A New Leaf

Look carefully at the titles of the top 10 bestselling nonfiction books on Amazon. OK, don’t bother – I’ll list them for you. As of December 20, 2009 at 1:50 pm Eastern time, the top ten nonfiction sellers on the US Amazon store are:

1. Going Rogue: An American Life (Sarah Palin)
2. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (Steven Levitt)
3. Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (Glenn Beck)
4. Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Greg Mortenson)
5. Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)
6. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (Andrew Ross Sorkin)
7. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time (Greg Mortenson)
8. Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (Mark R. Levin)
9. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Nicholas Kristof)
10. A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (Bill O’Reilly)

See any patterns here? I see several. First of all, it appears that conservatives are searching for a hero, and Palin looks better than the crusty talk-show hosts. Second of all, since gaining the White House, liberals apparently feel secure enough to engage in the leisurely fantasy that schools will end war and that we can simply “turn oppression into opportunity” for women. Third, the national conversation remains political.

But what I want to write about today is more insidious — it is the way these books are titled. Of the top 10, only O’Reilly’s #10 slot is not occupied by a title of the form “[Pithy title]: [Overly simplistic framing of the book's topic].” I guess that earns him the right to call himself a “bold fresh piece of humanity.” Come to think of it, it’s his publisher that deserves the accolade — titles are routinely chosen by the marketing machine, not by the author. (The Palin title is so utterly stupid, however, that I wonder whether it was the only original writing she did on it. Or maybe the publisher was just being ironical.)

What bothers me about these titles is not that they all contain subtitles. Subtitles have been around for centuries. But, these days, the smarmy way they trumpet and preen instead of simply explicate gets under my skin. Have readers been reduced to simpletons? Can society no longer tolerate depth and subtlety and nuance? Are the titles of books forever stripped of gravitas?

From “book titles, if they were written today”:

Then: [An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of] the Wealth of Nations
Now:  Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now:  Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now:  Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now:  40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

It’s funny because it’s true – the titles of books today are a sad, often misleading, representation of the ideas in the text. Gone are the days when the seminal work of the age has a title like “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” – another language, for Pete’s sake!

I’ll end with my appeal to publishers: if you spend as much energy deciding what cruft not to publish as you do crafting clever subtitles, we’d all be better off.