Just when you thought the whole Wetlands buzz had died down a bit - although it's still holding on strong at the top of the hardback fiction charts over here - the Guardian books blog has a new fluffy little piece about bestsellers and the state of the nation.
You know the score - the Japanese want Marxist classics, the Americans want spiritual guidance, the Brits want Americans or celebs, and the Germans want anal sex. Harrumph. But considering the book has been top of the pops for the past five months and is now in its eighteenth edition (since March!), there just might be something in it. And it seems to have leaped the generation gap now too - a friend told me about her father-in-law, a retired dentist, reading it, and there have been documented sightings of old bids purchasing the pink monstrosity. Although I think the idea that that's shocking says more about how we see older women than anything else...
The Guardian's Philip Stone also links to a rather explicit Wikipedia entry on Wetlands. All I can say is, if you're thinking of reading the book at some point you might want to avoid this link. It's one huge spoiler-fest of an entry.
The problem with the logic of Stone's argument, of course, is that the rights have been sold to 24 countries, which would indicate that interest in anal sex and anti-hygiene is pretty uinversal - or at least that publishers the world over hope it is.
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