1. The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown
2. Eclipse – Stephanie Meyer
3. New Moon – Stephanie Meyer
4. Twilight – Stephanie Meyer
5. Breaking Dawn – Stephanie Meyer (I’m beginning to sense a theme developing)
6. Guinness World Records 2010
7. This Charming Man – Marian Keyes
8. When Will There Be Good News? – Kate Atkinson
9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
10. Dreams From My Father – Barack Obama
11. My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult
12. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
13. The Other Hand – Chris Cleave
14. The Return – Victoria Hislop
15. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher – Kate Summerscale
16. The Secret Scripture – Sebasitan Barry
17. The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
18. The Girl who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson
19. Twilight – Stephanie Meyer (presumably a different edition to the one at number 4)
20. Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story – Ant McPartlin & Declan Donnelly

So, no surprises really. Dan Brown is in at number one with a bullet, selling about 100,000 more copies than his nearest rival. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry myself.

Then there’s the Twilight phenomenon. I tried to read the first one and nearly poked my own eyes out, but Eve at Vulpes Libris took one for the team and thus posted the brilliant Why I Hate Twilight. The comments themselves are worth your reading time too. Lots of capital letters.

In fact, the only book I’ve read from this list is number 15, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. I thought it was OK, but deeply flawed – do have a look at my year-old post on it.

The Steig Larsson books have been provoking lots of interest, which much of it centering around whether the books are “feminist” or not. I do own the first book, though haven’t read more than a couple of chapters so far, but The F Word did have this article arguing against the books having feminist credentials. Not having read them, I don’t know whether I agree, but this post is good food for thought at any rate.

One of the most sensational news stories of 1860 was the gruesome murder of a three-year-old boy, Saville Kent, at his home in Wiltshire. He was found in the outdoors privy suffocated, and with this throat cut. It was more or less immediately clear that the murderer must have been someone else in the house, either one of the Kent family, or one of their live-in servants. After some inept bumbling by the local police force, one of the relatively new London detectives was called in to help. The detective who was selected was Mr. Jonathan Whicher, who had enjoyed fast and heady success in the Met, and was trusted by those on high. He quickly decided that the culprit was the boy’s half-sister, Constance. But how to prove it?

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale wears a lot of hats: murder mystery, social history, biography of Mr. Whicher, survey of the fast-rising power of tabloid journalism. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the book was ultimately a jack of all trades but master of none. It is indeed a very well written book, and the opinions and actions of the local and national press were among the most interesting aspects – no surprise when you consider that Summerscale was formerly the literary editor of The Daily Telegraph. I was frustrated by the section on sensation fiction, which the Kent murder undoubtedly inspired to some degree, but Summerscale seemed to suggest that without this case then sensation fiction would never have happened. I think that’s pushing it a bit, to be honest. And, as Catherine said in her review, she seems not to have read Lady Audley’s Secret – to which she makes repeated reference – terribly closely.

The book won The BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008.  Not having read any of the books it was up against, I have no idea whether it really was the best of the bunch, but I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed by a book which I had been looking forward to for a long time.