East Bay Best-Sellers lists this month’s top-selling books as reported by independent bookstores in the East Bay, including Bay Books, Black Oak, Cody’s, Diesel, Pegasus, and Signal Books.
NONFICTION
NEW 1.The 9/11 Commission Report (Norton, $10). Tired of the spin, the conspiracy theories, the blame-slinging? Here’s the definitive account of what really happened that fateful day.
2. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, $24.95). This latest effort by the only man brave enough to call his sister’s feet “hooves” can make you laugh and cry within a single sentence.
3. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss (Gotham, $17.50). It’s Revenge of the Proofreaders as the British author makes a brave stand against the demise of punctuation.
4. Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer (Random House, $14.95). A 1984 murder moved Krakauer to write this probing exposé of the Mormon faith’s fundamentalist, polygamist fringe.
5. Berkeley High School Slang Dictionary, by Rick Ayers and BHS students (North Atlantic, $6.95). If you’re old enough to shave, you so need this book to understand what those dawgs are saying, yo.
6. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi (Random House, $13.95). Literature as liberation: amazing memoir of an underground women’s literary salon that defied Iran’s repressive regime.
7. My Life, by Bill Clinton (Knopf, $35). Most readers frantically scan the pages for “blue dress”; those with patience learn every detail of the remarkable Clintonian saga.
8. McSweeney’s 13, edited by Chris Ware and McSweeney’s (McSweeney’s, $24). The new all-comics issue of Dave Eggers’ journal features leading alternative cartoonists, from Crumb to Clowes.
NEW 9. Homegrown Democrat, by Garrison Keillor (Viking, $19.95). Surprising no one, Keillor comes out of the closet as a prairie home liberal Democrat.
10. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris (Back Bay, $14.95). The NPR autobiographer’s essays poke fun at family life down South as well as life as an expatriate in Paris.
FICTION
1. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead, $14). Afghanistan’s political upheavals are a striking backdrop for this powerful examination of cultural and personal morality.
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon (Vintage, $12). The year’s most unusual debut novel features an autistic narrator emulating his hero Sherlock Holmes to solve a canine murder.
3. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador, $15). This lyrical family saga of a Greek-American youth halfway between girl and boy snagged a Pulitzer.
NEW 4. R is for Ricochet, by Sue Grafton (Putnam, $26.95). Kinsey Millhone returns for the eighteenth time to unravel a money-laundering scheme among the amoral elite of Santa Teresa.
5. Life of PI, by Yann Martel (Harvest, $14). The author of this lively yarn about a boy and a beast surviving a shipwreck admits he “borrowed” the plot from a 1981 Brazilian novel.
6. The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (Amistad, $13.95). This disjointed tale of a free black man who owned slaves in antebellum Virginia snagged a Pulitzer.
7. The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Pulitzer winner delivers another masterfully crafted epic of immigrants from India finding new lives in America.
8. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (Doubleday, $24.95). A deft novelization of the bizarre Christian conspiracy theories popularized in 1983’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
9. New Dark Voyage, by Alan Furst (Random House, $24.95). A Dutch sea captain is enlisted in a perilous WWII maritime escapade, dodging Nazis from Crete to the Baltic.
10. The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (Dial, $24). Four Princeton students race to decipher the secret codes hidden in an ancient manuscript.
