Why We Read What We Read

Microtrends certainly sounds of interest, and I'll be looking for it: we have to know where people are going in order to light the way! On a different scale, Microtrends reminds me a bit of a book I read some months back, Why We Read What We Read: A Delightfully Opinionated Journey Through Contemporary Bestsellers, by Lisa Adams and John Heath. It's pretty much as the subtitle suggests, neither scholarly nor scientific, but it does say what people are reading (or at least buying) and offers a number of interesting and sometimes insightful (to me) observations. It's organized by genre. The cookbooks and diet books and health books are of less professional interest, but the chapters on political non-fiction, romance/relationships, religion and spirituality, and literary fiction are definitely of interest. Much of the discussion is about our society's desires, as reflected in twenty years of bestsellers, and what all that says about us as a people. Plus there's plenty of fun to be had at the expense (!) of Dan Brown, Oprah, the "Left Behind" series, and much more. Among the authors' other works is Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age.