Bestsellers

Scoring system:10 points for first place, 9 for second, down to 1 for 10th, on the lists of the American Booksellers Association (independent, sometimes highbrow stores), The New York Times (4,000 bookstores, plus wholesalers), Publisher's Weekly (general bookstores), and Amazon.com (Web purchases). 1 A Painted House John Grisham

29 points (ABA: 2nd; NYT: 1st; PW: 1st; Amazon.com: not listed)

GIST The boy, Luke Chandler, lives in rural Arkansas, 1952. His world consists of the family's 80 acres and the nearby small town with its handful of stores and the Baptist and Methodist churches. Harry Carey's radio broadcasts of Cardinal games are the highlights of summer evenings until the events that change his life forever.

WORLDVIEW Down-home humanism.

CAUTION Some profanity.

28 points (ABA: 1st; NYT: 2nd; PW: 2nd; Amazon.com: not listed)

GIST Evocative cross-generational and cross-cultural tale of a Chinese-American woman who struggles with commitment (she's been living with a guy for 10 years) and with her mother. The increasingly argumentative mother's stories about her past keep changing, but journals, translated from Chinese, reveal the truth and open up new possibilities for the future.

WORLDVIEW Thoughtful humanism.

CAUTION Adultery.

21 points (ABA: 4th; NYT: 8th; PW: 9th; Amazon.com: 2nd)

GIST Set in a working-class neighborhood in Boston, three boys are playing. One is abducted as the others watch. Years later, that event echoes in their lives, its vibrations affecting how they react to a brutal murder. The book raises questions about the role the past plays in the present, and whether individuals can ever break free of it.

WORLDVIEW Brutal fatalism.

CAUTION Foul language, explicit sex.

20 points (ABA: 10th; NYT: 5th; PW: 7th; Amazon.com: 5th)

GIST Cheesy potboiler involving a president's daughter, his morally compromised advisers, secret lives, murder, sexual abuse, illegal drugs, car chases, easy sex, foul language, the White House, and the Secret Service. Improbable plot and cardboard characters in an exciting locale.

WORLDVIEW Everyone does what is right in his own eyes.

CAUTION Foul language, explicit sex.

16 points (ABA: not listed; NYT: 3rd; PW: 3rd; Amazon.com: not listed)

GIST Reading this novel is like overhearing a series of crude conversations in which family members dish dirt about each other and to each other. Through first-person chapters, the characters come alive, flaws and all, and by the end of the book they learn to accept each other, flaws and all.

WORLDVIEW Trash-talking relativism.

CAUTION Language.

Tom Wolfe's latest collection of essays, provocatively titled Hooking Up (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), tackles some of the most contentious issues of our time. The author of such seminal works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities exhibits his usual writing flair while examining subjects as disparate as the computer industry and the modern novel. The title essay describes the obsession with sex and youth in American culture today; Mr. Wolfe later shows the religious roots of Silicon Valley culture. In "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Mr. Wolfe reports on recent advances in the fields of genetics and neuroscience, displaying his fascination with sociobiology. "Invisible Artist" tells the story of Frederick Hart, an artist who in any other century would have been hailed as a genius, but one almost completely overlooked in the modern art world. The novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" highlights some of the questions about television attack journalism, as a producer goes to almost any length in order to get his story.