Paulo Coelho, the elfin guru of a novelist who unleashed The Alchemist on the world, is at No. 2 on this week's hardcover list with a new novel, Manuscript Found in Accra - although a more forthright title might be Manuscript Found on Social Media, since Coelho assembled the book after soliciting ideas from his 6.3 million Twitter followers. The resulting volume of ponderous cliches will surprise nobody familiar with Coelho, or Twitter.
As Stuart Jeffries reported in a recent profile for The Guardian, Coelho "actually does write stuff like this: 'It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all' and 'Don't give up. Remember it's always the last key on the ring that opens the door.' " Jeffries went on to say: "Those of you who may so far have resisted the endorsements of Madonna, Julia Roberts or Bill Clinton may now be tempted to read him if only to test the proposition that Paulo Coelho exists to make Alain de Botton look deep." Judging from the rest of the profile, though, Coelho is less self-serious than you'd expect. When a cardiologist told him in 2011 that a heart blockage could kill him within 30 days, he took the news in stride. "I remember I was in my bedroom and I said: If I die tomorrow, I would die very happy. First, I did everything I wanted to do in this life - sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. You name it I did it. Orgies and whatever." Orgies? Jeffries asked. "Oh yes," Coelho replied. "Orgies. Ha ha ha!"
The Swagger And The Sweet: The subject of the novel All You Could Ask For, new at No. 17 on the extended hardcover list, is pretty standard fare for a best-selling tear-jerker: three women bond through an online support group for breast cancer patients. Less standard is the author: Mike Greenberg, known to sports fans everywhere as "Greeny" from the ESPN talk show "Mike and Mike in the Morning." Interviewing Greenberg for CBS News recently, Gayle King introduced him as a "guy's guy" and expressed surprise that the novel "reads like it was written by a woman." ("Look at even the girlie cover," she gushed.) But does it? On the first page a character sings the praises of her own butt - like no woman I've ever known - and 70 pages later, another character considers taking a lover after discovering her new husband's affair: "Maybe he wouldn't be quite so hard in all the places Robert was, maybe he wouldn't be so hairy, either. Maybe he'd have smooth skin, like that of a woman, and it would be soft against mine." Hmm. Maybe. If it's disconcerting to hear Greeny telling us what women want, well, it's no worse than a lot of pop fiction, and it's for a good cause: Greenberg was inspired to write the novel after a family friend died of breast cancer, and he's announced he'll donate all proceeds from the book to cancer research.
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