The bestseller list for any year can be seen as a guide map into the lives of Taiwan’s citizens, reflecting what people feel they lack and what they are hoping to get.

If we summarize the bestseller lists from Taiwan’s two main brick-and-mortar bookstore chains, King­stone and Eslite, along with that of top online bookseller Books.com.tw, we find that the most startling development in 2014 was that domestic books outcompeted translated imports. But sadly, the titles responsible for this success were limited largely to one genre: self-help. Top books included Kevin Tsai’s ‘The Way of Speaking’ 2, The Science of Meditation, Get on the Pathway of Your Dreams—And Finish Even if You Are Crawling to the End, You Are the Starting Point for Change, The Power of White, Could It Be that You Happen to Love Me?, Second Course on Youth, and Ou­yang Qing’s Book of Running for Women.... These form a jigsaw puzzle of mass readership in 2014 dominated by themes of personal growth: speaking skills, love, youthfulness, dreams, and fitness.

The bestselling translated novel in 2014 was S, a pricey book that nonetheless sold 80,000 copies. It topped the Books.com.tw list, was named one of the year’s ten most influential books by King­stone, and was voted by bookstore staff to be their most recommended book. It is a work of fiction, yet it is much more than that, allowing it to be marketed from a variety of angles. A maze that puts all your brain cells to the test, it includes a complete novel, a separate mystery to be solved about the novel’s fictional author, 23 loose inserts, and “handwritten” margin notes detailing the efforts of two fictional students to solve the mystery. This novel wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a notebook challenges the very definition of a “book.”

The Miracle in the Grocery Store, by Japanese crime fiction giant ­Keigo Hi­ga­shino, which stayed on bestseller lists for a year and a half, turned “mystery” into “therapy,” and became virtually compulsory reading throughout Taiwan.

Many of the translated non-fiction books were also of the self-help variety. For example, How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships and Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds flew off the shelves. Considered along with Kevin Tsai’s ‘The Way of Speaking’ 2, their popularity demonstrated that many people in Taiwan worry that they don’t know how to express themselves, or can never think of anything witty to say.

The most surprising book of 2014 must be The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, which was published in English in 2006. A fiction book written for children and young adults, for years it just sat quietly in its own category. But then along came the Korean television drama series You Who Came from the Stars, in which the alien protagonist skims through the book at every opportunity, and overnight it turned into one of the hottest products on bookstore shelves.

Another late developer was Second Course on Youth, by Wang Yi­jia, first published four years ago. Wang has been writing for more than 40 years, but never had a bestseller. But in 2014 this work, which brings together stories told by 96 celebrities about their youths, rode the “coming of age” genre to the Top Ten.

Nobody can foretell the fate of a book. But often it is TV or movies that turn a bestseller into a megaseller. There are countless examples such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Fault in Our Stars, and many more. There is even a new repackaged movie tie-in version of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Indeed, even books that haven’t been in print for years can benefit from the TV bump. Mr. Right ­Wanted by Chen Yu­hui, which was turned into a popular TV series, was republished in a 25th-anniversary edition.

At one time novels and essays constituted most of the published works in Taiwan, and for a few years translated literature enjoyed halcyon days, with first printings of 30,000 copies. But times have changed. Today publishing companies avoid like the plague any translated novels that aren’t science fiction, fantasy, or mystery.

And the Mountains Echoed was one of the few works of mainstream literature to perform well in 2014. It is a novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of the bestselling The Kite Runner. But its success did not rub off on A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, whose cover declared it to be “a ­Chechen version of The Kite Runner.” Likewise, the enthusiasm with which people consumed Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love did not light a fire under her novel The Signature of All Things.

Internationally recognized works of literature that came out for the first time in Taiwan in 2014 also struggled to find readers. These included books like Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, written in 1942 by Bruno Schulz and considered one of Poland’s great literary treasures, Stoner by John Williams, first published in 1965, which became a worldwide phenomenon in recent years, Le village de l’allemand by Boualem Sansal, Apostoloff by Sibylle Lewitscharoff, and many others.

Books that got the “Nobel bump” did somewhat better. Although a Nobel literature prize does not boost sales as much as having a book made into a film or TV series, there is still some effect. This could be seen in Taiwan by the attention given to 2013 laureate Alice Monroe’s short stories (the collection Too Much Happiness was listed by the China Times as one of the best books newly published in Taiwan in 2014), and also to 2014 laureate Patrick Modiano’s novels, whose 2007 work Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue was published for the first time in Taiwan, and whose Rue des Boutiques obscures was reissued.

With the publication of his short story collection Onna no Inai Oto­ko­ta­chi, Ha­ruki Mu­ra­kami held his status as one of Taiwan’s most steadily popular authors.

It seems that the main marketing road for great works of yesteryear is to be retranslations or reinterpretations. 2014 marked the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, and Taiwan saw its first ever direct translation from the German of the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front. There was also a new traditional Chinese character edition of Doctor Zhivago translated directly from the Russian. Hemingway’s short story collection Men Without Women was repackaged as “an inspirational work for the younger generation.” Fourteen years after its initial publication in Taiwan, Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu came out in a newly edited and corrected boxed set. There were brand new translations of the dystopian classics Animal Farm, 1984, and We, and the death of Gabriel García Márquez prompted new printings of 100 Years of Solitude and The General in His Labyrinth.

But the real winners in 2014 were translated science fiction and fantasy. Riding the coattails of The Hunger Games and Wool (which launched the Silo series), The Martian became a huge seller. Then the three different publishers producing Shift (also part of the Silo series), The Great North Road, and Red Rising, adopted the innovative strategy of holding a joint sci-fi seminar to promote sales of this genre.

Perhaps the most original and meatiest of the new books published in 2014 was ­Huang Chong­kai’s Yellow Novel. It depicts the loneliness and anxiety felt by men in Taiwan today, and became the first book by a 1980s-born writer to win one of the prestigious literature prizes awarded by the China Times newspaper group.

Over 99% of books will be forgotten, but 2014 showed that some have tremendous staying power. Song of the Coffee Shop of Sadness, which has been on the market for 18 years, came out in a special commemorative edition marking the printing of its 500,000th copy. This puts it in the same class as Qian Jiang You Shui Qian Jiang Yue, which has been on the market for 33 years and reached 600,000 copies last year.

Yet even as sales of literature languished, 2014 gave us a gaggle of translated texts about the art of writing. The most representative was perhaps Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principle of Screenwriting, which came out in its original English in 1997. Others in this genre of teaching people the skills needed to create marketable scripts or stories included FilmCraft: Screenwriting and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It’s an invitation to the idea that these days there may be more people interested in writing fiction than in reading it!

Would you like to be witty and humorous? Kevin Tsai’s ‘The Way of Speaking’ 2 was one of a number of guides to public speaking and verbal communication that were popular in 2014.

Statistics from Books.com.tw show a sudden spike in sales of translated social science books in March and April of 2014. This was a direct result of the Sunflower student movement of that time, though one must also take into account the larger background in Taiwan of growing wealth disparities, class conflict, and generational injustice. One book in particular, The Dictator’s Learning Curve by William Dobson, published in January 2014, became virtually required reading for the student movement, and made it into the ranks of bestsellers. It was also named by King­­stone as one of the ten most influential books of the year.

A number of do­mest­ic­ally produced works drew attention to important social phenomena in Taiwan. The Sunflower move­ment led to the publication of numerous personal memoirs from, and analyses of, the activism itself. Other impactful non-fiction books included The Question of Truth: Politicization and De-Politicization in Documentaries, the first book published in Taiwan to systematically critique domestic documentary films, arguing that they all follow the same pattern of “sentimentalism about Taiwan” and end up as nothing more than self-serving media for the middle class. Lee Yuan-chen, a pioneer in Taiwan’s women’s movement, wrote the movement’s first comprehensive history, Women en Masse Make Up a Fortress. Twenty-five-year-old Wu ­Xiaole, rather than taking to the streets, took herself into people’s homes—more than 70 family households, in fact. Her Your Child Is Not Your Child, a depiction of the landscape of the Taiwanese family, overnight became recognized as a pioneering work in parent–child relationships.

Perhaps the student movement and the 2014 election were only temporary blips that caused an upsurge of interest in the social sciences, but there are deeper reasons why non-fiction has cut so deeply into a market once the exclusive domain of fiction. For one thing, there is a much greater variety of non-fiction available today, and the books are more down to earth and accessible. Standing on a foundation of the latest knowledge and real events, they take readers to places that fiction can never go.

For instance, a biologist observed a circle of forest only one meter in diameter and poetically wove observations and scientific information into the book The Forest Unseen. Written with a similar dollop of poeticism, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, combines natural science, a history of artificial lighting, and astronomy. The Sixth Extinction follows the evolutionary history of 13 representative life forms, while Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind poses the question: “When humans become gods, and are no longer answerable to anyone, where will we go from there?”

From the world of medicine, new books in 2014 included Listening to Pain by Scott Fishman, which is a discourse on physical pain by an author who is at once a medical doctor, a literature PhD, and a patient needing a bone marrow transplant. Another doctor produced God’s Hotel out of 1686 conversations with patients about life. In The Story of the Human Body, a scholar of evolution explains that today’s lower death rate has come at the price of higher rates of illness.

The international gay rights movement also added to the list of impactful non-fiction in Taiwan in 2014. Notable translated books included The Cross in the Closet, one man’s attempt to reconcile Christianity and homosexuality, and My Two Moms, a book drawing on the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage and of the different forms “family” can take.

Finally, conservationists and animal lovers also made important contributions to our reading lives. In The Unnatural History of the Sea, a marine biologist details how mankind has, over the past century or so, systematically stripped away the ocean resources nature gave to us, and crushed the rest underfoot. It has been described as “a history of human civilization’s self-destructiveness.” And Zero (originally in Japanese) relates the story of a Japanese city that worked to reach the goal of having zero cases of euthanasia of unwanted or abandoned animals.

Sailing on the sea of books published every year, is the bestseller list a beacon guiding you to treasure? Or an anchor keeping you stuck in one place? The photo shows the bestseller kiosk at the entrance to a major chain bookstore.

For Taiwanese, it was possible to go through all of 2014 without paying much attention to the Sunflower movement or giving a hoot about new Tai­pei mayor Ko Wen-je. But the scandals over tainted food products were a national disaster that touched everyone, and they inspired many people to enlist in the “food and beverage revolution,” sparking sales of related books. For example, 2014 saw explosive growth in all kinds of guides to food preparation, such as how to bake your own bread.

Writings about food and drink are not just about the pleasures of chowing down, diet, and updates about the latest and hippest ingredients and restaurants. How and what we eat symbolize mankind’s transition from our primitive natural beginnings to mature cultures. However, now that few of us grow our own food, we need to get behind the scenes to see what happens before food gets to the table or even to the kitchen—we need to get out into the land and understand how farmers operate. Also, we can draw on the field of “culinary studies” to understand the history of human nutrition and so to escape being the puppets of industrial food processors.

One especially interesting new translated book in 2014 was Cooked, whose subtitle reads “A Natural History of Transformation.” It talks about how our culinary cultures have changed nature, and how nature, through food, has changed humankind. This “alternative” guide to food and drink is a manifesto for a culinary renaissance, and teaches readers how to distinguish between “tongue taste” and “hand taste.”

And let’s not forget that there is even a “philosophy of food.” In The Virtues of the Table philosopher Julian Baggini, starting from the premise of not violating a lifestyle of the holistic self, embarks on a wide-ranging consideration of the meaning of “food.” In so doing he explores the relationships between humans and nature, humans and other animals, and humans and other humans.

In 2014 Taiwan made its own contributions to the food category of publishing, with Small Journeys in Country Dining, a cross-disciplinary mélange of travel writing, sentimental reflections on our land, and culinary research. The author visited farms, kitchens, and dining tables at 12 different locations, tracing cultural threads and discovering corners where you can still find authentic original flavors. We also had There is a Kind of Epicurianism Called “Righteous Determination,” a discourse on Taiwan’s “real food revolution,” built around the author’s visits with cultivators who treat the land with respect and food preparers who do everything lovingly by hand.

Have you read S yet? This novel wrapped in a mystery and dotted with “handwritten” notes—plus numerous loose documents stuck in between the pages—challenged the very definition of a “book,” and was rewarded by being Taiwan’s top-selling translated novel of 2014.

Another genre that deserves mention is stories written by individuals following the beat of their own drum. In 2014 these included My Tai­tung Dream, about a woman who migrated from cosmopolitan Tai­pei to rural Tai­tung County; While You Can Still Remember, about learning to care for a relative suffering from cognitive degeneration; and Before I Leave, thoughts on death.

For historians and cultural researchers, nothing is more important than filling in the missing gaps in our understanding of the land we all share. This task combines elements of hope, compensation for past oversights, and redemption. As old Taiwan disappears and a new generation takes the stage, these intellectuals are there to keep the outgoing world in the public eye.

One fascinating work of 2014, Island Pictures of the Floating World, built around documentary evidence, carries readers back to the era of Japanese rule in Taiwan (1895–1945). Another, Forgotten Taiwanese Youth of 1946, recreates a world, not so very long ago, when many young people from Taiwan—filled with idealism and a sense of mission—went to mainland China just after World War II to study, only to be trapped there by the Nationalist–Communist civil war, never to return home.

If you kept your 2014 reading car going until you hit the intersection of History and Geography, you would have found several other domestically written books that deserve to be read. In Misunderstood Old Place Names of Taiwan, the writer used contemporary materials, old maps and field research to dig up the background behind place names and tell many heretofore unknown stories. Three Hundred Years of the Zhuo­shui River is a study of history, society, and environmental change in the Zhuo­shui River Basin over the last three centuries. And The Liu­gong Water Channel is the first book-length treatment of the construction and historical evolution of the Liu­gong channel, once a critical hydro-lifeline for Tai­pei City, which today has been literally paved over. (It still runs beneath Xin­sheng North and South Roads.)

Photographer Qiu ­Deyun spent four years in farming villages photographing all kinds of abandoned implements and utensils, testifying to Taiwan’s declining rural population and disappearing rural traditions. Reportage author Chen Shu-hua spent two years with Qiu making notes and writing text to accompany the photos. The result was Wind Blows and Sun Shines: Taiwan’s Rural Villages. Sadly, Qiu passed away before the book came out.

In periods of dramatic change, the lives of individuals, as Bogart said, “don’t amount to a hill of beans,” and such eras result in countless stories of loss and separation. Our tears from the play A Village in Formosa (about uprooted mainland Chinese living in military dependents’ communities in Taiwan after WWII) having just recently dried, in 2014 we heard the sad stories of the Wan­sei—Japanese born in Taiwan during the era of Japanese rule who, though they considered Taiwan their home, were forced to return to Japan after WWII. Over the course of 13 years, Wan­sei descendant Mika Ta­naka visited 200 Taiwan-born Japanese exiled to Japan, resulting in the book (written in Chinese) Wan­sei Go Home.

Scandals over unsafe food products sparked a “real food revolution” in Taiwan in 2014, and this was reflected in the publishing industry as well. One of the most popular entrées, Small Journeys in Country Dining, combines ingredients from travel writing, sentimental nativism, and culinary research.

Let’s slip back to the present.

One of the most interesting publishing phenomena of last year was the explosion of books about Tai­nan. This may be a result of the exhausting pace of modern life, which evokes a nostalgic desire to visit a smaller, historic city that moves at a slower pace. At least 20 books on Tai­nan were published last year, depicting the city from a wide variety of angles. From this you could conclude that in this city there is buried something that the people of Taiwan have lost.

Here in 2015, as the Lunar New Year approaches, Books.com.tw has launched a campaign to “Close your Facebook and open up a real book!”

Oddly enough, even as social media cuts into time once used for perusing the printed word, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made “read one real book every two weeks” one of his resolutions for 2015, hoping to learn more about different cultures, faiths, histories, and technologies.

Technology makes it possible to speed your life up, which is fine, but if you want real pleasure, you won’t find it in gadgets, but in sitting quietly and reading a good book.