Weekly Ranking: Fiction Bestsellers- January, 2018

January 22, 2018

January best-selling fiction is usually an interesting mix of the previous year’s bestsellers and new books that have been hyped on book blogs since December. If you’re stuck inside the house because of bad weather (or any other reason), it might be a good time to catch up on reading. Anybody can binge watch a show. It takes true brainpower to binge read a good book (or two) in one day (or weekend).

Below are the best-selling hardcover fiction novels for the third week of January 2018, according to the New York Times:

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

It’s the new Gone Girl. It’s the new The Girl on the Train. Stephen King calls it unputdownable. I put it down. One of us is wrong.

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

It’s also the new Gone Girl. It’s also the new The Girl on the Train. Stephen King did not call it unputdownable.

Origin by Dan Brown

This has NOT been compared to Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train. Instead, it’s compared to The DaVinci Code. That’s okay because Dan Brown wrote The DaVinci Code too.

The Rooster Bar by John Grisham

It’s another sleazy lawyer novel from John Grisham. Every time John Grisham writes a sleazy lawyer novel, thousands of readers are glad they didn’t go to law school.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Good book so far, but long paragraphs can hurt my eyes. Some authors really should ease up on the long paragraphs.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Once you read the goat skinning scene, there’s no turning back!

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

Psychics, they always cause trouble, especially when kids are involved. This book probably has the most interesting premise of all the novels on this week’s list.

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

The title is really cheesy, but the novel isn’t, at least not so far.

Robicheaux by James Lee Burke

Titles that are just the character’s name seem lazy, even if the author is James Lee Burke. I mean, Dracula and Frankenstein and Emma and Tom Sawyer were okay, but Robicheaux?

The People vs. Alex Cross by James Patterson

This is typical James Patterson. It’s over 100 chapters. Lots of dialogue where all the characters talk the same way. And one of my favorite descriptions in recent memory…

She was classy and brassy, and hilarious, as well as certifiably badass in the courtroom, which was why we’d hired her.

Sigh. What would we do without James Patterson?

*****

It’s not always possible to read every bestseller, but it doesn’t hurt to be familiar with them. Out of all the books on this list, I’d probably rank them (from what I’ve read, and I’ve read at least a little bit of each book) in this order: