NYT’s Top Ten on the Rise

The New York Time‘s announcement of their picks of the 10 Best Books of 2016 has had an effect on Amazon’s sales rankings. Of the paper’s ten picks, five titles have made significant leaps.

9780385542364_9d8d8Unsurprisingly, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (PRH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOTOverDrive Sample), already a best seller, has the highest ranking of the ten. The National Book Award winner moved from #80 to #55 at the time of this posting (bet on these titles gaining a bit more ground over the weekend).

9781627795944_e366cIan McGuire’s The North Water (Macmillan/Holt; OverDrive Sample) made a greater leap. The Man Booker longlist title skyrocketed from #4,907 to just outside the top 100 at #141, perhaps simply because it’s the first title on the NYT‘s list. For a refresher on the story, see the NYT Book Review by Colm Toibin, the daily NYT by Michiko Kakutani, and the take by The Wall Street Journal. It has not appeared on the other best books lists we’ve tracked.

9780525429630_6e612The National Book Award finalist,  The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (PRH/Viking; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) rose even more, moving from #5,189 to #280. It is also a Washington Post best of the year.

9781590514887_b6f51In nonfiction, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others, Sarah Bakewell (PRH/Other Press; OverDrive Sample) made the largest leap, moving from #4,716 to #264. The book earned starred reviews from all four pre-pub sources, with Booklist writing that it’s not all arcane philosophy, “With coverage of friendship, travel, argument, tragedy, drugs, Paris, and, of course, lots of sex, Bakewell’s biographical approach pays off.”

9780385535595_c7da8Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer (PRH/Doubleday; BOT) jumped over 1,000 titles, moving from #1,293 to #163. The very timely book is still part of the conversation as the president-elect creates his financial base of advisors. As we wrote earlier, Mayer explains how the Koch family and other wealthy conservative families have undertaken a concerted campaign to shape the political environment.

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