East Bay Bestsellers lists this month’s top-selling books as reported by independent bookstores in the East Bay, including: Avenue Books, Black Oak, Cody’s, Collected Thoughts, Diesel, Pegasus, and Walden Pond.
NONFICTION
1.STUPID WHITE MEN , by Michael Moore (Regan Books, $24.95). Comic iconoclast Moore skewers, barbecues, and gleefully humiliates the Washington power elite.
2.NICKEL AND DIMED , by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan, $23). Wondering how welfare reform was working out, the author worked for minimum wage.
3.9/11 , by Noam Chomsky (Seven Stories, $8.95). Chomsky out-Chomskys himself, blaming America for the September 11 attacks and branding it a “terrorist nation.”
4.FAST-FOOD NATION , by Eric Schlosser (Harper Collins, $13.95). Feces in the meat and the unsavory secret of Secret Sauce are but two of the revelations sizzling herein.
5. NEW SMALL WONDER , by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, $23.95). In her new collection of essays, the wealthy Kingsolver finds time to bash American capitalism and excess.
6. NEW MASTER OF THE SENATE: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON , by Robert Caro (Knopf, $35). It takes a mere 1,100 pages to delineate the immense power LBJ wielded as a 1950s Machiavellian senator.
7. COMFORT ME WITH APPLES , by Ruth Reichl (Random House, $24.95). Reichl starts her memoir in Berkeley, where she lived in a commune.
8. NEW CHEZ PANISSE FRUIT , by Alice Waters (HarperCollins, $34.95). Berkeley’s master chef reveals her secrets for transforming fresh fruit into mouthwatering delicacies.
9. SEABISCUIT , by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, $24.95). A horse is a horse, of course — but no horse could ever run like this champion.
10. NEW GODDESSES IN OLDER WOMEN: ARCHETYPES IN WOMEN OVER FIFTY , by Jean Shinoda Bolen (Quill, $13.95). An inspirational brew of feminism, paganism, and Jungian mythology.
FICTION
1. NEW EMPIRE FALLS , by Richard Russo (Vintage Books, $14.95). A dysfunctional cast of colorful characters spirals toward oblivion in a dilapidated and dying New England mill town.
2. NEW BEL CANTO , by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, $13.95) Offbeat epic follows a band of South American terrorists who seize an embassy, a Japanese industrialist, and an operatic soprano.
3. HOW TO BE GOOD , by Nick Hornby (Riverhead, $24.95). Extramarital shenanigans and a surplus of good intentions threaten to drive a marriage onto the rocks.
4. ATONEMENT , Ian McEwan (Doubleday, $26). McEwan dissects the nature of perception in this intimate character study that spans the decades.
5. NEW BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS , by Anne Tyler (Knopf, $25). Jam-packed with regret and dripping with sentimentality, Tyler’s latest reflects her own midlife crisis.
6. NEW EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED , by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin, $25). A twentysomething seeks his grandfather’s shtetl in this pyrotechnical, multilayered marvel.
7. NEW NANNY DIARIES , by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95). Two Mary Poppinses rip into the elitism and hypocrisy of a barely fictionalized socialite mater.
8. NEW THE SHELTERS OF STONE , by Jean Auel (Crown, $20.95). The fifth installment of Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear Cro-Magnon soap opera.
9. THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS , by Arundhati Roy (HarperCollins, $14). A Booker-Prize-winning narrative as famed for its lush prose stylings as its Dickensian view of Indian society.
10. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY , by Michael Chabon (Random House, $26.95). A Berkeley author’s swashbuckling tale of two cousins who create a comic-book hero.
