A reading of Las Vegas’ intellect

By Brendan Buhler (contact)

Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Las Vegas, the old truism and sometime political talking point says, is at the bottom of every good list and at the top of every bad one. But what about the lists we keep for ourselves?

To take one instance, what about a list of the most popular 15 fiction books checked out from the Clark County Library District last month? What does that say?

A third of the time, it says, “By Patterson, James.”

Oh, sweet Xenu, what does that say about us?

“Yes, there sure is a lot by James Patterson,” said Robb Morss, the library’s deputy director of public services. “But, you know, good for him.”

Maybe, although Patterson, a former advertising executive, would probably prefer to sell them.

Patterson dapples The New York Times best-seller list with novels like a starling decorating the side of a building. To say his books are bad is to, like Patterson, ignore the descriptive possibilities of the English language. The books are bad the way the sun is yellow: They are massive radioactive balls of flaming badness. They are literally, no exaggeration, honest-to-goodness, worse than “The Da Vinci Code.”

Take this scene of arson and homicide from “7th Heaven” (No. 6 in Clark County):

“Henry Jablonsky’s mind scrambled. What? What was happening? And then he realized. He could speak! He screamed ‘Pegg-yyyyy’ as the Christmas tree bloomed with a bright yellow glare, then went up in a great exhalation of flame.

“VOOOOOOM.”

Yes, the tree went “voooooom.”

As for “Sundays at Tiffany’s” (No. 2 in Clark County), a plot summary will do: A little girl loses her imaginary friend, but as an adult, she meets him and he’s real. They fall in love.

Now, a list of libraries’ most popular books usually looks like a New York Times best-seller list, but ours looks worse. Only two of our top 15 were Times best-sellers in July.

We checked around in similar-sized cities.

In Sacramento, the list starts the same as ours, with “Fearless Fourteen,” the latest mystery farce from Janet Evanovich, who can write. And then, oh dear, at No. 2, is James Patterson with “Sail,” No. 3 in Clark County. But that’s the only time he shows up.

In Kansas City, Mo., Patterson takes up four slots out of the top 15, which is too many, but still less than our five.

So why so much Patterson in Las Vegas? The library won’t guess, but perhaps a suggestion of an answer can be found on another list, the list of Clark County’s 15 most popular nonfiction books.

No. 1 is Barbara Walter’s memoir, which is popular everywhere.

No. 2 is “Master the GED.”

Right.

So we’re back to the other lists, the bad ones.

Compared with Sacramento and Kansas City, a lower percentage of Las Vegans have graduated from high school and a much lower percentage have graduated from college.

Is there any good way to look at this, James Patterson and all?

“Well,” Morss said about Patterson, “people are reading and that’s a good thing.”