Bestsellers

Scoring system:10 points for first place, 9 for second, down to 1 for tenth, on the lists of the American Booksellers Association (independent, sometimes highbrow stores), The New York Times (4,000 bookstores, plus wholesalers), USA Today (3,000 large-inventory bookstores), and Amazon.com (Web purchases). The Brethren John Grisham

33 points (NYT: 1st; ABA: 2nd; USA Today: 4th; Amazon.com: 4th)

GIST Short on thrills, long on liberal politics.

WORLDVIEW Cynicism.

CAUTION Bad language, crudities.

26 points (NYT: 1st; ABA: 8th; USA Today: 5th; Amazon.com: 1st)

GIST Family is the fount of evil and perversion, including brutality toward children, incest, and murder. God is either absent or evil.

WORLDVIEW Nihilism. With no God everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

CAUTION Graphic sexuality, violence, and bad language.

19 points (NYT: N.A.; ABA: N.A.; USA Today: 1st; Amazon.com: 2nd)

GIST Mixed into this conventional romance is a strange brew of moral relativism and Dr. Laura language. Allegra believes in "principles, ethics, fidelity," yet she's sexually active.

WORLDVIEW Relativism. "I don't care if you bring our kids up Jewish or Buddhist," one character says.

CAUTION Sexual situations, bad language.

18 points (NYT: 8th; ABA: 7th; USA Today: 8th; Amazon.com: 3rd)

GIST Many schoolchildren have suffered through Beowulf, or parts of it. Heaney, a celebrated Irish poet, spent 15 years on this translation, bringing to life Beowulf and his battles against the monsters Grendel and Grendel's mother. Heaney proves that poetry can be muscular.

WORLDVIEW n/a

CAUTION Descriptions of violence.

18 points (NYT: 2nd; ABA: N.A.; USA Today: 2nd; Amazon.com: N.A.)

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.

WORLDVIEW Relativism. The line between right and wrong is often blurry. (See WORLD, Oct. 30, 1999.)

CAUTION Witchcraft.

When physician and astronaut Jerry Linenger blasted off from earth on the space shuttle Atlantis, he knew he would not be home for months. But he didn't know how harrying his 115 days aboard the Russian space station would be. The joint program between NASA and the Russian space agency was supposed to be a monument to international cooperation. Instead it became, according to Dr. Linenger, a way for the U.S. government to funnel money into Russia. The result was a space program riddled with problems. During his stay on the space station, the crew was subjected to power failures, an almost deadly 14-minute fire, and a near-death collision with a docking Russian space ship. Dr. Linenger tells his tale in Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir (McGraw-Hill, 2000). Dr. Linenger, who chose to write his memoirs without the help of a ghostwriter, relates these adventures with an eye to specific detail that makes it a compelling read despite the occasionally clumsy writing.