East Bay Best-Sellers lists this month’s top-selling books as reported by independent bookstores in the East Bay, including Black Oak Books, Cody’s, Diesel, Pegasus, and Rakestraw Books.
Nonfiction
1. DUDE, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY?, by Michael Moore (Warner, $24.95). The Man Who Can’t Shut Up continues his unremitting barrage against the Bush family and everything even vaguely connected to them.
2. LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM, by Al Franken (Dutton, $24.95). Comedy writer and liberal pundit Franken takes devastating — and hilarious — aim at the corporate-controlled conservative media.
3. BUSHWHACKED, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose (Random House, $24.95). This acerbic follow-up to Shrub expands its authors’ exposé of presidential crimes and misdemeanors.
4. THE GREAT UNRAVELING, by Paul Krugman (Norton, $25.95). Our economy is in the toilet — or at least it was — and (surprise surprise) it’s all Dubya’s fault.
NEW 5. A RIGHT TO BE HOSTILE: THE BOONDOCKS TREASURY, by Aaron McGruder (Three Rivers Press, $16.95). Compilation of the wisecracking Boondocks comic strip, featuring the only black socialist lead character in the mainstream funny pages.
6. FAST-FOOD NATION, by Eric Schlosser (HarperCollins, $13.95). This perennial best-seller — already a classic of investigative muckraking — exposes the horrifying underbelly of the fast-food industry.
NEW 7. THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING, by Simon Winchester (Oxford University, $25). Where did the Oxford English Dictionary come from? Find out in this fascinating account.
NEW 8. BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE, by Ben Mezrich (Free Press, $14). True story of brilliant but amoral MIT students who master the art of card counting and fleece Vegas for millions.
NEW 9. TRUE NOTEBOOKS, by Mark Salzman (Knopf, $24). To his own surprise, the Lying Awake author finds himself teaching writing to inmates at a juvenile detention facility.
10. WHERE I WAS FROM, by Joan Didion (Knopf, $23). Former Berkeleyite’s semiautobiographical dirge about the corrupt, disappointing, and tragic land known as California.
FICTION
1. 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.
2. MIDDLESEX, by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador, $15). This lyrical family saga of a Greek-American youth who’s halfway between girl and boy snagged this year’s Pulitzer Prize.
3. 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.
4. THE NAMESAKE, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Pulitzer Prize-winner’s masterfully crafted epic of immigrants from India finding new lives in America.
5. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, by Sue Monk Kidd (Penguin, $14). Childhood traumas, the civil rights movement, mysterious Black Madonnas, and a trio of beekeepers populate this overambitious Deep South melodrama.
NEW 6. LOVE, by Toni Morrison (Knopf, $23.95). The pages of Morrison’s latest novella, examining lives and loves in a “coloreds-only” beach resort, erupt with emotional intensity.
7. THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY, by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor, $11.95). This mystery, set in Botswana, stars an irresistibly warm, wry, and well-written female sleuth.
8. THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, $26). Two boys from Brooklyn test the boundaries of best-friendship in this latest work from an ex-Berkeleyite. Special bonus: Scenes set at KALX!
NEW 9. ELIZABETH COSTELLO, by J.M. Coetzee (Viking, $21.95). Recent Nobel prizewinner Coetzee transcends traditional fiction formats with this collection of “lectures” given by a hypothetical Australian protagonist.
10. THE PIANO TUNER, by Daniel Philippe Mason (Vintage, $14). The title character travels to Burma from Victorian London to fix a rare piano, only to find himself embroiled in colonial exotica.
