Friends in Wales and Argentina wrote me yesterday with the news that there was a featured interview with J. K. Rowling in the Sunday edition ofThe Times(London), the ‘Culture’ magazine insert. It wasn’t until I read The Rowling Library’s Index page dedicated to it, though, that I learned what had prompted this Q&A, which, with all its Philosopher’s Stone and Potter Mania questions, seemed to apparate via Time Turner from 1997. The Times, it turns out was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its bestseller list. As TRL explains:
The Timeshas published a special feature today celebrating 50 years of the Sunday Times bestseller list by unveiling the 100 bestselling books of the past five decades. To mark this milestone, they interviewed a select group of prominent personalities, including several acclaimed authors, to delve into their thoughts on books and their personal literary journeys.
Among the authors featured isJ.K. Rowling, whose debut novel,Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, made the list. In this interview, Rowling reflects on the creation of her first book, the literary influences that shaped her writing—citing Charles Dickens as a major inspiration—and even shares a surprising confession: she couldn’t finish a novel byStephen Kingbecause it was just too frightening.
I share three thoughts after the jump about Rowling’s answers to The Times questions, why Team Rowling had to be delighted with the timing of this Q&A’s appearance, and the value of this compendium of “bestsellers.”
(1)The Times’ List of the “100 Bestselling Books of the Last Five Decades:Let’s begin with what rubbish this compendium is. Here were the criteria used to determine what books made the Top 100 and their various ranks:
Weekly sales figures were not published until 1998, so our calculations of the most popular books in the Sunday Times bestsellers, compiled for us by Nielsen Book Research, are based on the number of weeks that individual titles appeared in our Top Tens over the past 50 years — from April 14, 1974, to April 14, 2024. Where books have spent the same number of weeks in the chart, we have ranked them according to the number of weeks they spent at No 1 in the chart.Note that some bestseller lists, for example non-fiction, manuals and children’s, were not published weekly.
All fourTwilightbooks by Stephenie Meyer make the list (at #42, 58, 59, and 64 respectively) but onlyPhilosopher’s Stone makes it, at #23?
Bloomsbury, 1997
Remember how it used to be socially unacceptable for adults to read children’s books? Harry Potter changed that, winning over all ages with a mix of school days drama and supernatural high stakes. The adventures got darker as the series went on, but the chemistry of the first is irresistible.
117 weeks in chart
The Times would have us believe thatPhilosopher’s Stone dropped off their charts after a little over two years andnone of Rowling’s subsequent Hogwarts Saga novels and ancillary textbooks approached the first volume’s success. This is beyond absurd. Check out the Amazon page for ‘The Top 20 Most Read and Most Sold Books of the Week’ for 11 August 2024; six of the top twenty areHarry Potter novels,seventeen years after the finale,Deathly Hallows, was published. Which is not even to mention the sales of the various illustratedPotterbooks, each of which makes the book a bestseller once again upon re-publication.
How didThe Times jigger the list so thePotter titles were not the top seven books of their Top 100?The Times of London had simply followedThe New York Times’ lead (or set the precedent the NYT followed?) in creating a children’s list separate from the Fiction/Non-Fiction Bestseller lists to mask the degree to which Rowling’sPotter novels were redefining the possible reach of the printed word. (read the ridiculous lengthsThe New York Times went to in this regard in their own history of the anything-but-subtle effort to diminish Rowling’s achievement).
What one reader wrote about this NYT shell game in 2008 is still true today of lists like this Sunday’s “Top 100 Best Sellers of the Last Fifty Years:”
There was nothing “controversial” about [The New York Times’] starting a bestseller list for children’s books. Doing a list for mysteries and sci-fi/fantasy and any other genre you want is fine, too. What is controversial and idiotic and wrong from a news point of view is arbitrarily deciding children’s books don’t belong on the general bestseller list.
Imagine a Box Office rundown that didn’t include animated films because they don’t count and animated movies were taking away slots from “real” movies. Imagine a Top 10 TV shows list that didn’t include reality TV (give ’em their own list) because American Idol was too dominant and took away slots from “real” tv shows like dramas. Or didn’t include gameshows because Who Wants to Be A Millionaire was taking up three slots and that was annoying other networks.
Absurd, right? The bestseller list should be just that: a list of the most popular books purchased online and at bookstores by individual buyers every week, regardless of whether they’re romances or children’s books or Jhumpa Lahiri. The last six years or so of the NYT bestseller list is deceiving and simply wrong. The bestsellers are a simple fact, just like the top-grossing movies or most-watched TV shows and should be reported as such.
(2) Why Team Rowling Had To Be Delighted byThe Times’ Q&A: As deceptive and border-line insulting asThe Times’ Top 100 Bestsellers’ list is, I have to think Rowling’s Public Relations staff (see the Acknowledgements page of her last four or five books for their names or Nick Jeffery on ‘Stonehill Salt PR’) were thrilled by being included at all and, most especially, by the softball interview that being #23 allowed. In fact, if Rowling-Galbraith winds up giving The Times an exclusive interview whenHallmarked Man is published, there will be whispering on our moderator channels here that the publication of this puff-piece Q&A was part of the PR Team’s efforts to staunch the flood tide of negative stories about Rowling.
A friend who follows Rowling stories on the internet tells me that the cyber-bullying complaint by the Algerian XY boxer with a Women’s gold medal, a complaint in which Rowling is named, has created an unending stream of stories online and in the broadcast and print media, most of which portrays The Presence in a negative light. WithHallmarked Man‘s marketing blitz due to start (assuming the book has been finished and is set for publication in time for Christmas sales, an assumption seeming less and less plausible as each day passes) and a Bronte Studios adaptation ofInk Black Heart scheduled to air this December, having the author pigeon-holed by the stereopticon media as a “bully” after four years of her being slandered as a “transphobe” and “bigot” needed a counter-narrative.
AndThe Times Q&A provided just that. There were no questions or asides about genderist accusations that Rowling was “murdering” transgender youth (see the Dr Slowfinger retweets from Neil Murray on this subject here and here). There was no mention of Rowling’s daring Scotland to arrest her for calling “transgender women” men in a twixter thread for the ages. And, most important, certain Algerian and Taiwanese gold medalists and the former’s “cyber-bullying” complaint was not included in the Times questions.
All we got in the Q&A this Sunday were a series of questions that hearkened back to the simpler times of Potter Mania for Rowling’s PR team, when The Presence was a Horatia Alger figure, the plucky single mother who escaped an abusive husband to achieve fame and fortune, and who paid her taxes and gave away big chunks of her fortune to help cage children and those suffering from MS.
How long has it been since Rowling was asked a question to which she could answer just “Jane Austen”? A long time. Rowling’s PR Team have earned another mention in a Strike book’s acknowledgement page for their stewardship in bringing this piece to press as it is.
(3) Take-Away Notes from the Q&A:I think there are at least three interesting answers from Rowling to file away for future reference, especially with respect to her Lake of unresolved psychological issues from which she draws story inspiration.
- The Philosopher’s Stone Material:
There are fourteen questions in the article, five of which appropriately are aboutPhilosopher’s Stone, whose appearance on theTimes bestseller list is the supposed reason for the conversation. I discussed yesterday Rowling’s misdirecting comment about how much of the series she had planned by the timeStone was published. The main take away for me is that either Rowling remembers the first “first line” she wrote forPhilosopher’s Stone or there exists a manuscript copy of those first efforts. I only know of one textual history specialist who focuses on Rowling and I suspect he’d like to see that copy.
- The Steven King Answer:
There are six questions about Rowling’s life as a reader, which surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. One has to hope that readers of theTimes‘Culture’ supplement and its bestsellers lists are a bookish lot, book store owners are in the audience certainly, so these questions are fan-servicing pieces — to which Rowling gives fun answers, almost all of which we have heard before (Dickens, Austen, even Joni Mitchell).
The answer that was the most challenging was in response to the question, “Is there a book you just can’t finish?”
No disrespect to Stephen King(in fact, it’s a compliment in many ways) but I couldn’t finish the advance copy ofLisey’s Storythat I was sent. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so I’ll just say I found one part so disturbing I put it down and never picked it up again.
Rowling had a very public break with King during the Genderist mob’s assault on her, when King bent the knee to the Zeitgeist and its punishing metanarrative. He subsequently claimed she had “cancelled” him for his heroic stance of total conformity with the online mob. This answer in The Times, then, could be an olive branch peace offering in public — or a knife in his back. It seems bizarre to imagine there is “one part” of Lisey’s Story, a book King describes as a personal favorite, that is “so disturbing” to her that she cannot finish it.
Rowling has written a lot of “violence against women” stories, some bordering, in her words, on “violence p*rn.” King stepped beyond those boundaries for her? Lake readers of Rowling’s work should take a serious look atLisey’s Story to see if there are potential life-fiction correspondences to which the very private Rowling has tipped her hand.
And, yes, watchThe Way We Were more than once — and hire a private detective to find her first true love as well as Mystery Michael and the reason for both of the break-ups.
- Caravaggio’sSupper at Emmaus
There were fourteen questions in Sunday’s Q&A; six were about reading, five involvedPhilosopher’s Stone, the book on the best-seller list, two were about music (first album purchased, first “gig” attended), and one was about art. That last was a curiosity, but in the way the question was asked and the readiness of her answer, both of which suggest it was a plant:
What’s the first piece of art you loved?
I visited the National Gallery on my own when I was around 19 or 20 and was absolutely mesmerised by Caravaggio’sSupper at Emmaus. I had a battered print of it on my wall for years afterwards and it featured on my first ever website.
I started writing up my thoughts on this, but it quickly became a tail wagging the dog of this post. I’ll discuss it tomorrow in a write-up of its own.
Conclusions
Outside of the Caravaggio confirmation and expansion of something she said first in 2001’sConversations with J. K. Rowling, I think this Q&A will soon be forgotten.
The Times should be ashamed of their deliberate attempt through the years to belittle the success ofHarry Potter,the success of which is self-evident in the Hogwarts Saga’s near invisibility on this anniversary tabulation.
Team Rowling should be delighted at its throw-back feel to a time when The Presence’s name didn’t automatically trigger online trolls and those in fealty to the madness of our historical period; it provided a break from if not the end of the “cyber-bullying” complaint’s command of media attention.
And the Royal Society of Rowling Readers? What did we get from the interview? Trivia worthy of a Lightning Round or Sudden Death in case of a tie, not much else.
Except, I think, for ‘The Supper at Emmaus,’ about which, more tomorrow!
