Reading Tom Perotta's latest novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," gave me the same comforted feeling that watching an hour-long HBO drama about someone else's dysfunctional family always does. Sure, we live in an America where some people are benighted religious loons, where teenaged children hate their parents, where the denial runs as deep as the cynicism. But at least everyone is attractive, in a well-lit, fresh-scrubbed way, and at least everyone's romance storyline has a chance of working out! This book is about Ruth, a divorced, mom-hot small town sex ed teacher who balks at teaching her school district's new abstinence based curriculum, and Tim, a divorced, dad-hot druggie deadbeat dad turned born-again Christian who feels Ruth's wrath after leading her teen daughter's soccer team in prayer. Sounds like these two have a lot to teach each other about religion, politics, and, why, who knows what else! It's a testament to Tom's considerable skill at keeping the machine of a novel humming briskly along that these somewhat predictable proceedings stay interesting until the closing credits. Uh, acknowledgments page, rather.

Shalom Auslander sees himself as a foreskin—"unwanted, cut off, bloodied, tossed aside"—because of his repressive ultra-religious upbringing among the Orthodox Jews of Monsey, New York. This tortured and, let's face it, icky metaphor underlies all the stories in 'The Foreskin's Lament,' which is about Shalom's struggle to come to terms with a nasty, vindictive, stickler of a God who, much to his chagrin, he still sorta believes in. Weirdly, I was reminded of 'A Million Little Pieces' while reading 'The Foreskin's Lament'—it is an addiction memoir, of a sort. A 'this is how I manfully dealt with my terrible addiction' memoir. Sucks for Shalom that the drug he's trying to kick is the sick thrill of worrying desperately that some omnipresent deity cares enough about what you eat and how you surgically alter your child's genitalia to punish you for screwing it up.

I had been meaning to read 'The Female Thing' ever since it got enthusiastic but skeptical lady-peer reviews. Recentlyish, it came out in paperback and I bought it and put it into my carry-on! I don't know about you, but I read books like this as a sort of booster shot, a quick medicinal jolt that reactivates my feminist—um—consciousness. So when they're not actually painful to wade through I find myself recommending them overenthusiastically, the way you would a good doctor with a short waiting-room line. Read it, it's good for you!

The Guardian has a quiz on books and book-happenings in the year 2007. When you fail it, you can console yourself with the knowledge that there's no way you could ever know what the fuck a Tesco is unless you lived in the UK. Also, sometimes it's nice to fail things. Keeps you humble, right? [Guardian]

Everybody knows that publishers now expect you to have a "platform," a built-in audience so that you can sell your book all by your own damn self, instead of relying on their increasingly useless in-house promotion. Sometimes, however, there is no platform, except in the literal sense. "This my book, this my book, and this my book," said a gentleman on the downtown 1 train the other day. (He goes by "Blue" but is also named Brad Bathgate.) "The first is a novel called Pretty Ugly. The second is called Corner Stores in the Middle of the Block. The third is a book of poetry, titled Don't Beat Your Children Or They'll End Up Like Me." Laugh it up. "Blue" has published exactly three more books than most of us, probably, and surely outsold this one!

"There's a great story to be told about the success of Starbucks. But we'll have to wait to hear it from somebody other than Taylor Clark," begins P.J. O'Rourke's review of 'Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture.' Ooh, burn! But then halfway through the review, after rambling about how he wishes he'd bought Starbucks stock at the right time, P.J. does a 180, helpfully announcing first that "here comes that 180 degree turn in critical appraisal that so often happens in the middle of a book review." He goes on to praise the book's "astonishing examples of open-minded intellectual honesty, arguments from evidence and cleareyed reporting." Which seems sort of an unfair move to pull a few hundred words after writing an opening paragraph that makes anyone remotely interested in the book immediately cross it off their reading list. [NYT]

"The year was punctuated by anxiety over the decline of many newspaper book review sections and worry that publishing, with its old-fashioned way of printing books on paper and shipping them to stores or to online services, can't keep up with a fragmented, increasingly distracted and digital world," according to the LA Times, which was one of many newspapers that cut back or altered its book review coverage in 2007. Another problem was that there just weren't that many exciting books this year, according to Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner: "There was a lot of excitement about books by major writers... But all of them were mild disappointments." But wait, there's hope!

What does 'Motherless Brooklyn' and 'The Fortress of Solitude' and 'That Other More Recent Book, What Was The Name Of It' author Jonathan Lethem eat? The same things most people eat: bagels and sandwiches and macaroni and cheese from a box, and sometimes fancy meals out at restaurants or at friends' houses. "I love Jonathan Lethem. Can we hear about his grooming habits and/or laundry secrets next? Please keep these peeks into his life coming!" writes a commenter who is probably not being sarcastic. [NYM]

There's increasing hope for books that are born as or on blogs. Jeff Kinney, who originally serialized "Diary of A Wimpy Kid" on a website called Funbrain.com, has joined Julie "Julie and Julia" Powell, Frank "PostSecret" Warren and Tucker "That Horrible Asshole" Max in the ranks of authors who gave away the milk for free and whose cows were subsequently bought: "Diary" has sold 147,000 copies, according to Bookscan. "'There's nothing like holding the weight and smelling the paper," said one dad who bought the book after already having read it online. Mmm, paper! [NYT]

Is Michael Wolff for real? Now he's trashing his sole competitor in the Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. book game. He tells Keith Kelly, regarding Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison, who'll take a year off from the paper for her own book: "The problem with someone from The Wall Street Journal writing a book is that they are inevitably conflicted. Either they're bitter that Murdoch bought the place or they are trying to save their job." And no one's ever conflicted at all by years of sucking-up to moguls.

Because why not, we spent a minute assessing current trends in book publishing by looking at the past couple of days' worth of deals on Publisher's Marketplace. Here were some themes we identified: Editors are still acquiring those "my year when I did a thing" books. Editors will acquire a book by anyone who has ever been on a T.V. show. And, some people are going to work on the design, copyediting, and printing of a book about "tasty and nutritious non-alcoholic drinks for all the hip moms to be." There is going to be an actual printed book about that. With pages.

Happy 20th birthday, 'Bonfire of the Vanities'! Today, the Times celebrates Tom Wolfe's novel with a look at the ways New York has changed since 1987—it's full of rich white people now, did you know?—and interviews with some of the people who characters in the book were based on, or who knew those people. The choicest quote comes from Ronald L. Kuby, the former partner of the radical lawyer William 'Al Vogel' Kunstler. "'Bonfire of the Vanities' ... managed to create a fantasy criminal justice system where rich, white Sherman McCoy is being railroaded by a combination of craven black leaders and corrupt journalists and spineless political leaders. That was white people's fantasy, that was not black people's reality. It was a fundamentally racist novel appealing to the very worst in white people, at their most privileged and snivelly. And no, I don't think it could possibly have the same cachet today."

Last night Doris Lessing accepted the Nobel Prize for literature with a speech about how, amidst the desperate poverty she has witnessed in Africa, people there are still hungry for books and education. She says that we in the word-glutted West must relearn the value of literature and reading. "We never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?" She continues: "We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency."

Bad-boy UK publisher Jamie Byng of Canongate has acquired world rights to litblogger Mark Sarvas' debut novel, Harry, Revised, in what Mark characterizes on his blog as a "'good preempt' (in the vernacular of Publishers Lunch, although it felt more like a 'fucking awesome preempt' to me)." Jamie has called Mark's book "the hottest début novel on the planet." And maybe it is! Sure! It's entirely possible that the same guy who writes sentences like: "[Jamie] has tucked Harry under his arm and is running hard, head down, to the end zone. For the last week, I've basically been going along for the ride, sitting in the eye of a hurricane" could write a perfectly great novel.

Starbucks has just chosen a methy memoir as the next title in its book program, signing on to sell David Sheff's 'Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction' in more than 6,500 of its stores come February. Now, there are probably a ton of reasons why Starbucks makes its choices, but William Morris agent Bill Clegg has something to do with the process, a factoid that has some publishing types snickering. Well, come on, that's silly! You don't have to have been an addict to like addiction memoirs!

Five months prior to Riverhead's release of a "heh!"-funny essay collection whose publication surely has nothing to do with her connections, the Observer has seen fit to lengthily profile Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley. She's non-threateningly pretty, often listens to people when they speak to her, claims to have an unusually ample ass for a Caucasoid, and is thus "the most popular publicist in New York." Joan Didion finds her "sweet"; Elizabeth Spiers likes her; Lockhart Steele likes her. You probably like her too. She's pretty much been spending the last few years building a web of alliances that prevents anyone from criticizing her in a public forum! Crafty. But, as reporter and former Weekend Gawkerer Leon Neyfakh discreetly intimates between em dashes, there's a private anguish behind all that public likability.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's editor Pete Osnos steps to his author's defense on Editor&Publisher today, accusing the media of misinterpreting the excerpt of McClellan's book in PublicAffairs' spring catalog. The snippet, widely publicized last week, seems to accuse high-ranking administration officials, including the president, with direct involvement in the Valerie Plame scandal. "But what was amazing about the response was that it became a huge story before anyone pursued its context," grumbles Osnos. If the "frenzied" "vituperative" media had peeped said context—thought it's a little unclear as to how they were meant to do so, considering that the misleading excerpt was the only part of the book made available!—they'd have realized that "McClellan believes that Bush, at least initially, did not know he was telling his press secretary to relay a series of howlers about who said what to whom."

Like Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson announcing their divorce, the Times has tried to sneak very important news past us while we're all dazed and Thanksgiven and unable to process things! That's right: the 100 Notable Books of 2007 list is out. Actually maybe it is meant to help you with your holiday shopping, which you must begin today because God said so in the Bible. Anyway, the list includes all of the usual suspects, and also Vendela Vida. [NYT]

From the mailbag: "'Last Lecture' [remember, the book cowritten by the dying professor which was rumored to be selling for $6.75 million] is finally fucking over. Closed with Hyperion, like everyone knew it would, since they offered more. Gah! I hate beauty contests."

Publishers Marketplace is reporting that Nosheteria.com blogger Adrienne Kane has sold her first book, to be titled 'Cooking and Screaming,' to Simon & Schuster imprint Simon Spotlight Entertainment. We'd never heard of this blog, but we like eating food, so we decided to check it out. Of a recently purchased handful of satsumas and persimmons, Adrienne writes, "Soon the fruit beckoned to me, and it told me it wanted to play with that lonely endive in the fridge. And play they did, quite beautifully, together on the chartreuse salad plate. I love a salad with fruit, not a fruit salad mind you (though they are stupendous as well), but a salad that has the mystical interplay between sweet and savory, and that is what this salad had." She's a regular Danyelle Freeman! As Josh and I ate lunch at our desks, we wondered: how hard could it be to write about food in the style of these ladies?