Tuesday is the big day this week: Major hardcover releases and the bulk of the paperback versions drop on the second day of next week. There will be plenty of Christmas-gift fodder for eager shoppers who didn't spend all their money on Black Friday!

Hint for the parent, spouse or child of the fervent reader at your address: Have Amazon deliver your gift book order to an alternate address to avoid a pre-Christmas unwrapping. I've traded this favor with a neighbor down the hill for three years now, and my spouse has yet to catch on! Gosh, honey, they delivered the Ross's Amazon order here again this year!

Tuesday, November 29
Dean R. Koontz' Forever Odd leads us off next week as he brings back Odd Thomas (from his novel of the same name) for a further look at this boy who can see (but not talk with) the dead. "These days Odd is still hosting the ghost of a morose Elvis Presley, still grieving for his dead girlfriend, Stormy, and still worrying about his very fat friend P. Oswald Boone, whose cat, Terrible Chester, likes to pee on his shoes... Odd's strange gifts, coupled with his intelligence and self-effacing humor, make him one of the most quietly authoritative characters in recent popular fiction." —Publishers Weekly

Red Lily by Nora Roberts brings Robert's In the Garden trilogy to a captivating conclusion, following Blue Dahlia and Black Rose. "Three women learn that the heart of their historic home holds a mystery of years gone by. A Harper has always lived at Harper House, the centuries-old mansion just outside of Memphis. And for as long as anyone alive remembers, the ghostly Harper Bride has walked the halls, singing lullabies at night..." (Publisher's release notes)

Before blogs, there were "journals" and "letters," and Doris Lessing is a stellar light in that world. Time Bites: Views and Reviews by Doris May Lessing presents 65-odd essays, letters and reviews from the incisive pen of this "grande dame of English letters... There's a tirade against Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia was Lessing's homeland) and a coruscating indictment of American complacency before 9/11. The main theme, whether addressed overtly or underlying her literary criticism, is the indispensable place of books in the life of an educated person and an enlightened culture. Hers is a clarion call." —Publishers Weekly

Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth 60th Anniversary Edition by Richard Wright brings back this seminal autobiography in a new hardcover edition. "...sometimes considered a fictionalized autobiography or an autobiographical novel because of its use of novelistic techniques... [it] describes vividly Wright's often harsh, hardscrabble boyhood and youth in rural Mississippi and in Memphis, Tenn. [In 1945], many white critics viewed Black Boy primarily as an attack on racist Southern white society... the work came to be understood as the story of Wright's coming of age and development as a writer whose race, though a primary component of his life, was but one of many that formed him as an artist." —Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature