Read between the lines

After being crowned for several wrong things, here comes a breather for the national capital. It seems that the Delhiites are among the most well-read individuals across the nation. According to an Amazon survey, Delhi NCR is the most well-read city in India, followed by Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. The ranking was determined by compiling sales data of all the physical books sold during the course of the year 2014.

Colaba Conspiracy by Surendra Mohan Pathak, a Hindi book was voted as the most popular book of 2014 in a reader’s poll. Sorry, You’re Not My Type by Sudeep Nagarkar, When Only love Remains by Durjoy Dutta, Half Girlfriend by Chetan Bhagat and Your Dreams Are Mine Now by Ravinder Singh came in top five subsequent positions. Books lovers from across the country were invited to vote for their favourite books under six different genres: Indian writing, biographies, literature and fiction, children’s and young adult, business and economics and politics and history.

The other interesting findings of the poll result as compared with bestsellers in the same genre were as follows:

• And Then One Day: A Memoir by Naseeruddin Shah got the maximum votes in the biographies category, whereas the highest sales were for Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing it my way.
• In business books, the most popular book was another Indian book, Rokda: How Baniyas Do Business whereas the highest selling books were The Small Big by Steve Martin and How Google Works by Eric Schmidt.
• Politics being a hot genre this year with lots of hi-profile books, saw the highest votes for The Accidental Prime Minister by Sanjay Baru (the tell-all book on the Congress regime) and Not Just an Accountant by Vinod Rai (first-hand account of 11th CAG of India on several corruption scams like 2G, coalgate, civil aviation et al).
• In children and young adult category, the top votes were for The Fault in our Stars, Blood of Olympus and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The long Haul.