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. 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.
2. 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.
3. The Cheese Board Collective Works, by Cheese Board Collective (Ten Speed, $21.95). Recipes and philosophy from the most important little cheese shop in the world.
4. Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi (Random House, $13.95). Literature as liberation: An amazing memoir of an underground women’s literary salon.
5. NEW The South Beach Diet, by Arthur Agatston (Rodale, $24.95). Carrots are evil, exercise is unimportant: it’s the diet that lets you feel good.
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. 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.
8. 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.
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.
10. NEW Berkeley High School Slang Dictionary, by Rick Ayers (North Atlantic, $6.95). If you’re old enough to shave, you so need this book to understand what those young punks are saying.
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. 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.
3. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador, $15). This lyrical family saga of a Greek-American youth halfway between girl and boy snagged last year’s Pulitzer Prize.
4. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (Harvest, $14). The author of this lively yarn about a boy and a beast surviving a shipwreck admits “borrowing” the plot from a 1981 Brazilian novel.
5. The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Pulitzer Prize-winner delivers another masterfully crafted epic of Indian immigrants finding new lives in America.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. NEW Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown (Pocket Star, $7.99). The Illuminati, the Vatican, doomsday weapons, and outlandish conspiracies aplenty populate Brown’s precursor to his Da Vinci Code.
9. NEW Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman (Ecco, $29.95). A fresh, engaging new translation of the Castilian classic.
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.
