USA Today Crowns the 'New' Roth!

English majors rejoice! USA Today has compiled its annual breakdown of what Americans were reading in 2010, and fiction has had a very ‘boffo’ year,  as the industry types say, with novels dominating the weekly best-seller list. And now, English majors, return to your traditional state of prematurely wizened despair: many of those novels were penned by Nicholas Sparks.

Other unsurprising tidbits: Stieg Larsson’s cocktails of sexual violence and Swedish ghastliness continued to perform, and movie adaptations make financial sense, if little else. On that note, prepare to soon be sick of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games”: work on the first film installment of the teen sci-fi trilogy is slated to begin in the spring, under the auspices of the same production company that brought us the “Wimpy Kid” movie – another YA heavy hitter in the fiction marketplace. And all this despite sounding like a Sade album circa 1994.

But hey, there’s some room for optimism here, as well. Vampires are finally getting passé, and there is not one mention of books about Labradors or other household pets.

Finally, only in USA Today will the ‘Roth’ in the headline “Roth, Franzen and Winfrey” refer to the author of “Women, Food and God.”