At first glance this year's Nielsen top 100 is unrelievedly dispiriting. Too many of the strongest fiction performers are musty, movie-sustained pre-2009 titles - from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (1) to Eclipse (6), Twilight (7) and New Moon (9) - that this year's paperbacks were too feeble to overthrow. The entire chart contains just one new, ie hardback, novel for adults, Martina Cole's The Family (58). Throughout there's a reliance on cinema to sell novels and TV fame to sell memoirs and cookery titles, a sense that books are helpless without a piggyback ride from another medium.
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