Pop Quiz: What does the new Top Ten list mean?
Nick Hornby, New Yorker, 20 August 2001
IN 1973, FOR AN ESSAY published in The New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal read his way through the Times best-seller list in an attempt to understand popular taste, trashing as he passed, among others, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Total word count of piece: 2831
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