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The Birthday Best Seller Book Challenge is a reading challenge of #1 New York Times Fiction Best Sellers that spans decades.
My birthday is August 8 and this year I will be 49. As the midpoint of my life looms ahead I find myself reflecting on where I am in my life and where I have been. But this is not a philosophical mid-life crisis post. This is about two things I have loved over this past half-century: books and challenges.
I have decided to create the ultimate challenge for myself. – The Birthday Best Seller Book Challenge.
What is the Birthday Best Seller Book Challenge?
There are a lot of lists and reading challenges out there of must-read books. Things like “Top 50 Books to Read Before You Die”, “50 Essential Classics” and so on. But I wanted something different. Enter my birthday reading challenge. I am going to take a break from my Random Reads project and over the next year, I will be reading the #1 New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller from my birthday week of each year of my life. My goal – to read all 50 books by my 50th birthday.
Why NY Times Best Sellers?
I have read a lot of books in my 49 years from a wide variety of genres but one thing I never really looked to when picking my reading material was the New York Times Best Seller List. This wasn’t a conscious choice, rather it just never spoke to me. In trying to decide on an epic birthday challenge I thought I might do something like Pulitzer Prize or Booker Prize winners but what I really I want to read is something that reflects the decades I have lived and what was happening around me.
The New York Times Best Seller List is often called a popularity contest. Some even speculate that publishers heavily influence the list and artificially push books up the ranks. The exact formula for making the list is not known. A large part of the basis for selection is the quantity of sales of the book from a wide range of booksellers, including retail chain giants and smaller independent stores. In theory, it is supposed to reflect what people, the average reader, are buying and reading at the moment. But who are the people reflected in this list?
I frequently watch BookTube, follow plenty of Bookstagram accounts, and read a lot of book blogs and quite often they don’t reflect the books listed as #1 on the New York Times list. (What is interesting is this year might be the first exception to that with BookTok darling Fourth Wing currently ranked as No 1 on the list. I am curious to see if this is the start of a new trend or just an anomaly. Time will tell.). Occasionally books will be discussed that are on the list but they don’t always reach that pinnacle of #1. I have noticed that lower ranking books will be talked about on the social media circuit. Or a celebrity book club choice will push a book up the ranks.
This discrepancy between book-based social media and the purchasing of physical books in stores intrigues me. And having never really read any of these top best sellers I want to know why they are so popular. Also because here at The Book Curio I like to focus on forgotten books from the not-so-distant past I thought this challenge would be a perfect endeavor. Reading fifty #1 best sellers from the last five decades, from 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to 2023’s Fourth Wing.
How Does the Reading Challenge Work?
My goal is to each week (or two) read one of the best sellers on the list and write a review for you. I want to not only discuss my thoughts and opinions on the book but also offer some insight into why this book became #1 and what was happening in the county at the time that may have influenced this. In the end I hope to recap my favorites, which ones were duds, and is the #1 rank a true litmus test of what people want to read.
If you would like to join me on this challenge click here to receive a free printable of the books I am reading.
One thing I discovered when creating my list is that there are a lot of books from series, and often a later book in the series not the first. Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series has eight entries on my challenge roster! For these types of cases I either deferred to the #2 best seller or I will read the first book in the series instead of the later one that was ranking. After all, if people love the series so much to make subsequent novels number one then the start of the series must have been pretty good. In one instance I went to the #1 Young Adult book because I had already read #2 and #3 on the Adult list. Hey it’s my list so I get to make the rules!
I am really looking forward to exploring this new “genre” (popularity fiction). I hope you will join me on this exploration of a half-century of books by my half-century birthday!
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