The Popular and the Forgotten

Last week I was talking to some teachers about the best-selling books of all time. One teacher said she'd heard the number one best seller was the Bible and the number two was The Chronicles of Narnia. I believed the Bible part easily enough but, as much as I love The Chronicles of Narnia, I found the idea that it was number two very surprising. Later, I googled and found a surprising variety of lists of all time best-selling books from different sources. I guess it's really hard to pin down the best-selling books of all time though I think it is fair to assume the Bible really is number one. Most lists, though, seem to have Don Quixote as the best-selling fiction book of all time, which makes more sense to me. The book's had four hundred years to accrue readers, it's widely considered the first European novel, and it basically spawned the whole picaresque genre that was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.

On lists of series of books, the Harry Potter books seem always to be number one. I remember when I was getting my TESL/TEFL certificate at college, there was a girl in the class with me who was putting together a whole lesson plan to teach in South Korea that utilised Harry Potter and I thought she was going to get a rude awakening when she found no-one in South Korea was into Harry Potter. But, boy, was I wrong because the series is massive in Japan and apparently throughout Asia. That's the real reason J.K. Rowling can't be cancelled. In fact, it may have been the attempt to cancel her that finally revealed the true impotence of cancel culture. It's ultimately another manifestation of the infamous tendency of liberals to eat their own. The left can only effectively cancel people like Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, people who are icons of progressive media.

Anyway, the truly surprising title I saw cropping up on these lists was H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She which Wikipedia has listed ninth at 83 million copies sold. Other lists, like this one, put it at 100 million copies, basically making it tied for sixth with The Hobbit, And Then There Were None, and The Dream of the Red Chamber (the site lists The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at 10th with 85 million copies sold). I'd have never dreamed an H. Rider Haggard book had outsold Edgar Rice Burroughs or Arthur Conan Doyle and, if one did, I would've assumed it would be King Solomon's Mines. But, hey, it is an amazing book. I read it a couple years ago, just looking for an old pulp adventure and was astonished to find it is what I consider a masterpiece of atmospheric, psychological, fantasy fiction. I had seen the Hammer movie with Peter Cushing, Bernard Cribbins, Christopher Lee, and Ursula Andress. That movie was a massive box office success in the '60s but is now all but forgotten, much like the novel is. But as much as I loved the movie, it's not even a fraction as good as the novel.

It goes to show, like Harry Potter's position in the global zeitgeist, how distorted our perceptions of culture can be by forces within the culture.