This is a companion piece to “The Magazines of Wal-Mart.”  In that post (and now in this post) I put on my amateur anthropologist hat and explored the range of reading materials made available to consumers by America’s largest retailer. 

I traveled to a Wal-Mart superstore yesteday to check out the types of books for sale.  Why?  Because Wal-Mart serves as a culture filter to the many people who don’t take the extra effort to shop for books at bona fide book stores.  For those people who select their books from the limited offerings of Wal-Mart, here is the full range of written materials with which they are fertilizing their minds.  Here is how they prepare their minds to deal with important things such as parenthood, justice, the practices of other cultures, the meaning of life and how to vote. 

The book section of the St. Louis area Wal-Mart I visited consists of five large sections of shelves.  The three inside sections consist entirely of fiction; most of those titles are romance novels.  Here are some of the fiction titles you can buy at Wal-Mart:

Such fiction works constitute 60% of the titles made available by Wal-Mart. 

If you are one of those people who wants to buy a “Best Seller,” you would need to check out the first section of book shelves (the left-most). But don’t expect to see any of the following books, each of which is currently ranked within the top 15 books on the …