerly revealed every Friday night on Top of the Pops. According to him, the whole thing was a marketing scam intended to trick gullible teens into buying the latest worthless ear-noise pumped out by the record companies under the viral influence of peer-pressure. If any given child was brainwashed into thinking everyone else his age was wasting their pocket-money on the same tuneless dirge from Generic Rapper A and Identikit Warbler B, then so would he in his own turn, the theory went. In fact, the true bestselling record each and every week of the year was by my informant’s own personal favourite act, top elderly Irish folk-music duo Foster & Allen, but the music-world PR gurus and their co-conspirators at the youth-worshipping BBC would never admit it.
I must confess, I often think much the same thing about the annual Sunday Times Bestseller Lists, the 2024 variant of which was released in late December. Looking at it, I wonder who precisely buys all those 211,300 copies of The Pinch of Nom Air Fryer Guide, 141,953 copies of Greg the Sausage Roll: Lunchbox Superhero, 148,034 editions of Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart, or, worst of all, 126,714 printings of Intermezzo by (shudder) Sally Rooney. Then again, coming in at number 10 on the list, with 227,539 units shifted, is a crime novel named None of This Is True. Is that title inadvertently revealing?
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