Every week, the Harvard Book Store shares its list of bestsellers with us, and we look at what’s among the top fives (hardcover and paperback) and compare it with what’s on the New York Times’ list of national bestsellers.
Hardcover Local readers buying new works are trying to understand a country in a moment of chaos. Entering the week, the top hardcover seller is “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” by Daron Acemoglu, a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics who says liberalism, a philosophy built to challenge power, never adjusted to becoming the establishment and turned its back on its core promises while fumbling the effects of digital technologies. In the No. 2 slot is “The People’s Historian” by Dave Zirin, a friendly biography and defense of local professor Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History” and an enduring bogeyman of the right. No. 4 is “Grandma Joy and Me: A Journey of Healing, One National Park at a Time” by Brad Ryan, which sounds like what it is, and still thriving in the zeitgeist at No. 5 is “Yesteryear,” Claire Burke Caro’s novel about a tradwife influencer who somehow wakes up in 1855, the brutal era she extolled as great in online videos. The outlier is the No. 3 bestseller, the novel “A Tender Age” by Chang-rae Lee, a dramatic growing-up tale through the eyes of a child of immigrants.
Only one of these, “Yesteryear,” intersected with the Times’ top fives, where the bestselling fiction is mainly genre (“The Unknown” by Riley Sager at the top, “The Lion & the Deathless Dark” by Carissa Broadbent at No. 5 – and the fifth book in the Crowns of Nyaxia series) and the nonfiction is at least as grim (led by “Regime Change,” about the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, and “Biological War” by Annie Jacobsen) but includes a “Grandma Joy” styler leavener in “Your Fellow Americans” by Peter Santenello, a travel YouTuber who is “reminding us of all the reasons we’ve got to love this place and one another.”
Paperback We’re in a classics mode in softcover, putting Homer back on the bestseller list with “The Odyssey” at No. 1 as Christopher Nolan’s epic film lingers in theaters. At No. 4 is the rediscovered 1965 novel “Stoner” by John Williams – following the life of a quiet English professor who is named by the store as an “archetypal American” and “an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.” Speaking of existentialism, No. 5 is “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, the 1946 novel of a man who is drawn into a senseless murder. The contemporary paperbacks are at No. 2 (“Theo of Golden” by Allen Levi, whose website calls it “beautifully written stories of kindness and neighborliness”) and No. 3 (the role-playing-game-inspired “Dungeon Crawler Carl” by Matt Dinniman, soon to be a Peacock TV series).
The Times’ weekly fiction lists share “Theo of Golden” at No. 2 and “Dungeon Crawler Carl” at No. 4 – and put another, newer Dinniman (“Carl’s Doomsday Scenario) at No. 5. The monthly nonfiction bestsellers have nothing in common with local sales.
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge
