Deepak Chopra and Michael Moore

As mentioned below, several authors had more than one title on the list of most popular non-fiction titles last year. So we thought it might be instructive to lump all the non-fiction circulation by author, and see who the most popular authors were.

• Deepak Chopra
• Joanna Cole (she writes nonfiction series for small children)
• Michael Moore
• David Sedaris
• William Shakespeare
• Noam Chomsky
• His Holiness the Dalai Lama
• Joseph Campbell
• Seymour Simon (non-fiction books for older children)
• Wayne Dyer
• C. G. Jung
• Paul Theroux
• Stephen Ambrose
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Bill Bryson
• Al Franken

      There are several questions raised by this list. Non-Fiction is a very peculiar umbrella term. As used in our library, it means not-a-novel not-a-short-story. Novels and short stories on one side of the building, all the rest of human experience -- art, washing machine repair, humor, history, new age spirituality, horse training, everything -- on the other. Why should Shakespeare appear in the list above, instead of with all those authors of works of imagination in the fiction list? Should I have left Mozart out because he wrote music and not words? What about those children's non-fiction authors? What is this a list of, really?
      It seems likely that the most popular fiction authors here in Santa Fe differ only in detail from those elsewhere in the country. Probably Nora Roberts and Stan Berenstain rule everywhere. But does our taste in non-fiction have a Santa Fe flavor?