I just finished Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. In it, there are at least 5 different times across at least 7 narrators, but every single one is written in present tense. Recently I’ve noticed a lot more books than usual in present tense, so I wondered if this was just a coincidence, or if there really has been a rise.

It turns out that I’m not the only one who has noticed this. But so far as I can tell, no one has actually attempted to quantify it. Has it actually increased? By how much? I didn't find any real data.

So I tried to found out for myself! The basic methodology was:

1. Fetch the top N NYT Hardcover Fiction bestsellers by time on list in a given year using the NYT Books API

2. Grab Goodreads Quotes for those books by crawling the site (sorry Goodreads, but I had no other automatic source of book content)

3. Have Claude/GPT (Sonnet 5/Terra) take those quotes and classify a narrative tense for the book.

For this market, we're focusing specifically on 2020-2026, the top 20 books within each year.

This market resolves to the bucket that contains the % of books with their base event narration in the present tense, rounded to the nearest integer. That means the core story of the book is written in the present tense ("Jane walks to the store"), not past ("Jane walked to the store"). For example, if 80/120 of the books are present tense, resolves to 51-100%.

I've done my best to filter out prologues, narrative asides, flashbacks, interior monologues, paratext, etc. I don't guarantee that every book label is perfect.

As a (potentially misleading) hint, here's a historical sample from 1931 to 1995.