Greetings from charred California. As I write this, we’re still in flames and it’s difficult for most Californians to focus on the things that just yesterday seemed so important. The air has been brown and thick, the sun like a spot of blood through the haze. We can’t help thinking of the thousands who have lost their homes and businesses - we pray and do what we can to help. Out my window now a soft rain falls and we celebrate this blessing.

I’ve been doing bookstore readings and signings of my new novel, I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO, and if I were to see it on the New York Times Best Seller list, it’s blurb would read, "Growing up in America in the 50’s, a young Italian girl struggles to keep her family and world together."

Good enough?

A bestseller list first appeared in the U.S. in 1895, over a hundred years ago. Even then purists groused that literature in that day was a trade. "The successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets," claimed New Grub Street. (Yet another denial of the notion that higher education among the masses has made us a more sophisticated nation of thinkers.)

The British literary establishment held out against publishing bestseller lists until 1974, maintaining they would not fall prey to the American obsession with sales as a measure of a book’s worth. It rejected the idea that if a book was popular, it must in some sense be important.

I want to share with you an article from the London Observer this past summer about bestseller lists. Journalist and writer, Tim Adams, read every novel in the top 10 list to come up with conclusions about why they made it to the top and what it says about the reading public. He said they all came to seem a little like chapters in the same story. Here are some of his tallies: of 3,891 pages he found 54 murders (throats cut: 17); orgasms: 24 (simultaneous: 8); central women characters who did not talk about needing a man: 0; pistol whippings: 5; uses of the phrase 'all hell broke loose': 2; uses of the phrase ‘you do the math’: 4; times he went to sleep halfway through a paragraph describing the night sky: 2; times he laughed out loud when supposed to: 0; and times he smiled at an authorial joke: 4. Seven out of the 10 books on this British list feature a key element of their plotting the abduction, murder, rape or torture of a young child.

Gore Vidal did this exercise 30 years ago in the New York Review of Books to show how literary culture had become infected by the visual culture of television and film, and how reading the ten bestsellers was like "staggering from one half remembered movie scene to another."

There is a theory that there are only half a dozen or so plot line available to any aspiring writer. If bestselling books are all about escape, about taking us quickly to lives which are more extreme or more glamorous than our own, it seems the places we most want to inhabit are those that we most fear.

We look at what’s in and what’s out by the commercial bestseller lists. (At the same time, we might find it interesting that literary editors mainly review only literary books when bestsller lists indicate readers are more eager to read the often poorly written commercial books.)

Book sales and bestseller lists tell us the novel is declining. The novel has been pronounced dead many times, however. In 1936 George Orwell said, "The novel is likely, if the best brains cannot be induced to return to it, will survive in some perfunctory, despised and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tombstones ..."

Norman Mailer gives this advice: "Writing a bestseller with conscious intent to do so is a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover the absence of love more on onerous than anticipated." He says a properly commercial book cannot be faked. It’s always simply the best book that the author is capable of writing at that time.

Tim Adams concluded his bestseller reading exercise with a favorite sentence: "I’m not going on another mission, no matter what happens ..."

We can hear a huge sigh of relief.

Still, would any of us regret finding a place on the Best Seller lists? Let's continue this discussion next time. Let me hear your thoughts.

And be sure to check the other updates on this website.

I love autumn. I live In southern California now so I don’t see the trees celebrate their leaves, or the mellowing of the world preparing for winter, and the air isn’t that wonderful crisp air with a nip to it like I grew up with in Minnesota. But still, it’s autumn and I love it. October has forever been my favorite month no matter where I am. Happily, I’ll be returning to Minnesota this autumn for book signings and I’ll experience family and friends, and maybe even the feel of alpaca against my skin.

Today when I walked along the beach, the surf lopped against the beach like popcorn, lumpy white stuff piled up on the sand, and I thought of my character ChiChi, in I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO, who had never seen a lake or the country until she was in her twenties (it happens in the next book). I didn’t see the ocean until I was in my thirties, and I wonder if ChiChi ever will. Guess I’ll have to wait to find out.

Franz Kafka once told a friend, One reads in order to ask questions,” and I find that very true of writing, too. I find myself asking a question on almost every page. The great master of the question, in my opinion, is Dostoevski. I love the painting, "A Reader of Dostoevski" by Emil Fila. Take a look at it here, the poor reader has fallen into a trance! His hand has gone grey. He’s out of it! Kafka also said that he believed "... we ought to read only books that bite and sting us." He thought a book should shake us awake like a blow on the skull. I agree and I don’t. If I want to get shaken awake and bludgeoned on the skull, I’ll listen to CNN. If I want to be touched and moved, perhaps even enlightened or made to be glad I’m alive, I’ll choose a book with care.

George Eliot, who was Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolen in "The Importance of Being Earnest." said she never travelled without her diary because "one should always have something sensational to read in the train." (Now that’s inspiring, isn’t it?)

Let us hope what our characters do in our books and where our poems take us are sensational. Ernest Hemingway, at the end of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," has his dying character reflect on all the stories he will now never write. "He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?"

Ouch.

So let us be encouraged this glorious autumn to snuggle up with new books to read and write. I’d say there are at least a hundred million good stories out there.

Before I sign off, I wanted to let you know I finished Book Two of the I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO trilogy and my agent has hied it off to the publisher and so I'll know what a projected publication date will be. This second book was two years in the writing.

I also must thank you for your wonderful letters and e mails! I love hearing from you, and love receiving your responses to I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO (check out "Having Your Say"). A big thank you to the bookstores who are featuring the book in their stores. Be sure to check the links on this site for my new autumn offer and also my itinerary as it builds. I would love to see you at the readings!

Also, DO submit your poems to ROADSPOETRY, the online poetry journal for our next issue. We had good response to our inaugural issue. Check it out! ROADSPOETRY.COM.

Also, by the time this posts, my "Tomato" website should be up, MarieGiordano.com. I'll look for you there!