The last time we canvassed some of our region’s s booksellers to see what their popular titles were, it was just a few months after the 2016 election. We were early into the mayhem that has taken us to current, current events. Back those years ago, copies of the U.S. Constitution were flying off the shelves. Political books were selling like mad, as were nonfiction titles that purported to help us manage the turbulence of the times. (Did they help, we wonder?)

This year, the regional bestsellers don’t lead to such an obvious theme, except, say the booksellers: People are tired of the political books. Fiction — all genres — is most of what we’re reading. “People are looking for community and comfort,” says Sharon Weinberg, owner of The Chatham Bookstore. And comfort is not what you’ll find much of in all those books about the Trump presidency.

One of the top fiction sellers at House of Books in Kent, Connecticut is To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara, says Katharine Otis, the store’s marketing and events coordinator. The Anomaly, a novel by Hervé Le Tellier, recently translated from the original French, is a thriller House of Books can’t keep on its shelves.(It’s sold over a million copies in France.) Local authors’ books are selling well: Amy Peoppel’s Musical Chairs is fun, light and whimsical, and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends speaks to our rural sensibility. “It’s a lot of escapism, having fun through reading,” Otis says.

The same is true in Berkshire County. “We’re not selling so much political stuff anymore,” reports Matt Tannenbaum of The Bookstore in Lenox. But when a customer comes in wanting a nonfiction title, it’s usually related to what’s in the news at the moment. For instance, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid is not a new book, but Tannenbaum had a copy on hand for this moment in time when a customer asked for it. And sales of Maus, the Holocaust graphic novel that was recently removed from classrooms in Tennessee, have picked up. One runaway hit at The Bookstore is The Dawn of Everything by David Graber, which is, according to Amazon,  is “A dramatically new understanding of human history.” With close to 30 copies leaving the store, it would seem that readers are yearning to understand humanity, if that’s possible. And if they’re not going for fiction off the New York Times Best Sellers list, they’re enjoying memoirs by Stanley Tucci, (Searching for Italy), David Sedaris (A Carnival of Snackery) and Mel Brooks (All About Me ).

“People are not reading those Trump books,” says The Chatham Bookstore’s Weinberg. If they’re reading anything political at all, it would be U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin’s  Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, and The 1619 Project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones for the New York Times Magazine. Columbia County readers love Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake, as well as Robin Walkimer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. “Around here, readers are into nature and connectedness," Weinberg says. “There’s so much anxiety about climate change and how we can live comfortably in the world without destroying it.”

Over at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck and Millerton, readers are “pretty exhausted by all the politics,” echoes owner Suzanna Hermans. Those books about racism and white privilege following the Black Lives Matter protests have pivoted into anti-racism fiction, and there are many popular books by people of color: Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez came out just a month ago and is already selling well. So is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry, which was released on January 25 and sold right away. Then there is Amanda Gorman’s new collection of poetry, Call Us What We Carry, a popular new release that was mentioned by several of our booksellers. As far as fiction sales, the romance, horror and sci-fi genres are doing better than normal. “People are looking for escapism, levity and joy in their reading,” says Hermans.

So, go bliss out in your reading nook...with, please, a book you’ve purchased from your local bookseller in the Rural Intelligence region.

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