I have a confession to make. I read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I enjoyed it.

I didn't plan on reading it. But Steve (yes, I blame him) downloaded a sample of The Lost Symbol on the Kindle, got hooked, bought the rest of the book and read the whole thing. That really surprised me, so I took a look at it too and also got hooked.

It wasn't the best book I've ever read, the writing was not stellar, but it was well-paced and, like the best pulp stories, it kept me wanting to know what happened next. I could make the same comments about Gone With the Wind, which I re-read this year for the first time in forty years. GWTW was the bestselling book in America for both 1936 and 1937. I liked it when I first read it and I liked it just as much this time as I did when I was twelve.

This unexpected excursion into the bestseller list got me thinking. We recently watched a DVD course from The Teaching Company called Great American Bestsellers. It covered bestsellers in this country from Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in 1776, right up to Stephen King, John Grisham, and yes, Dan Brown. It was a fascinating series of lectures, even the ones about snoozers like The Last of the Mohicans.

Maybe it's time I gave the bestseller lists a closer look.

Normally, in choosing books, I flail about, randomly selecting the most attractive covers or intriguing titles, turning up my nose at the “popular” books. What is this, high school? Maybe those books are popular because...people like them? Is it possible that sheer snobbery is keeping me from enjoying the books the rest of America is reading?

So for the New Year, I intend to read NOTHING BUT bestsellers.

I'm not sure exactly how I'll go about it. I could limit my reading to choices from The New York Times Best Seller Lists, of which there are eleven (hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, trade paperback fiction, mass market paperback fiction, paperback nonfiction, hardcover advice, paperback advice, graphic books, children's books, hardcover business, paperback business). In the course of a year, there are roughly 2,000 books on all the New York Times lists. That would provide a wide choice of popular, successful books.

Or I could limit myself to reading only the books at Wal*Mart or Costco. Some people are saying that once the bookstores have all gone out of business, big box discounters will be the only place to get books. I could get a taste of the future. I don't known how long I could last on the Wal*Mart diet though. I wandered through their book aisle today and found it to have a fair number of titles, but the number of categories was quite limited: Religion, Romance, Teen, Fiction, Biography (Palin, Huckabee, Beck).

Maybe I'll just read Oprah's picks.

I'm open to suggestions. There's still a month to go before I start on my new reading program. Will this be the start of a mind-expanding experience that changes my life? Or will this be a brain-sapping nightmare from which there is No Return?