.East Bay Best-Sellers

What you're reading this month.

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

1.The Cheese Board Collective Works, by Cheese Board Collective (Ten Speed Press, $21.95). Recipes and philosophy from the most important little cheese shop in the world.

2. Fast-Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser (Harper Collins, $13.95). This perennial best-seller —- already a classic of investigative muckraking —- exposes the horrifying underbelly of the fast-food industry.

3. 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.

4. 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.

NEW 5. Living to Tell the Tale, by Gabriel García Màrquez (Knopf, $26.95). Time ebbs and flows and truth is an illusion in this first volume of Màrquez’ memoirs.

NEW 6. Hegemony or Survival, by Noam Chomsky (Metropolitan, $22). The Chomsker is back with more evidence that the War on Terror is little more than a continuation of Cold War policies.

7. Where I Was From, by Joan Didion (Knopf, $23). Former Berkeleyite Didion’s semiautobiographical dirge about the corrupt, disappointing, and tragic land known as California.

8. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Owl, $13). A middle-class author pretended to be poor so as to describe the struggles of the underprivileged to mainly middle-class readers.

9. 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.

10. A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, by Aaron McGruder (Three Rivers Press, ($16.95). Compilation of the Boondocks comic strip, featuring the only black socialist hero in mainstream funny pages.

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. 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.

3. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador, $15). This lyrical family saga of a Greek-American youth who is halfway between girl and boy snagged this year’s Pulitzer Prize.

4. 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.

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.

6. 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.

7. The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Pulitzer Prize-winner Lahiri delivers another masterfully crafted epic of immigrants from India finding new lives in America.

8. Three Junes, by Julia Glass (Anchor, $14). Eloquent, National Book Award-winning saga of a melancholy Scottish family, traced through three loosely connected novellas.

9. New Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee (Penguin, $13). A narcissistic, loveless professor flees to his daughter’s farm in South Africa’s countryside, only to discover more disgrace and misery.

10. 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.

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