On Beauty
by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

Zadie Smith’s latest novel is a wonderfully mad jumble (and gentle farce) of families, culture, academia, art, music, politics, and romance. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Smith asks, how much should we doubt the veracity of the viewer? She shows that beauty can be mercurial and fleeting, and that what we think is beautiful might be an elaborate self-deception, revealing more about us than about the object of our adoration. -V. Verano

Black Hole
by Charles Burns (Pantheon)

Charles Burns the artist, working in immaculate black and white, is a striking complement to Burns the writer, who portrays ambiguities with perfect pitch. Black Hole, a story about 1970's Seattle-area teenagers who contract a disease that changes them, is his ideal subject. To teenagers it's an all-or-nothing world, but the creeping greys of adulthood are omnipresent and must be accepted as they grow older. Not all of them make it. -P. Constant

Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie

With characteristically lush and ornate language, Salman Rushdie has crafted a personal oeuvre for his beloved ancestral Kashmir, and the terror-laced realities of current times. This novel revives familiar "Rushdian" themes of the interconnected fates of characters and countries, compelling us to ask how we humans can endure such relentless strife in a world gone mad. -J. Reiner

The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion (Knopf)

Joan Didion's haunting account of the first months after her husband's sudden death, during their daughter's severe and unexplained illness, perfectly captures the sense of shock, sadness, and fractured time after a tragic loss of a loved one. The particulars of the days, pieces of memory, and the evolution of her unmoored, yet resilient, self are all rendered in Didion's spare, moving prose, making this book impossible to put down. -K.M. Allman

The Café Flora Cookbook
by Catherine Geier (HP Books)

Seattle's Café Flora is renowned for its delicious vegetarian and vegan fare. Dishes like the Spicy Seitan Fajitas and Portobello Wellington have even meat lovers raving. Now readers can prepare these and other fantastic dishes at home. With tons of helpful advice and straightforward recipes, this cookbook can help anybody create amazing meals. The Oaxaca Tacos are highly recommended! -K. Markowitz

The Planets
by Dava Sobel (Viking)

This is one of those books which remind us that heavenly bodies and the people who study them haven’t always been confined to the ivory tower of academics. Sobel draws from mythology, poetry, and science to give each planet a personality of its own, using tales of past and present philosophers and scientists that encourage us to look towards future discoveries. -M. Hickner

I, Wabenzi
by Rafi Zabor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In jazzy riffs of storytelling, Zabor recounts his midlife odyssey from his home in New York to the golden, olive-laden hills of Turkey. On his way he reunites with an amazing spectrum of characters from his past. I, Wabenzi belongs on the shelf next to On The Road, and Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s the story of a man seeking not answers, but rather the wisdom gained from discovering that which is not sought. -J. Zaidi

Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
trans. by Edith Grossman (Knopf)

The unnamed narrator of this novel wants to give himself a treat for his ninetieth birthday, an adolescent virgin. He is a lifelong bachelor and all of the sexual experiences in his life have been bought. In the late autumn years of his life he finally falls in love, with a young prostitute. This is vintage Garcia Marquez to be savored. -G. Berry

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
by Alan Jacobs (HarperSanFrancisco)

Children made C.S. Lewis uncomfortable. This embarrassing fact is gently considered as Jacobs traces how Lewis, for whom the ideal place was a house full of books with nobody knocking on his door, became the author of a beloved children's series and a mentor to many people around the world. Jacobs examines the deep joy that is never far off in Lewis’s work, and finishes by kindling that joy in the reader of this new biography. -M. Helsel

Saving Fish from Drowning
by Amy Tan (Putnam)

A colorful art collector assembles an odd assortment of travelers for a journey to the East, but, after her mysterious death, she is left to watch helplessly from the afterlife as her travelers veer onto an unfortunate and dangerous course. The hapless group eventually disappears into the Burmese jungle and encounters some equally lost, very postmodern people. Part picaresque, part commentary on colonialism and human nature, Tan’s novel is both ambitious and satisfying. -K.M. Allman

The Age of Anxiety: McCarthy to Terrorism
by Haynes Johnson (Harcourt)

Greed, anger, and stupidity seem to be the chief characteristics of our age. Joseph McCarthy, the demagogue’s demagogue, had these characteristics in spades. He played upon good old-fashioned American paranoia like a virtuoso beating on the drum of fear. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson’s book uses McCarthyism as a template to take measure of our current political climate. -G. Berry

The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook
by Editors at America's Test Kitchen (America's Test Kitchen Publishers)

Collecting cookbooks is a passion of mine (okay, maybe more like an obsession). So, when America's Test Kitchen announced that they were coming out with a new all-encompassing, all-purpose cookbook, I was ecstatic! While some cookbooks are only beautiful to look at, this one is wonderful to use. Especially helpful are the visual how-tos that illuminate almost every page. Make sure when you compile your holiday gift list that this is at the top! -T. Nisly

The Lost Painting
by Jonathan Harr (Random House)

Opening a window into the research-laden world of art history, this book shows us a case study of its politics and passion. Written like a thriller, it tells the intertwining stories of art historians infected with a consuming love of Caravaggio's paintings, as they slowly trace the history of one of his lost masterpieces. It's fascinating; in this case, reality is better than fiction. -M. Helsel

The City of Falling Angels
by John Berendt (Penguin Press)

The city of Venice is sinking—not because of its poor foundations but rather from the weight of all the emotional baggage the city has to shoulder. Using the demise of the Fenice Opera House as his flint, Berendt burns exquisitely through societal soirees, the (possibly) underhanded dealings of the Ezra Pound Foundation, a stationary moon landing, and the heartbreaking death of a man who looked for love in the wrong places. -C. Joyner

One People
by Lonely Planet (Lonely Planet)

Be careful when you open this book, because you aren't going to want to close it until you've turned the last page. It's a splendid photographic exploration of the way that every life is lived, from birth to death, with all of the joyful, thoughtful, passionate, laborious, tragic moments in between. This book is a glorious, gorgeous, exciting reminder that we are, everywhere in the world, members of the "family of man." -J. Brown

A Storybook Life
by Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Twin Palms)

This beautifully printed and carefully sequenced book of color photographs begins with an image of a man napping in his room and ends with a man at rest in his coffin. In between are seventy-three plates that eloquently express a range of universal human experiences in a wordless narrative form. Each image is masterfully constructed with poetic details that fill the frame, leaving the viewer with an overall dream-like feeling of melancholy and tenderness. -A.C. Jennings

Classic Houses of Seattle
by Caroline T. Swope (Timber Press)

Be it caused by fire, modernization, a difficult landscape, or just variety in the taste of its residents, Seattle's residential architecture is something of a patchwork. Swope's dissection of our patchwork from 1870-1950 includes a brief history, a good explanation of the different architectural styles, and a slew of wonderful photographs. Take a tour of your neighborhood, the whole city, or learn the story of your own house by using Swope's last chapter. -I. Akio

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio (Ten Speed)

"The world produces more than enough food for everyone; it is just not distributed equitably," Marion Nestle tells us in the foreword to Hungry Planet, a gorgeous book that shows thirty families from all over the world, and what they eat in a week. With compelling photographs and essays, this book feeds our curiosity and nourishes our desire to ensure that everyone on earth has the food that they need. -J. Brown

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
by June Jordan (Copper Canyon)

June Jordan, beloved poet, teacher, and activist, wrote powerful poems filled with tenderness, compassion, rage against injustice, and with a survivor's sense of humor. She is remembered for her passionate words, her work for liberation, and for her great love for her fellow human travelers. This collection of her poetry includes a fine introduction by Adrienne Rich, and selections from her first published work through her last poems that were written before her death in 2002. -K.M. Allman

Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman (Morrow)

Poor 'Fat Charlie' Nancy: his father just died, the brother he never knew he had has turned out to be a god, and he may have lost his job and run afoul of the law at the same time.

Gaiman's successor to his fabulous American Gods is a dark comedy—guaranteed at least a laugh per page—of family ties (or in this case webs) that bind, ancient myths, love, karaoke, mistaken identities, and good old-fashioned white-collar crime. -V. Verano

A Crack at the Edge of the World
by Simon Winchester (Simon & Schuster)

Simon Winchester is a hero of nonfiction, who examines his subject in unbelievable scope and detail, yet tells his story with the page-turning lyricism of a talented novelist. In his latest exploration, he tackles the devastation of San Francisco on April 18, 1906. Cleverly weaving together American history and rudimentary geology he traces the earthquake's cause across the earth's crust and deep into its core in a book that slyly educates through entertainment. -J. Zaidi

The Great Stink
by Clare Clark (Harcourt)

A foul tunnel carrying the refuse of an entire city seems an unlikely source of treasure, comfort, and heroism, but is all of these things and more in this novel built around the engineering of London’s sewer system. A desperate young man self-mutilates, an old man finds an unexpected love, the people of London suffer from cholera, and a murder in the sewers connects them all. This story is a romp through the filth, a surprisingly enjoyable experience. -T. Hayes

William Cumming: The Image of Consequence
by Matthew Kangas (University of Washington Press)

Cumming's early work is somber with a dark color scheme of slouching unemployed faceless men on Skid Road. His most recent is vibrantly painted in yellows and reds of people, still faceless, frolicking at Golden Gardens. The common thread, his painting, is steeped in Seattle and the Northwest. Considering Cumming’s work along with his memoir Sketchbook, it becomes clear who laid the foundation for the progressive and fiercely independent Seattle way of thinking, expressing, and creating. -A.C. Jennings

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
by Mary Roach (Norton)

Why worry about what happens after you die when science will do it for you? Mary Roach, author of Stiff, focuses her hilarious inquisitiveness on the world's almost obsessive need to know what happens to our "souls" once we’ve become the "dearly departed." Examining mediums, hauntings, the ideas of a reincarnation researcher, and the old "going to the light," Roach mixes hardcore science with humanity's oddball theories. -C. Joyner

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Knopf)

Readers of twentieth century history and biography have had their hands filled with books about Nazis, Bolsheviks, and their leaders. Now we have a definitive, devastating account of Chairman Mao and his fellow Maoists, a leader and regime filled with corruption, secrecy, theft, terrorism, and murder. The authors conclude that Mao was responsible for about seventy million deaths and untold misery. Chang and Halliday have added a tremendous amount of information to this horrific period of history. -C. Kirchner

Busting Vegas
by Ben Mezrich (William Morrow)

Mezrich follows the success of his last book, Bringing Down the House, with an even more amazing story about the triumph of genius over the big casinos. Semyon Dukach's adventures as part of an elite group of MIT students who exploited a few simple, legal techniques to win millions is a riveting, and at times troubling, look into a world of excitement, fear and giddy success. -S. Bigler

Gift suggestions from our Children's and Young Adult department

Wizardology
as told by Master Merlin (Candlewick)

Merlin, the wisest sage of all, offers advice to aspiring apprentices in this enchanted text. Filled with the history of magic and magicians, as well as practical information about the workshop, proper attire, and tools of the trade, this lush treasure is packed with pop-ups and pull-outs that lead the reader on a mystical journey. A brilliant companion to Dragonology and Egyptology, this tome is a boon to all students of the alchemical arts.

The King in the Window
by Adam Gopnik (Miramax)

Oliver, an eleven-year-old American living in Paris, is not happy. His schoolwork includes rhetoric and fencing classes, and his parents seem busier all the time. After an argument with his friend Neige, he is dreadfully lonely. One night as he gazes out a window, he sees a boy wearing a blue doublet who suddenly vanishes. Adam Gopnik introduces young readers to France, from the Louvre to Versaille's great hall of mirrors, in this magical adventure.

I Can Make a Difference
selected by Marian Wright Edelman
illus. by Barry Moser (Amistad)

In her introduction to this amazing collection Marion Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, talks about the "material idols" and "cultural junk foods" that our children seek. These can be replaced by the stories, parables, quotes, and poems in this magnificently illustrated book, which echoes the sentiments of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

Lies and Other Tall Tales
collected by Zora Neale Hurston
adapted and illus. by Christopher Myers (HarperCollins)

No writer could capture the cadence and idioms of American dialects better than Zora Neale Hurston. Christopher Myers celebrates her talent in this delectable collection of fibs. From a man so short he had to stand on a box to see over a grain of sand to a wife so small she could stay dry in the rain by stepping in between the raindrops, these "lies" will tickle every reader's fancy.

Sign of the Raven
by Julie Hearn (Atheneum)

Tom has much to deal with. His mother is recovering from a mastectomy and together they have come to his gran's house to mend family fences. Tom finds in the basement of the house a tunnel into the eighteenth century where he encounters social outcasts, the sideshow freaks. As he races to save one of these new friends from unspeakable horrors, he learns a dark secret from his family's history that weaves together past and present.

D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths
by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire (New York Review Children's Collection)

If you’ve ever played the "Ten Books to Take to a Deserted Island" game, chances are that D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths was on your list. Now you can add their edition of Norse myths because it is back in print, with all the gods in their heroic glory. Illustrated with the d'Aulaires' "spectacular and quirky" pictures, as Michael Chabon notes in the introduction, this collection makes a fantastic choice for bedtime stories.

Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs
by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart (Candlewick)

This book really POPS! Masters of the delicate and intricate pop-up, Sabuda and Reinhart turn their substantial talents to the intriguing world of dinosaurs. From Waterhouse Hawkins and his dinner inside the model of a dinosaur to current theories of extinction, the dozens of spectacular and colorful paper engineering feats are as pleasantly puzzling to study as the prehistoric subject matter that they illustrate. This is an amazing book to be pondered over by kids of ALL ages!

I, Coriander
by Sally Gardiner (Dial)

There is great political turmoil in seventeenth century Puritan London, but for Coriander Hobie, her heartbreak is caused by the death of her mother, her father’s rapid remarriage and his flight to avoid persecution. Left to her horrid stepmother and a cruel Puritan minister, Coriander faces trials and punishment until she finds her way to the land of her mother's birth, the realm of the fairies. This is a brilliant blend of history and fantasy that will be savored.