Best sellers.

I just received an email from Foyles Bookstore (the place where we bought all those books when we were in London), and among the new-release announcements was a list of the chain's top ten bestselling books. At the top was that new Dan Brown thing, of course, but I was surprised to see the great Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities at number nine. Wow -- a 35-year-old structuralist postmodern meta-novel on a bestseller list in 2009! I love England.

There were some other good books in the bottom nine, which makes me wonder if Foyles' clientele is divided between people who read Dan Brown and people who read real books.

Of course, a more likely reason for a best-seller list crammed with good books is that nobody buys books anymore unless they're written by Dan Brown, and the titles that actually manage to sell a copy or two the rest of the week make up the rest of the list.