85 with a bullet

When my book, Tuesdays with Mantu, My Adventures with a Nigerian Con Artist, was first published I made a regular habit of checking its progress on the amazon.com sales chart. I'm told this is fairly common behavior among published authors.

I stopped checking in a long time ago, when I realized I wasn't going to be on Oprah. And no one in Hollywood ever planned to make a movie out of my book. Or even read it, for that matter.

But I went back recently and discovered my book had soared to number 85 on the charts, albeit in a very specific niche: Children's Educational Books/Citizenship. I don't know how it got grouped in this category, but it did. And though it is not very glamourous, it is in the top 100.

Naturally, I'm very happy to have beaten "A Hole in the World" (a euphemism for my career.)

But I'm equally steamed about trailing A Family Casebook: Problem Based Learning and Mindful Self Reflection.

Damn you Maria Napoli.

And your soaring prose about the fluid dynamics of teacher/student engagement via focused alpha-level introspection.

Damn you.