"The Secret Life of Bees" is supposed to be pretty good. Nicholas Sparks is always bad.

I know very little about any of the other books. Really, i only read the bestsellers list to see if Al Franken is doing better than Ann Coulter (or whatever the lefty/righty authors of the week are) or the reverse.

Why has Oprah dropped books?

Oddly enough, we picked Anna Karenina for my classics book club this month. It's a little disconcerting to find it on the NYT best-seller list via Oprah.

I have read The Bourne Supremacy, and Nutty's right, they get progressively worse. The first one was kinda fun, but after that basically they just involve lots of running around and shrieking. I recall lots and lots of yelling. And swearing. I did however, think The Matarese Circle was very good, what I remember of it.

Now my spy novel reading basically consists of Alan Furst, who's excellent. Strong prose, complicated conflicted characters, dark and foreboding WWII-era and post-war Europe. Good stuff.

I see Dan Brown is on the list with another one. I keep hearing about another novel by two guys that is also sort of a secret history, but it's much better than The Da Vinci Code. Something of Four? That ring any bells?

I just checked her website and I was completely wrong, she still does books. Does she still do shows dedicated to the discussion of the selected book? I swear I remember something about her not doing book things anymore.

Why has Oprah dropped books?

She bumped into a table.

She suspended the book club for a year or so after Jonathan Franzen got snotty about "The Corrections" being chosen. I don't remember what the official reason was.

She did, with like live authors. Which bummed me out, cause I always learned from it. That Franzen asshole. But then, she got pissy back and said that she couldn't find anything inspiring in modern books anymore. Which, even unpublished, made me go "Hey!" Friends don't let friends read Dan Brown. Or Nicholas Sparks. Oy. Totally painful, for completely different reasons. But they both make Gutenberg cry.

Something of Four?

The Rule of Four. One of the authors is actually a college classmate of mine, though I didn't know him. I mostly want to read it for nostalgia's sake, since it's apparently set at Princeton.

Heaven is the one who grows up backwoods hillbilly poor, has a crush on her (alleged) half-brother, a sexual relationship with her foster father, then ... help me. I remember she moves in with her birth mother's family and sleeps with someone there, but I don't remember whether it's her step-grandfather or what.

Her step-grandfather (who, it turns out, raped and impregnanted her mother so therefore is her bio-grandfather) tried to rape her in the 3rd book Fallen Hearts because she had bleached her hair and looked like her mother. She falls in love with Troy, who she believes to be a non-blood relative but when they learn that she is indeed his biological neice, he drowns himself and she ends up marrying Logan, her sweetheart from back in the hills. (But, as in true series-romance, Troy was not dead, comes backin the 3rd book and he and Heaven have an affair that results in her daughter Annie.)

And doesn't she, like Dawn, ultimately marry a boy she was raised as a sister to? Or am I making that up?

Dawn did, but Heaven didn't. Tom, the boy Heaven was raised with as brother and sister dies in the second book, Dark Angel.

(Yes, I'm almost 30 and I still read the series twice a year)

Well, I recall it got a nice mention on NPR, so one assumes it doesn't suck.

I have friends who knew Matt Ruff at Cornell, which is one reason I continue to follow his career. The other reason being that he's really very talented, and needs to write more.

Says the woman still a frustrating 50 pages away from the end of Set This House in Order.