Celebrities and Bestsellers

I noticed on a recent list of NY Times bestsellers (they publish the list in the Sunday Star-Telegram) that most of the books are simply celebrity crap.  OK, I haven't read them, so I don't know that they're all crap, but here's the run-down, from the May 22 hardcover non-fiction list:

1. TV star memoir
2. rock star memoir
3. movie star memoir
4. TV star memoir
5. poems collected by a Kennedy
6. country singer memoir
7. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
8. biography of Barack Obama's mother
9. Navy Seal book
10. TV star memoir
11. football coach memoir
12. Starbucks CEO business book
13. movie star memoir
14. The Social Animal, by David Brooks
15. TV star book
16. movie star memoir

Nine of the top 16 are these celebrity books, 10 if you include the football coach.  Plus, BO's mom is a person of little consequence, and, even though some great, famous poems are collected in the Kennedy book, would anyone care if they were collected by, say, an English lit prof who doesn't come from a famous political family?  Unbroken is a great book (I reviewed it here), I'm sure the Starbucks CEO has some interesting things to say, and Brooks's book sounds pretty legit.  A Navy Seal book may not be great literature, but it's probably an interesting perspective on their role in the U.S. military, especially given their role in the raid to kill Bin Laden (which was quite a distance from any navigable body of water. . . .hmmm . . . ).

So what's my point in all this?  I don't know that I have one, except it bothers me that 75% of the NYT bestseller list, the thermometer of American literary culture, is a bunch of garbage.  I guess I'm used to the fiction list being a mix of movie tie-ins, pulp fiction, and good literature.  But these "books" that make it onto the non-fiction list bother me.

I was prompted to write this by a Star-Telegram article this morning (here's the link to the NYT version) that discussed upcoming novels by the Kardashian sisters, Snooki (from some reality show), and some other people who are famous for being famous.  It's a funny article, especially when the air-headed celebrity "authors" talk about the rigors of writing, then, as it turns out, have a ghost writer doing the real work.

Speaking of writing garbage, maybe that's what I'm writing with this little rant.  I just hope the future of a literate United States doesn't rest exclusively on the shoulders of Snooki, Shania Twain, and the Kardashians.