Well, I've never read it, so it can't be that good.

According to askyahoo.com, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is the best-selling novel of all time. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. The authorship is lovely here. God (or a group of historians with a motive, depending on how you see it). A hack fiction writer borrowing heavily from other sources (or a historian with a motive, depending on how you see it).

Catholicism and Catholic subversion. Interesting, our mental dichotomies. Or rather, our shifting sensibilities over time, because it is probably worth noting the periods of most intense sales for these books. The Bible has had most of literary history to achieve top-dog status; Brown's novel does not come close to eclipsing the Bible, but it reached the top of its genre in a matter of months. And I wonder what the drop-off in Bible sales looks like over the last 100 years--because I'm sure there's been one.

I'd like to see the stats for the number of households currently in possession of a copy of each of the two books. And then again for the number of each sold copy that has actually been read.

I guess it's no surprise--what with population blooms, mega-mass-production, and globalization ushering in an age of international trends and zero-cost translation--that current pop culture would overtake the sales of even the most widely-read classics. 100 years of teachers assigning Crime and Punishment cannot compete with a global feeding frenzy in 2004. So I would postulate that record-holding power is lessening. Look at other fields. It seems every Olympic year, yet more records are broken. We are a culture obsessed with being the best, and since there are about a billion more of us every decade, there's increasing likelihood that the best will soon be bested. How long it takes someone to swim the 100m freestyle is a fairly objective measure of greatness. The best are getting better, even if only by hundredths of a second. But book sales? Consumption quite obviously does not equal quality. In fact, this may be an unfortunately universal axiom.

If the reign of the best-selling novel or the highest-grossing film shrinks with each incarnation, I have to wonder also about the trend in the quality of the champs.

Is the Bible's record going to fall to a tell-all by Colin Powell?