It is a bit surprising that so many people still buy “real” reading material despite increasing digitization. On the other hand, it is also a good sign that so many readers still appreciate a good book. For this reason, you can now find the stern orderers for the print editions, which are published every Thursday, online. Here are the fiction and nonfiction bestsellers for October 2022.
“How majority opinions are formed, even if they aren’t” is the subtitle of this media scolding. Welzer and Precht believe that we are too committed to the mainstream and that we don’t give enough space to those who think differently. The star was not deterred and recently invited the two to an argument. The two intellectual influencers also had ample opportunity to formulate their criticism of us journalists in “Zeit” and “Lanz”. It didn’t do them any harm to get involved with the “fourth estate”, as so often before. According to our thesis, she could have contributed to the fact that this book became a bestseller. In any case, the current majority opinion seems to be: This book should be read. Here is the book.
Back when Dörte was still small and the world was practically minded, the Hansens not only wiped the house flies, the brandy waste and who knows what else off the table with the kitchen rag, but also wiped the snotty noses of the children. From September to May, the North Frisian slanting rain hit your hood, at the village school in Högel there was thrashing for dirty fingernails, and at the start of class a soldier’s song was blared out of children’s necks: “The blue dragoons, they ride”. This is precisely the stuff that gives birth to literature. Today, 58-year-old Hansen sees herself as a chronicler of dying worlds and says: “I want to describe what disappearance means.” In her third novel, she sets sail and takes on life on the stormy islands of the North Sea. A book for landlubbers too. Here is the book.
The product descriptions on Amazon announce this work as follows: “Scarlett St. Clair lives in Oklahoma with her husband. She has a degree in librarianship and is obsessed with Greek mythology, books and the afterlife.” So we read straight into this morbid debut. And were not disappointed. Mrs St. Clair actually manages to lock the noble figures of Greek legends in a bizarre literary soap opera building. There they suffer from trivial continuous shelling. This novel belongs to the new book genre “New Adult”. This should fill the gap between youth and adult literature. We didn’t even know this gap existed. But this list shows: It is there and has been filled. “Holy Hades. I need more of this,” wrote one avid reader. We do not agree. Here is the book.
Because Niklas Kolorz manages to explain almost everything simply via Tiktok, he is already a Grimme Prize winner. In this book he takes on nothing less than the universe and how it all began. Heavy material, prepared for easy reading; always accommodating the shrinking attention span of readers used to multimedia with flashy subtitles: “What the beginning of everything has to do with pigeon shit”. Some teachers say that the actual explanation units in school lessons should not last longer than 30 seconds so that the students can still follow. Kolorz has apparently perfected this. We think: has it been 30 seconds so far? Here is the book.
Lawyer and writer Karsten Dusse founded his own book subgenre: the mindfulness crime novel. Its hero, Björn Diemel, is a stressed-out lawyer who is sent to a mindfulness coach by his wife. What he learns there he can put to good use in leading a crime syndicate that he accidentally had to take over from a mafia boss. The joke of the books comes from the combination of “hard thriller meets meditation and inner contemplation”. In the fourth part of his successful series, Diemel dives into the world of the former guru Bhagwan after a few complications. Incidentally, in 1977 we also sent our reporter Jörg Andrees Elten to the ashram in Poona. The colleague came back as a disciple of the guru. Here is the book.
Everything is stretched out quite a bit with these chart-toppers, who managed to push Richard David Precht and Harald Welzer off the throne from the start. Respect! Then the title: Given its length, you might think it would be a complete sentence. Then the author names doubled over. The doctor Bracht and the engineer Liebscher probably couldn’t agree on a common one. After all, he accepted hers. Finally, the recipe of the two therapists, which is as simple as it is successful: press, roll, deeeeeeehnen. Elongate the muscles and fascia. We suspect that the book’s whereabouts in our bestseller list will also be quite a long time coming. Here is the book.
The good news: Of the 85 recipes that the food blogger from Cologne uses to organize her culinary year, around half are vegetarian. The bad news: Emmi is not vegan, only a few meals are really modern, many classics that have been chewed through for decades. And one or the other composition is so simple that we would not dare to write instructions for it, for example watermelon with feta. At least the book saves us from having to scroll through long texts on Emmi’s website, which are long enough to fit a lot of advertising in between. If that’s not good news. Here is the book.
Does anyone remember Peter Handke and his mob appearance (“silly literature!”) at the “Group 47” conference in Princeton in 1966? Or Rainald Goetz, who scratched his forehead at the Klagenfurt Literature Days in 1983, ended his reading with a bleeding wound and demanded in vain: “My brain should run out with my blood.” Mission-conscious young men, still fondly remembered today. The literary hit genre has now been revived by Kim de l’Horizon from Ostermundigen near Bern. After winning the German Book Prize, the 30-year-old non-binary person with a mustache and a dress sang a song and shaved her head in solidarity with women in Iran. There’s finally something going on in the slow-moving book industry! Here is the book.
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