This Week's Bestsellers: August 10, 2015

Seuss Hops on Top

After two weeks as the #1 book in the country, Harper Lee’s Go Get a Watchman has been unseated by another newly published book written decades ago: What Pet Should I Get? by Dr. Seuss, which sold 171K print units last week. That means that What Pet, based on a single week’s worth of sales, is already the seventh-bestselling Dr. Seuss title of 2015—no mean feat for an author with numerous books that consistently show annual unit sales in the six-digit range. Here, we look at how What Pet’s sales measure up against this year’s other top-performing Seuss books, aka the ones to beat.

Print Unit Sales, Year-to-Date

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Reading Circle

With 13.5K print units sold, Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun, a fictionalized take on 1920s aviator Beryl Markham, lands at the #3 spot on our Hardcover Fiction list. McLain is making a name for herself in historical fiction; her 2011 novel The Paris Wife also examined the 1920s, looking at the decade through the fictionalized lens of Hadley Richardson, the first Mrs. Ernest Hemingway. The Paris Wife sold 305.7K units in hardcover and nearly 431K units in paperback, and though it did well right out of the gate, first-week hardcover sales were only a little more than half of Circling the Sun’s 7,332 units.

Call It a Comeback

Returning to our Hardcover Fiction list at #24, with 2,137 print units sold, is the May release My Fight/Your Fight by UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey. It’s been seven weeks since the book did that well (in the week ended June 14, with 2,361 units), which may have something to do with Rousey’s recent high-profile performance: at a bout in Rio de Janeiro on August 1, she knocked out challenger Bethe Correia in just 34 seconds.

Another not-brand-new title, How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims, which was published on June 9, debuts on our Hardcover Nonfiction list this week at #22. It sold 2,371 print units, its best week yet. In her book, Lythcott-Haimes, former dean of freshman at Stanford University, makes the case against helicopter parenting, a case that those who are preparing to send kids off to college in a few weeks may find welcome.

Top 10 Overall