1998: The Street Lawyer by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project.  

The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 348 pages

Subject/Genre: Homelessness PSA/Legal thriller

Michael Brock was an up-and-coming anti-trust lawyer on his way to a partnership in a big DC firm, then the unthinkable happened.  A homeless man barged into the law office and held several of the lawyers hostage, including Brock.  He then berated them for their heartlessness towards the more needy, before mentioning something about an eviction and having his head blown off by a police sniper.  This may sound like the beginning of Quentin Tarantino's A Christmas Carol, but is really the impetus for what Grisham presents as a serious look at the plight of the homeless.    

First, let me say that the plight of the homeless isn't a joke, and that a society with more than enough food and resources to care for all its members and still doesn't needs to take a good long look in the mirror.  Michael Brock, after his harrowing experience, contacts the 14th street legal clinic, who represented the kidnapper previously.  He agrees to volunteer at a homeless shelter with a lawyer from the clinic, where he meets an adorable child and his family.  Said child and family freeze to death soon after, leading Brock to take steps in seeking justice.  This is one big problem I have with the novel.  Pretty much every character exists solely to spur on Brock's development, with no real motivation of their own.  His relatives are one-dimensional success-oriented cardboard cutouts, the homeless characters are extras borrowed from The Fisher King, and Michael Brock is a Scrooge-like persona, sliding from 'self-centered rich yuppie' to 'beleaguered defender of the downtrodden.'  For a book that clearly presents itself as having a clear moral purpose (helping the homeless), the homeless play a pretty small part in it.  It's about the brave lawyer turning down a promising career as a soulless attache to the rich in favor of becoming a brave lawyer with a heart of gold.  He further undermines his own point by focusing the plot on a criminal conspiracy against a group of homeless people, which, while it allows for a happy ending where they stick it to the man, detracts attention from the completely legal ways in which our current system is unjust.  Despite some sentimental speeches about society's apathy, the majority of the novel paints the altruistic lawyer as the salvation of America's homeless, at the same time relieving the readers of the sense of responsibility the novel is supposed to instill.  

I realize I'm being pretty harsh, but let me say that it's a good thing Grisham used his reach as a public figure to draw attention to a good cause.  As a novel, it's better than last week's The Partner as well as The Testament (which I'll review next Monday).  If you have some insatiable urge to read a Grisham novel, and this is the only one available, go right ahead.  Otherwise, skip it.

Bestsellers of 1998:

1. The Street Lawyer by John Grisham

2. Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

3. Bag of Bones by Stephen King

4. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

5. Mirror Image by Danielle Steel

6. The Long Road Home by Danielle Steel

7. The Klone and I by Danielle Steel

8. Point of Origin by Patricia Cornwell

9. Paradise by Toni Morrison

10. You Belong to Me by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1998:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Holes by Louis Sachar

1971: Wheels by Arthur Hailey

The Author:

Arthur Hailey (1920-2004) has appeared once on this list already, for 1968's bestselling-novel, Airport.  Born in England, Hailey dropped out of high school due to financial stress, later joining the Royal Air Force during World War II.  In 1947, he moved to Canada and later gained dual citizenship.  

He went on to have a long and successful career in film, television, and publishing, appearing on the top ten annual bestsellers list five times and taking the number one spot twice.

The Book:

Wheels is to the automobile industry what Airport is to aviation.  While there are many subplots, dealing with everything from race to the artist's dilemma, the real protagonist is the automobile industry itself, in all its flawed grandeur.  Overall, it sees the auto industry on the verge of bigger and better things, while still calling it out on its failings (e.g. unethical salesman, management issues, etc.).  

While Wheels certainly benefited from Hailey's previous successes, its popularity can be delved into more.  I find Hailey similar to Michener and Uris, even though the latter are historical fiction writers.  All three have plenty of character subplots, but their stories are not about the characters.  Michener writes about the land, Uris about political and social climates, and Hailey about industries.  Perhaps one reason I find Hailey so dry is that he's trying to be educational.  People like Hailey, Michener, and Uris used fiction to illustrate their extensive research.  So the question is why did this type of novel become popular at this point in time, that is to say, the late 60s-ealry 70s?  As soon as I asked myself that, I remembered David Foster Wallace's idea of the "vocational travelogue":

"'Vocational Travelogue' is a shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures that they'd never really get to see...modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that today few people are in a position to know much about any professional field other than their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction's 'touristic' function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties."

In 1978, Wheels was adapted into a miniseries starring Rock Hudson:

This is the best image I could find

As far as Hailey goes, you know what you're going to get.  If you are interested in the auto industry of the late 60s and early 70s, Wheels is for you.  Otherwise, you can skip it.




Bestselling novels of 1971:

1. Wheels by Arthur Hailey
2. The Exorcist by William Blatty
3. The Passions of the Mind by Irving Stone
4. The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
5. The Betsy by Harold Robbins
6. Message from Malaga by Helen MacInnes
7. The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
8. The Drifters by James Michener
9. The Other by Tom Tryon
10. Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Also Published in 1971:

Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Grendel by John Gardner
Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Sources:

• Hailey, Arthur. Wheels. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1971. Print.

Wallace, David Foster. "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama." Science 22 December 2000: pages 
     2263-2267. Web.

1933-1934: Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen

Who?
          William Hervey Allen, Jr. (1889-1949) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he later attended the U.S. Naval Academy, but was given an honorable discharge after having “overstrained himself in athletics” (Kunitz 18).  He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1915, then joined the Pennsylvania National Guard.  He served as a lieutenant in the infantry in World War One and was severely wounded. 

            After returning to the U.S., Allen settled down in South Carolina and began his career as a teacher and a writer, teaching English at Charleston High School and founding the Poetry Society of South Carolina.  He later lectured at Columbia and then Vassar where he met Ann Hyde Andrews, whom he married in 1927. 

So what's this book about?
            Anthony Adverse was published in 1933, and was to be Hervey Allen’s best-known and most successful work.  Nearly penniless by the time he finished the novel, the royalties alone allowed him to buy a manor in Maryland.

            Anthony Adverse tells the life-story of the eponymous Anthony.  And when I say life story, I mean it covers his entire life in near-exhaustive detail, from the circumstances surrounding his conception in 1770’s Europe, to his death in Mexico at what I would guess to be the 1820’s or later. 

            This is an adventure novel, following the orphan Anthony, the son of a noble Scottish woman and her lover, abandoned at a convent by his mother’s husband, the evil Marquis Don Luis.  Coincidence finds him the ward of his maternal grandfather, a wealthy merchant in Livorno, Italy.  From there, his adventures include everything from African expeditions to owning a Southern plantation, to doing battle with Native Americans. 

            Two things about this book immediately jumped to my attention.  The first was the style.  It’s written in a style that seems to fit in more with the Romantics.  For example:

            There could be no holding back now.  Had he not followed her all the way from Paris?
            After the crushing of all hope by her marriage, after a year of foreboding and life in death,
            to find this full cup of life held out to her, waiting as it were just around the next turn in the
            road, intoxicated her, thrilled her through every fibre and flamed up with a sudden blaze
            and hope of fulfilment in the very core of her being. (Allen 47)

            The second thing that struck me was the length.  I’m reading a first edition copy which totals 1224 pages.  Part of the length is due to the at times excessive attention to detail, in regards to dress and architecture and landscape.  Then again, if I were to have read this for a different purpose, I would have been able to take much more time with it. 

Why was it so popular?

            While I feel the detail may be excessive, it certainly paints a good picture of the fashions and styles of the time.  Not only did this offer escapism (an orphan with a wealthy benefactor who goes on great adventures) but it has the added attraction of history.  Historical novels have been popular in American literary history (e.g. 1926’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy, 1928’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1930’s Cimarron, 1931-2’s The Good Earth, etc.).  Somewhat of a rags-to-riches, wish-fulfillment story, this historical adventure novel was the perfect type of escapism during the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. 

            Anthony Adverse had another thing going for it.  “Issued with great publicity just in time to catch the summer reader, Anthony Adverse provided him (or, more usually, her) with three books for the price of one…” (Hart 261).

Why haven't I heard of it?

            It seems to me that unless a book is a classic or contemporary, most people aren’t interested in spending the time necessary to read twelve-hundred pages.  Anthony Adverse was also, to some degree, a harbinger of its own doom.  While historical fiction had always been popular, Anthony Adverse ushered in a new fervor for the genre, resulting, most notably, in the popularity of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. 

            Perhaps the current obscurity of Anthony Adverse and the continuing popularity of Gone with the Wind are due to their respective movies.  A film version of Anthony Adverse was released in 1936 starring Freddie March and Olivia De Havilland.

Although the film won four Academy Awards and was nominated for three more (including best picture) it’s worth taking a look at its page on Rotten Tomatoes: A 13% fresh rating with only 48% of audience approval (as opposed to Gone with the Wind, with 96% fresh rating and 91% audience approval). 

Should I read it?

            If you’re looking for a long book with a lot of adventure and don’t mind the anachronistic prose, you’d like Anthony Adverse, but you’d probably be better off with Dumas.

Also published in 1933 & 1934:

Samuel Beckett - More Pricks Than Kicks
James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice 
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night 
Robert Graves - I, Claudius 
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer   

Souces:

Allen, Hervey. Anthony Adverse. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. 1933. Print
Hart, James. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste. New York: Oxford
               University Press. 1950. Print.
Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern 
                Literature. New York: H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.

1922: If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson

Who?

Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson (1879-1971) was born in British India.   His father was a General and his mother was a Scottish noble.  He was expected to go into the military as his brothers did, but was rejected due to his poor eyesight and instead chose to study medicine in London.  He dropped out of medical school and became a journalist in London until the outbreak of World War One, in which he served with Royal Engineers and a Canadian tunneling company.  After the war, he wrote his first success, If Winter Comes.  He continued writing through the 1940’s with some commercial success.  He married in 1926 and moved to Eastbourne where he started a family. 

(Unfortunately, information on Hutchinson’s later life has been hard to find.)

So what's this book about?

If Winter Comes follows the life of Mark Sabre from 1912 through 1919.  The story takes place in an English suburb and focuses on the deterioration of Sabre’s marriage and career, in large part due to Sabre’s inability to adopt the worldview of the suburbanites, including his wife.  Throughout the story, Sabre is reunited with his real love, the Lady Tybar, and deals with changes resulting from World War One.  The book’s title comes from the last lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, “Oh Wind,/ If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”  And, in much the same way that nature destroys and replenishes, so does Sabre’s life fall apart and reconstruct. 

            There is no doubt that we should be rooting for Sabre throughout, and to this end, his wife, Mabel, is unlikable.  My biggest problem with this book is that I can find no reason why Mabel and Sabre ever got married in the first place.  There is nothing about their relationship before they got married, and from day one they don’t really get along.  It seems like a marriage of convenience; convenience for the author, not the characters.   On that note, most of the characters opposed to Sabre are unequivocally mean, and Sabre’s friends are all ‘good.’  In many ways, this is a romance about a man trapped between what he feels is his duty (e.g. staying with his wife, serving his country, etc.) and what he wants for himself.  As a romance, or a story or redemption through virtue, If Winter Comes is successful.

What made it so popular?

If Winter Comes became popular in Britain before making the leap across the Atlantic.  Not only did the novel benefit from word of mouth advertising, but the controversial plot elements managed to pique the public’s interest, elements that set the tone of disillusionment generally considered characteristic of literature during and after World War One. 

Why haven't I heard of it?
The elements that were controversial enough to garner the novel attention at the time have since lost their shock factor. And while If Winter Comes is an enjoyable read, there is nothing particularly transcendent about it that would put it in the realm of classics.  It was made into two films, the first in 1923 and the second in 1947, but since then has not had much of a presence in popular culture.

Should I read it?
If you like romance, then you’ll probably enjoy If Winter Comes.  



You can read If Winter Comes on Project Gutenberg.

Also published in 1922:
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Ulysses by James Joyce

Sources:
Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1942. Print.

Hutchinson, Arthur.  If Winter Comes.  1920. New York: Pocket Books Publishing, 1947.

1915: The Turmoil by Booth Tarkington

Who?
            Newton Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was born, lived, and set most of his works in Indiana.  He was the offspring of old American families: His father’s side of the family moved to Indiana from the south in the late eighteenth century, and his mother’s family in New England could be traced back to colonial days and still held prominent positions in society and politics (in fact, Booth was named after his uncle, Newton Booth, then governor of California).  During his youth, his family was one of many who fell into financial hardship.  They managed to hold on, and Tarkington was educated at Purdue and later Princeton University.  He became a rather successful playwright and novelist, his first novel, The Gentlemen from Indiana, being published in 1899.  But it was not until a divorce and his marriage to Susanah Robinson in 1912 that he entered what biographer James Woodress called his “major phase.”  The first novel of this phase was 1915’s The Turmoil, the first volume of what became known as Tarkington’s Growth trilogy, including his Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918).   Tarkington was the first author to win two Pulitzer prizes for fiction (the second was for 1921’s Alice Adams), a feat that has only been duplicated by John Updike and William Faulkner.

           

So what's this book about?
           The Turmoil tells the story of the nouveau riche Sheridan family, led by the consummate industrialist, Jim Sheridan.  The main character is the family’s youngest son, twenty-two year old Bibbs Sheridan, who at the beginning of the novel is returning from a sanitarium after two years spent recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by his father’s attempt to mold Bibbs after his own image (as he had successfully done with Bibbs’ two older brothers).  The novel’s main focus is on the relationship between Jim and his children and the relationship between the Sheridan’s and the “old rich” families of Indianapolis, specifically the secretly destitute Vertreeses and their daughter Mary, and how these things affect Bibbs’ personal growth.

            Therein lies the heart of the novel: Bibbs, the dreamer, poet, and outsider, assuming his maturity in a changing world.  Tarkington creates an honest picture of an isolated young man with vague ambition and his transformation as he reenters the world and falls for Mary Vertrees.  The story is often funny and, on a few occasions, tragic, as the lives of all the characters drastically change.  

            Besides Bibbs and Mary Vertrees, the characters are often typecast so as to parody certain kinds of people or situations.  That is not to say that they don’t have depth (although there are a few characters who don’t), and this parody is intended and generally succeeds in being humorous.   And when the characters examine the reasons behind their behavior, or break from their established caricatures, it is done skillfully, giving the reader a deeper understanding of their personalities. 

            Overall, The Turmoil has aged well.  The relationships between the members of the Sheridan family are true to life and easily accessible, even after all this time.  However, the attitudes the characters hold in regard to romantic relationships and the old wealth vs. new wealth are strictly representative of their time.

So why was it so popular?

            This was a time of great industrialization and corporate growth in the United States.  The lives of the rich and powerful have always been popular subjects for novels, and the fall of American “aristocracy” to the nouveau riche was of particular prevalence at that time.  I also noticed an interesting correlation between The Turmoil and The Inside of the Cup: they have remarkably similar openings.  Both describe a midwestern city, once home to the well-to-do, now made urban and industrial.  In both openings, the sign and symbol of this prosperity, is smoke.  Churchill wrote: “Little did the … prominent people foresee the havoc that prosperity and smoke were to play with their residential plans! One by one, sooty commerce drove them out.”  Tarkington wrote: “The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches.  He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously.  He has a voice,  a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: ‘Wealth! I will get Wealth!’”

            The industrialization of the Midwest affected many people, including Tarkington.  According to his biography: “The sedate, well-mannered, and self-contained society that he rememberd in Indianapolis in 1900 had crumbled before the irresistible force of big business and the vast complexities of an industrial democracy.  The life he formerly knew had been succeeded by a frenetic rat race in the grimy maze of his once relaxed and friendly city (Woodress 181-2).

Why haven't I heard of it?

               That’s a good question.  At the time of writing this, I’ve already finished reading Tarkington’s Seventeen (the bestseller of 1916).  Judging from these two (very different) novels, I feel that the reason is that they are very much period pieces.  Obviously, much fiction takes place at the time it was written, and that time is from a  past period, but that is not what I mean by “period piece.”  As I define it, a period piece is a story in which the attitudes of the characters are deeply entrenched in that specific time and place.  For example, if we look at Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the film adaptation Apocalypse Now, even with the change in the specifics of the setting (replace colonized Congo with occupied Vietnam, mercantile with military), the characters’ attitudes and values are not anachronistic.  The same cannot be said of Tarkington’s characters.  The characters are still accessible and coherent, but they can only be understood as products of their time. 

        
Should I read it?       

               If you don’t mind period pieces, then yes.  The Turmoil is fun, emotional, and well-written. 

You can read The Turmoil on Project Gutenberg.

Also published in 1915:

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Sources:

Churchill, Winston. The Inside of the Cup. 1913.
Tarkington, Booth. The Turmoil. 1915.
Woodress, James. Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana. New York: J. B. Lippincott. 1955.

100 years, 94 books

     For this blog I plan, among other things, to read and review every novel to reach the number one spot on Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list, starting in 1913.  Beyond just a book review, I'm going to provide some information on the authors and the time at which these books were written in an attempt to figure out just what made these particular books popular at that particular time.

    I decided to undertake this endeavor as a mission to read books I never would have otherwise read, discover authors who have been lost to obscurity, and to see how what's popular has changed over the last one hundred years.  I plan to post a new review every Monday, with links, short essays, and the like between review posts.

Here is the list of books I plan to review:

• 1913: The Inside of the Cup by Winston Churchill     
• 1914: The Eyes of the World by Harold Bell Wright
• 1915: The Turmoil by Booth Tarkington 
• 1916: Seventeen by Booth Tarkington
• 1917: Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H. G. Wells
• 1918: The U. P. Trail by Zane Grey
• 1919: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
• 1920: The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey
• 1921: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
• 1922: If Winter Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson
• 1923: Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton
• 1924: So Big by Edna Ferber
• 1925: Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs
• 1926: The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine
• 1927: Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
• 1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
• 1929: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• 1930: Cimarron by Edna Ferber
• 1931: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• 1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck *
• 1933: Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen
• 1934: Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen* 
• 1935: Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas
• 1936: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• 1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell*
• 1938: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
• 1939: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• 1940: How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
• 1941: The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin
• 1942: The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel
• 1943: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
• 1944: Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith
• 1945: Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
• 1946: The King's General by Daphne du Maurier
• 1947: The Miracle of the Bells by Russell Janney
• 1948: The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas
• 1949: The Egyptian by Mika Waltari
• 1950: The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson
• 1951: From Here to Eternity by James Jones
• 1952: The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain
• 1953: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas*
• 1954: Not as a Stranger by Morton Thompson
• 1955: Marjorie Morningstar  by Herman Wouk
• 1956: Don't Go Near the Water by William Brinkley
• 1957: By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens
• 1958: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
• 1959: Exodus by Leon Uris
• 1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
• 1961: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
• 1962: Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter
• 1963: The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris L. West
• 1964: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• 1965: The Source  by James A. Michener
• 1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
• 1967: The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
• 1968: Airport by Arthur Hailey
• 1969: Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
• 1970: Love Story by Erich Segal
• 1971: Wheels by Arthur Hailey
• 1972: Johnathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
• 1973: Johnathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach*
• 1974: Centennial by James A. Michener
• 1975: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
• 1976: Trinity by Leon Uris
• 1977: The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien
• 1978: Chesapeake by James A. Michener
• 1979: The Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum
• 1980: The Covenant by James A. Michener
• 1981: Noble House by James Clavell
• 1982: E.T., The Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle
• 1983: Return of the Jedi by James Kahn
• 1984: The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
• 1985: The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M. Auel
• 1986: It by Stephen King
• 1987: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
• 1988: The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy
• 1989: Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy
• 1990: The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel
• 1991: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley
• 1992: Dolores Claiborne  by Stephen King
• 1993: The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
• 1994: The Chamber by John Grisham
• 1995: The Rainmaker by John Grisham
• 1996: The Runaway Jury by John Grisham
• 1997: The Partner by John Grisham
• 1998: The Street Lawyer by John Grisham
• 1999: The Testament by John Grisham
• 2000: The Brethren by John Grisham
• 2001: Desecration by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye
• 2002: The Summons by John Grisham
• 2003: The Da Vinci Code  by Dan Brown**
• 2004: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown*
• 2005: The Broker by John Grisham
• 2006: For One More Day by Mitch Albom
• 2007: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini**
• 2008: The Appeal by John Grisham
• 2009: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
• 2010: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson
• 2011: The Litigators by John Grisham
• 2012: Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
• 2013: Inferno by Dan Brown
• 2014: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

* Books that appear multiple times will be condensed into one post. The review of The Robe, the only book to reach number one on two inconsecutive years (1943 and 1953) will be published under the earlier date.

** Publishers Weekly did not include the Harry Potter books in its listings.  Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix was the bestselling book for 2003, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the bestselling book of 2007.  I have decided to go with the official PW list.  This is not due to any bias against Harry Potter (I have fond memories of waiting in line for the midnight release of the final book).  By not counting Harry, I add The Da Vinci Code and A Thousand Splendid Suns to the list.  The Da Vinci Code already appears for 2004.  A Thousand Splendid Suns has a lot less notoriety than Harry Potter, so is more in tune with the mission.