Wednesday, March 05, 2008

By Our Bestsellers Shall You Know Us

The British buy books by television personalities, Americans are obsessed with self-improvement, French choices are more highbrow, the Germans like holidays while the Japanese have more eclectic tastes. If it were not for Harry Potter, the survey by Amazon of global reading tastes would look like a very lazy exercise in national stereotyping.
Ben Hoyle in the Times looks at what bestseller lists tell us about national character.

So what do Malaysian best seller lists (examples here and here and here) say about us?

2 comments:

Su-Lyn said...

We like pop culture books - easy to digest and barely mind-stimulating.

Anonymous said...

Only women read, and only women's guilty pleasures sell.

- K.