In the recent US election, Republican leader Donald Trump secured a win against democrat leader Kamala Harris, and to understand the reaction of the public, one need only look at the book bestseller charts. With CNN reporting a 6,866% increase in sales of The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Independent claiming that Solnit’s collection of essays ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ has climbed 40,000 places, it’s impossible to ignore this hardly coincidental surge. It is not hard to draw a connection between the debate surrounding women’s reproductive rights, which took a prominent place in the presidential election campaigns, and Atwood’s dystopian universe in The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems that the discourse surrounding Roe v. Wade has led many people to fear that America will become a dystopian reality under Trump’s government, with women’s reproductive rights stripped away. Other fears manifest in the resurgence in popularity of other dystopian texts, such as Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.
Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny has also experienced a huge resurgence. Even before the election, Synder encouraged readers of his Substack newsletter to fight for the preservation of democracy and the rule of law. It seems that these ideas are fresh in people’s minds as they scramble to read Snyder’s book, which discusses how to resist authoritarian regimes.
However, while news outlets are quick to report on the fear evident within the increased popularity of certain books, there is another side to the story. Former first lady Melania Trump’s memoir entitled Melania has enjoyed a comfortably high position in the charts, as well as vice-president JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. The popularity of such books shows that it is not all fear and despair, but hope as well. Clearly, both peoples’ votes and their choice of books demonstrate a rift in opinion in the US – some look to the future with hopeful prospects for the next four years, while others fear a dystopian fiction becoming a reality, only time will tell which reality will come to pass.
“The Handmaid’s Tale | Fujica ST801” by Bernt Sønvisen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.