Dan Brown tops Oxfam’s chart of most-donated books…
Think this through a moment: more Dan Brown books are sold new than of any other (well, damn nearly any other). Thus we would expect to see more Dan Brown books in second hand shops than any other, more donated to charity shops than any other.
Yes?
There’s simply millions more around than there are of the Life of Pi….
So, what does The Guardian make of this fact?
Dan Brown might be one of the world’s bestselling authors but it turns out that readers aren’t too keen on keeping his special blend of religious conspiracy and scholarly derring-do on their shelves once they’ve bought it.
Yes, they’ve slightly missed the point that a larger supply of first hand copies will lead to a larger supply of second hand ones. To do so would of course have meant leaving out the sneer….
5 responses so far ↓
1 Tim Almond // Aug 21, 2009 at 10:13 am
No-one keeps unread copies of Dan Brown books on their shelves for their friends to see.
2 ChrisM // Aug 21, 2009 at 2:56 pm
They’ve got a nerve considering Sam Brown is the non-de-plume of guardian writer Jonathan Freedland.
3 David Gillies // Aug 21, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I didn’t have the heart to inflict Dan Brown on a charity shop. Angels and Demons is one of the very few books I have tossed in the trash partially read. I’ve failed to finish books before, of course, but this was such an appallingly meretricious piece of rubbish I felt compelled to dispose of it in the appropriate manner (I should’ve flushed it down the bog.) If I recall, the final straw was when one of the characters, who is meant to be director of CERN, gets the ratio of the nuclear diameter to atomic diameter wrong by a factor of ten. This would make the fine structure constant ten times too large and mean, inter alia, that stars, CERN directors, Dan Browns and formulaic pulp novels would not exist.
4 Tim Newman // Aug 21, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I’m with David. Normally I wouldn’t dream of damaging a book, but the single exception was when I tore The Da Vinci Code in half when on holiday in Thailand so my wife and I could read it at the same time.
5 jus'askin // Aug 24, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Can’t help wondering what the first hand/second hand ratio of Salman Rushdie is.
My suspicion is 1/1 the latter being largely mint past the first chapter.
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