Entertainment

03:10 PM CST on Sunday, December 25, 2005

By JEROME WEEKS / The Dallas Morning News

This was the year the publishing industry created the Quill Awards so they'd get a book prize ceremony onto American TV (just as the Man Booker Prize is televised in England). That way, they'd fire up more interest in books. It's all about literacy, not profits.

Right. No one cared anyway. In the first place, the awards were popularity contests (winners: J.K. Rowling, Stephen King – those overlooked dears). Second, so few voters went to the Quill site that the trackers of Web traffic couldn't even add up an accurate number.

No wonder blogospheroids still crow over the book's imminent demise – as if in revenge for ever having to read one. Meanwhile, publishers are text-messaging teens to sell books. They're experimenting with "viral" Web campaigns, Google set up its Print Library, Amazon will soon sell books by the page and the number of litblogs has ballooned, all of them chattering on about books.

All of this looks less like the last, frantic efforts of a dying trade and more like our future of "multiplatform delivery systems."

So go open that book Mom bought for you – it's under the tree next to the Xbox.

New brand of nonfiction has readers thinking and debating

Since Sept. 11, it's been a fact of life for the publishing industry. Nonfiction rules. When the Twin Towers' dust settled, people started looking for answers. While industry profits since 2000 have been sagging, concerns about war and politics, religion and history have churned up book sales in those areas – even for personal or polemical reflections about America (Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values, Patrick Buchanan's A Republic, Not an Empire).

But this year, a new wrinkle in nonfiction appeared, perhaps best marked by the moment in late January when Malcolm Gladwell had Blink on the hardcover best-seller lists and The Tipping Point on the paperback lists. A few months later, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics and Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat both hit.

These are not the usual, easily pegged best-sellers: diet advice, business memoirs, pop psychology and partisan sniping. Instead, these take a cross-disciplinary, sometimes counterintuitive approach to their topics. At the same time, as off-kilter as they might seem initially, their ideas and terminology have been quickly picked up in the public lexicon.

In Freakonomics, for example, Steven Levitt looks for the real (often hidden) profit incentives for people in everyday situations by asking oddball questions – like, why do so many drug dealers live with their moms? It turns out that many gangs have a corporate structure that ensures the leaders get the big bucks while the average street dealer is actually earning minimum wage or lower.

Or Blink – with its defense of snap judgments. Mr. Gladwell includes warnings about how ads can shape our first impressions or fear can cause us to leap to wrong conclusions. But he moves easily among such fields as art history, law enforcement and psychology to examine how "gut instinct" or intuition actually works and can be taught through such disciplines as facial reading.

The authors' arguments can certainly be questioned, and their sometimes obvious conclusions have been unnecessarily ballyhooed (anyone recall similar, puffed-up, pop sociology like The Greening of America or Future Shock?). In The World Is Flat, Mr. Friedman is so busy championing globalism and digitalization and sounding the alarm that America is slipping behind that he discounts any grim downsides to his eagerly anticipated future.

Meanwhile, the most infamous example in Freakonomics – crime has gone down because poor women or potentially bad mothers got abortions – has already been picked apart.

But dismissing or reducing these works to formulas can do them an injustice. Most best-sellers make the list by reinforcing readers' ideas. These can stimulate fresh thinking – a welcome outcome, even if it's in disagreement.

E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com

On Beauty

(Penguin Press, $25.95) by Zadie Smith.

The author of White Teeth updates E.M. Forster's Howards End . Dad's a British adulterer and art historian, mom's an African-American medical worker, and their son's in love with the daughter of dad's fat-cat, conservative enemy. Ms. Smith slips up on American teens, but she brings such warmth and humor to racial-cultural-sexual tensions, they're a joy to read about.

The March

(Random House, $25.95) by E. L. Doctorow.

Ragtime on a rampage. Modern America is born violently on the March to the Sea as freed blacks, traumatized Southerners, Gen. Sherman and Abraham Lincoln himself must contend with what the Civil War has unleashed.

Kafka on the Shore

(Knopf, $25.95) by Haruki Murakami.

Not as fine as his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but still wonderfully odd. Young Kafka runs away to foil an Oedipal prophecy and has sex with a ghost, while the aged Nakata talks to cats and kills Johnny Walker (yes, the whiskey icon). Leaves magical realism utterly behind for a quiet contemplation of dreams and death. Runner-up: Never Let Me Go (Knopf, $24) by Kazuo Ishiguro. Sad, beautifully restrained fantasy by the author of Remains of the Day.

Beyond Black

(Henry Holt, $26) by Hilary Mantel.

Dark, elliptical novel about a traveling British psychic. She sees dead people (who taunt her), gives advice to the living (who ignore her) but can't resolve her own troubled life until a bitterly funny woman becomes her manager. Mordant yet matter-of-fact about working-class life and death. Runner-up: Charles Burns' Black Hole (Pantheon, $24.95) – brilliantly grotesque graphic novel. Teens fooling around are a standard horror-movie start. But nothing like this.

No Country for Old Men

(Knopf, $24.95) by Cormac McCarthy.

One might think Mr. McCarthy was responding to charges that his Border Trilogy got misty-eyed because No Country is a drug-war thriller as if written by an angry Jehovah: fast, bleak and vengeful. McCarthy at his most accessible but also his crankiest.

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26) by George Packer.

A fascinating must-read. The Bush White House went looking for a war, the neocons had the justifications for one. New Yorker staffer George Packer, sympathetic to neocon ideals, has written an intellectual history that grips like a thriller – as those ideals crash into reality.

Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town

(PublicAffairs, $26.95) by Nate Blakeslee.

Reporter Blakeslee broke the story about 47 mostly minority suspects convicted on one officer's say-so. Now it's a terrific piece of true crime reporting with cliff-hanging cases, ornery rebels and the effects of the drug war, farm subsidies and racism on rural life. The Texas book of the year. Runner-up: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New Press, $29.95) by James W. Loewen. Just how deep and evil housing discrimination has been across America. Hair-raising.

The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece

(Random House, $24.95) by Jonathan Harr.

To make art research captivating, be sure to have the archives Italian (dotty, ancient), the settings Rome and Dublin (beautiful, historical) and the painter Caravaggio (brilliant, murderous). If only the book had illustrations and a fuller treatment of his art. But the author of A Civil Action has such a good yarn, he can resolve the quest partway through, and you'll race on.

Melville: His World and Work

(Knopf, $30) by Andrew Delbanco.

The past decade in Melville research culminated in Hershel Parker's two-volume epic on the mostly undocumented life of the author of Moby-Dick. But Andrew Delbanco proves that when facts fail, sympathetic literary assessments and deft, clear-headed writing can go far. Inspiring.

Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

(HarperCollins, $29.95) by Lyndall Gordon.

When women couldn't divorce, couldn't own property and could find work only as teachers, governesses or prostitutes, the uneducated Mary Wollstonecraft made herself into a professional writer and activist and wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It wanders too much, but it's a stirring defense of the once-reviled, against-all-odds godmother of women's rights.

This list was compiled by Barnes & Noble and includes both fiction and nonfiction, hardback and paperback. It's based on sales for 2005 through mid-December.

1). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling.

2). A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey.

3). You, the Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body That Will Make You Healthier and Younger, by Mehmet Oz.

4). 1776, by David McCullough.

5). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Friedman.

6). Eldest, by Christopher Paolini.

7). The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.

8). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

9). Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell.

10). The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.

11). The Broker, by John Grisham.

12). French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure, by Mireille Guiliano.

13). Mary, Mary, by James Patterson.

14). Honeymoon, by James Patterson.

15). The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? , by Rick Warren.

16). 4th of July, by James Patterson.

17). Predator, by Patricia Cornwell.

18). Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats, by Rachael Ray.

19). The Mermaid Chair, by Sue Monk Kidd.

20). True Believer, by Nicholas Sparks.