According to one bookseller, the book of the summer is … “a Dante’s Inferno kind of vibe”?
In a year where Billboard’s official song of the summer, “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, was dubbed by Billboard editors as “vulnerable, emotional and relatable,” which “proves that a summer hit doesn’t always have to be high-energy,” the King’s Co-op Bookstore’s top seller isn’t what manager Paul MacKay would call an “uplifting summer read.”
The bookstore’s bestseller of the season was R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, released in August. The shop sold over 40 copies of the book, which MacKay says is “King’s and classics coded,” drawing comparisons between the novel and Inferno by Dante Alighieri.
“We don’t really do a whole lot of those beach read, summer vibe kind of things,” he says. “People come to us to get literature that will make you cry or like existential dread sort of thing.”
MacKay says the bookstore — a windowless room hidden in the basement of the University of King’s College — doesn’t have much luck selling summer beach reads.
“Sometimes I bring them in, and it’s just not what people come here for. The Emily Henry books and stuff like that, they can be here, and they just sit. People just don’t really care about it.”
Henry has sold over 10 million copies of her adult romance novels worldwide, according to The Times. Her latest book topped the Toronto Star’s list of the summer’s top beach reads.
“They just don’t really move for us,” MacKay says.
Katabasis was also the most popular book released in August on Goodreads, a website boasting an estimated 150 million users, where readers can catalogue and review books. The book centres on two graduate students who journey into hell to rescue their professor after killing him in a magical accident.
MacKay says the bookstore has had more people purchasing fiction books — with “a lot of people” coming for Katabasis — since Dalhousie University locked out members of its faculty on Aug. 20, causing most classes at the university to be indefinitely suspended.
“Some people have been buying their coursebooks early, but then they’ll see something fun and go, ‘Well, I might as well read that instead; might as well have some fun.’”
Katabasis also sold 33 copies at Bookmark, a downtown Halifax bookstore.
Bookmark’s number one book of the summer — with 123 copies sold — was Sarah Emsley’s The Austens, a novel about Jane Austen’s friendship with her sister-in-law, Fanny Austen. Emsley lives in Halifax and obtained her master’s degree and PhD in English from Dalhousie University.
“She’s part of the Jane Austen Society, which is a global community,” says Patrick King, a bookseller at Bookmark. “We had to tell people in Italy that we couldn’t ship internationally. We were getting orders from everywhere.”
The Austens wasn’t the only Austen summer pick.
Katherine Lloyd, a first-year applied computer science student at Dalhousie, says Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was the best book she read this summer.
“The main relationship was really cute,” Lloyd says. “It was nice to see it develop slowly throughout the course of the story.”
King says some of Bookmark’s top-selling books fall into the summer romance category.
“We cater to a lot of folks who are on vacation,” he says. “We get the cruise ship crowds, so it’s a lot of people looking to pick up a book to read while they’re lying next to the pool. They read a lot more fluffy stuff when they’re on vacation.”
The works of George Orwell twice appeared on Bookmark’s list of top summer sellers. Animal Farm sold 63 copies, landing at number four, and 1984 sold 47 copies, making it the shop’s eighth best seller.
King says he is “almost certain” that there is a connection between Orwell’s popularity and the controversial proposed book ban in Alberta. 1984 is on the proposed list of books to be banned by the Edmonton Public School Board.
“There’s only one reason you ban a book like 1984, and it’s not because you’re on the right side of history,” King says.
