BOOKS AS BESTSELLERS, PART 2

READER COMMENTS

Thanks to all of you who responded to my recent BLOG on “What makes a bestselling book.” Below are some of your book favorites, old and new and read and still reading.

NONFICTION BEST SELLERS

How to be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery

(also The Soul of an Octopus)

West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House by Gautam Raghavan

A Promised Land by Barack Obama (also on audio—recommended)

A Politics of Love by Marianne Williamson

Untamed  by Glennon Doyle (memoir)

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

OTHER NONFICTION

The Art of Stillness and Adventures in Going Nowhere  (TED Books) by Pico Iyer

Books by James Herriot

FICTION BEST SELLERS And Others

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The House of Spirits  by Isabel Allende

The Unspoken: An Ashe Cayne Novel  (mystery/thriller) by Ian K. Smith

To Kill a Mockingbird (classic) by Harper Lee

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

My Life in a Cat House: True Tales of Love, Laughter, and Living with Five Felines by Gwen Cooper

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games Series)

Firefly Lane and Fly Away by Kristin Hannah (two related books)

HISTORICAL

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amos Towles

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn  (spawned the Bridgerton Netflix series)

The Giver of Stars by Jo Jo Moyes

WHAT I LOOK FOR AS A WRITER READING BESTSELLING BOOKS

I look for the basic ingredients that I use when writing a story—

PRESENTATION—Is the story well presented?  

Is the BOOK COVER representative of the story?

DOES THE FIRST PAGE DRAW ME INTO THE BOOK?  What is the hook?

Is the book presented in a FORMAT that is easy to follow?

What is the book structure? Does it ramble or is it presented in a way that I can pick it up and

 read either large or small bits at a time?

DO I RETAIN CHARACTERS after I finish reading the book?  Are they realistic?  Do I feel I

 know them personally?

IS THE BOOK WELL WRITTEN?  Does the author have good command of her craft? Does the

 book surprise me?  Does it make use of metaphor and simile?  Does it use interesting verbs and 

unusual words? 

Are geographic places and cities and areas realistic?  (Especially in historical fiction)

DOES THE PLOT HOLD TOGETHER?  IS IT BELIEVABLE?

How much of the book do I remember months or even years later?

IMPORTANT BOOKS ON THE PLAGUE AND SCIENCE

The following two books may never make it to a bestseller list but I consider them “must read”

 and collectible in any serious library. I found them extremely helpful in understanding this time

 of COVID 19.  See if any of what I relate from these books sounds familiar?

LAURIE GARRETT’s The Coming Plague

This fact-filled amazing treatise focuses on diseases themselves, how they developed, how cures

did or did not follow. Hers is the story of warfare against the microbial world versus our human

 immune systems. This book left me stunned at the effect of viruses and respiratory diseases.

 Garrett, a health and science writer, opens with the following sentence in her Preface, 

“We always want to believe that history happened only to them. . in the past. . . . and that 

somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it (but). . .in one vital area, the 

emergence and spread of new infectious diseases, we can already predict the future—and it is 

threatening and dangerous to us all.”  Garrett tracks worldwide disease through the stories of the

 men and women who have struggled to understand and control the threats of microbes from

the 1990s into the present.   She calls the men who track these diseases into Africa and Central 

America “disease cowboys” and shows how some became heroes.

     Diseases include:  various stages of influenza since 1918, when 500,000 died in the United 

States, and 21 million died worldwide. She relates the story of the Hong Kong flu of 1968, and

 the difficulty in convincing people to accept vaccines.  She writes of Lassa Fever, Swine Flu and 

Legionnaires disease, and Ebola.  She tracks the development of the polio vaccines, shows 

how acyclovir was able to relieve various forms of herpes and tells the stories of toxic

 shock syndrome.  She devotes an entire section of her book to AIDS and HIV.  She explains the 

development of syphilis and gonorrhea and its treatment by penicillin and antibiotics.  She also

 explains the efforts to contain tuberculosis. 

     The discovery of DNA and RNA is celebrated when James Watson and Francis Crick win the 

Nobel Prize for Medicine in l953, and Barbara McClintock is remembered with the Nobel in 

1990 for her DNA contributions. This book is loaded with intensively researched information

 about diseases of all types in our world and the years and decades spent to combat them.

 Garrett closes her book with a quote by Joshua Lederberg from a speech given to Manhattan

 Bankers “The world really is just one village.  Our tolerance of disease in any place in the world 

is at our own peril.”  (page 619)

JOHN M. BARRY’s The Great Influenza reads like a novel as the author leads

his reader through the stories of the men and women who developed medicine in the United 

States. Barry offers a panoramic view of American medicine and his book is of equal importance 

to the one by Laurie Garrett but focuses on the l9l8 pandemic and efforts to find the virus. He

 opens with the advent of World War I and how American soldiers fell prey to influenza and

then carried it wherever they went. The virus erupted at an Army camp in Kansas and killed

 more in twenty-four weeks than AIDS killed in twenty-four years.  Barry sees 1918, as the first 

collision between modern science and epidemic disease.  His book is a story of the search for the

 virus and is well-crafted around the lives of the doctors, the researchers, and the founders of 

research hospitals and medical schools, especially Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore,

 Maryland. I was struck by the author’s description of what happened in the city of Philadelphia

 where deceased bodies were stacked on porches waiting for burial.  In San Francisco, where 

residents took the epidemic more seriously, results were better.  Public health director William

 Hassler quarantined all naval installations before cases surfaced, and mobilized the city into

 districts with its own medical personnel and emergency hospitals.  A full-page newspaper ad 

cried ‘Wear a mask and save your life!” (pages 374-5)                

     On pages 450 to 451, Barry writes, “. . .if a virus caused a 1918-like pandemic (today), 

modern medicine could likely prevent significantly more than half of those deaths. . .but tens of 

millions would still die.  And a severe influenza pandemic would hit like a tsunami, inundating

 intensive-care units even as doctors and nurses fall ill themselves. . .pushing the health care 

system to the point of collapse and possibly beyond. . .hospitals have gotten more efficient by 

cutting costs, which means virtually no excess capacity. . .schools and day care centers might

close for weeks.”

     Barry’s book was published by Penguin in 2004 and 2005.

     Garrett’s book came out in 1995 (also Penguin)