Bestsellers

Scoring system:10 points for first place down to 1 for 10th on The New York Times list (4,000 bookstores, plus wholesalers), the American Booksellers Association list (independent, sometimes highbrow stores), and Publisher's Weekly (general bookstores). 1 Holes (paper) Louis Sacher

23 points (ABA: 4th; NYT: 5th; PW: 1st)

GIST Stanley is a loser from a long line of losers. It's all the fault of his "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather" for initiating a curse that has been bringing bad luck to the family for generations. At Camp Green Lake, which isn't a camp and has no lake, Stanley reaches the end of the Yelnats' bad luck.

20 points (ABA: 6th; NYT: 3rd; PW: 4th)

GIST This slim volume purports to be a facsimile of one of Harry's textbooks, complete with handwritten marginal notes. It is a digest of strange creatures that includes their scientific names, habits, and a danger ranking system, ranging from "known wizard killer, impossible to domesticate" to "boring."

19 points (ABA: 2nd; NYT: 1st; PW: not listed)

GIST Harry lives in a topsy-turvy moral universe, a place where your friend may be your enemy, the person you are talking to might be someone else, and even your pet cannot be trusted.

17 points (ABA: 3rd; NYT: 2nd; PW: not listed)

GIST The orphan Harry lives with his Muggle relations, where he struggles to get along despite his difference. The discovery that he is a wizard opens up new opportunities at Hogwarts School, where Harry learns that he is no ordinary wizard.

16 points (ABA: 8th; NYT: 4th; PW: 5th)

GIST Another slim paperback written to amuse those Harry Potter fans who can't get enough information about Harry's world. It's a facsimile of a well-circulated library book containing everything a young wizard might want to know about Quidditch, the broomstick sport: its history, its rules, and its current practice throughout the wizard world.

Harry Potter continues to dominate the bestseller lists, a feat that receives much less notice than it did last year, when week after week the books dominated The New York Times fiction bestseller list. To remedy the situation, the Times created a separate children's list and banished Harry Potter to it. In addition to the four books in the series, bookstores are full of Harry Potter stuffed animals, journals, and ersatz textbooks. With the Fall release of the Harry Potter movie, families who have been avoiding the book series will find their resolve put to the test. One alternative is to acquaint your children with Tolkien's classic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. With release of a movie based on the first book in the trilogy (The Fellowship of the Rings) scheduled for the end of this year, bookstores are promoting the Tolkien books as never before. Just in time for the movie's release, a new children's biography of Tolkien, written by Canadian Christian Michael Coren, should be available in the United States. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Created the Lord of the Rings (Stoddart), already published in Canada, is a delightfully written and well-illustrated account of Tolkien's life from his parents' courtship to his death at home near Oxford.