Handmade gifts show love. For those of us with more time than money (an expanding category these days), hand made may be the only way to go.

For the crafty among us, now is the time to think about holiday gift giving; a darling scarf for the mother-in-law, mittens for the cousins, or bath salts for the sister. Here are four new titles that work with kids and can form the basis of a gift-making program.

Kid Made Modern Todd Oldham Retail Price: $22.95 Hardcover: 192 pages Publisher: Ammo Books – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 1934429368 / 9781934429365

Cool craft projects with a modern slant. Bright colors and clean lines are featured in print-making. Make wooden spoon puppets, Noguchi-like sculptures, Calder-like mobiles and wearable art.

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FamilyFun Homemade Holidays: 150 Festive Crafts, Recipes, Gifts & Parties Retail Price: $12.95 Paperback: 96 pages Publisher: Sterling – (2009-10-06) ISBN / EAN: 1402763581 / 9781402763588

The craft projects in this new version of the book originally pubbed by Disney in 2002 are right up my alley. Want to plan an ornament making program? Lot’s of terrific low-cost suggestions from 3-D dough pieces to elegant paper drops. Want to know how to make dancing gingerbread people? Love the edible wildlife ornaments; Pine Cones stuffed with peanut butter and birdseed (use almond butter if allergies are a problem) carrots wrapped in twine, and popcorn strung garlands. My favorite is the homemade gift of a gingerbread family decorating kit. Make gingerbread people and fill a tissue-lined box with a tube of white icing, sprinkles, redhots, tiny M&M’s and string licorice. Label the box Gingerbread Family Decorating Kit. Did you know you can make peanut brittle in the microwave? Have you thought about washing an old woolen sweater until it is felted to create material to reuse as mittens? Pretty easy and green too. Not just Christmas but other winter holidays are represented. Make a kinara for your Kwanzaa celebration. Create a mobile of stars for your Hanukah party.

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One More Skein: 30 Quick Projects to Knit Leigh Radford Retail Price: $19.95 Paperback: 128 pages Publisher: STC Craft/A Melanie Falick Book – (2009-09-01) ISBN / EAN: 1584798025 / 9781584798026

I am digging into my yarn stash after being inspired by the comfy yet stylish wrist warmers; a great beginner project for anyone who has just learned to knit and purl. I’ve been wanting to make a hot-water bottle cover; here it is as well as neck warmer. Also included are some pretty cool felted projects.

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Interweave Presents Knitted Gifts: Irresistible Projects to Make & Give Ann Budd Retail Price: $21.95 Paperback: 136 pages Publisher: Interweave Press – (2009-08-01) ISBN / EAN: 1596680911 / 9781596680913

From Ann Budd who wrote my favorite knitting book, The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns, comes a book of 30 gift ideas. A variety of projects for the beginning and experienced knitters; scarves, hats, socks, and toys that can be knitted up over a short period of time with lovely professional results.

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Refashioned Bags: Upcycle Anything into High-Style Handbags Faith Blakeney, Justina Blakeney Retail Price: $19.99 Paperback: 112 pages Publisher: Potter Craft – (2009-11-03) ISBN / EAN: 0307460886 / 9780307460882

Reduce, reuse , recyle: create clutches, totes, computer bags from old neckties, wool sweaters, shower curtains and even an umbrella.  These are just the kind of things that I see for sale at the very hipster Brooklyn Flea. So that’s how they made that!

For the second time in two months, a potential bestseller appears on the cover of the Book Review; this Sunday’s issue gives the cover treatment to Stephen King’s Under the Dome. It is, however, difficult to decipher whether the reviewer likes the book. While King’s “continued and slightly frenzied commerce with his muse has been one of the more enthralling spectacles in American literature,” his prose is “not all smooth sailing. Given King’s extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse.” (P.G. Wodehouse? Really?)

But, wait, there’s even more potential bestseller coverage. King’s unwitting cohort in the WalMart/Amazon/Target price wars, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, is also reviewed (“breathtaking”) as well as a book that appears on the nonfiction list for the first time this week, at #15, William Shawcross’s The Queen Mother (“more a document replete with data than a book designed to entertain”). Even more surprising, the #13 NF bestseller, My Life Outside the Ring, by Hulk Hogan is also reviewed; he “can be a lively, breezy narrator,” but “his compulsive confessing feels more like an effort to pre-empt the Us Weeklys and TMZs of the world than an authentic attempt at soul-searching.”

Adding to a string of acclaim for BEA librarian favorite,  Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Kate Christensen (Trouble) declares that she “loved” Rhoda Jantzen’s book.

This issue also features children’s books, including the Best Illustrated Childrens Books of 2009, plus reviews of several childrens and YA titles:

• Young Adult Novels About Fairies
• ’14 Cows for America’
• ‘Leviathan’
• ‘Purple Heart’
• Books About the Dust Bowl
• ‘Tales From Outer Suburbia’
• Picture Books About Winter
• Picture Books About Colors
• Animal Books
• Books About Trucks, Cars and Traffic
• ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ (reviewed by Roger Sutton)
• ‘White Noise’ — many libraries have not purchased this pop-up, probably because, as the reviewer says, it’d difficult “not to tear its intricate feats of paper engineering.”
• ‘All the World’

Next week is relatively light in terms of number of titles from big names.

Memoirs

Open: An Autobiography Andre Agassi Retail Price: $28.95 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2009-11-09) ISBN / EAN: 0307268195 / 9780307268198

Random House Audio; 9780739358566; $32

An excerpt from Open was the cover story in last week’s People and the press has been covering his admission that he took crystal meth. Agassi will be interviewed by Katie Couric on 60 Minutes on Sunday. The book gets a strong review in the new issue of Time. Despite all the publicity, holds in libraries are light.

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Last Words: A Memoir George Carlin Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2009-11-10) ISBN / EAN: 1439172951 / 9781439172957

S&S Audio; 9781442303188; $29.99

Fiction

Holds are running heavier at most libraries for Linda Howard’s new book than they are for Stephen King’s.

Ice: A Novel Linda Howard Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2009-11-10) ISBN / EAN: 0345517199 / 9780345517197

Random House Audio; 9780307577610; $30
Large Print; Thorndike; 9781410420343; hdbk; $33.95

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Under the Dome: A Novel Stephen King Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 1088 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2009-11-10) ISBN / EAN: 1439148503 / 9781439148501

S&S Audio; 9780743597302; $75

Gets 3.5 out of a possible 4 stars in the new issue of People, saying “although it lacks the power and strangeness of works like It and The Shining, it is till a wildly entertaining trip.”

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Wishin’ and Hopin’: A Christmas Story Wally Lamb Retail Price: $19.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Harper – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 006194100X / 9780061941009

HarperAudio; 9780061953262; $19.99
HarperLuxe; 9780061950261; pbk; $19.99

The Lacuna is Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel since her 1998 highly acclaimed, best-selling, Oprah-annoited book, The Poisonwood Bible. Fans looking forward to the new title may have been disappointed by Maureen Corrigan’s review on NPR’s Fresh Air. Damning the book with faint praise, she calls it just “so-so”;

…[the main character], Harrison is so pallid, so retiring that it’s very hard to stay for extended periods in his company, and seeing history unfold from his wan point of view isn’t all that illuminating.

I admit it: I’m mystified… [it] that feels altogether vacant.

Equally so-so is the review in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, which says that the book “never quite comes together…the plot grows muddy — and worse, a bit predictable.” Curiously, it still gets a B (is EW suffering from grade-creep?)

Other opinions have been decidedly different. People gave it 4 of a 4 possible stars, saying Kingsolver delivers “her signature blend of exotic locale, political backdrop and immediately engaging story line.”

In the UK, the Independent‘s reviewer loved the book so much that she swapped her bike for public transportation, so she could read it during her commute.

The Lacuna is one of the 10 titles in the Wal-Mart/Amazon/Target price wars; pre-ordered copies were priced at $8.98. The Lacuna is one three of the titles released on Tuesday and, as the AP reports, prices on those titles have since “moved up and down like stock market shares.”

Currently, The Lacuna is at #6 on Amazon’s sales rankings, where it’s now selling for $13.49 and #15 at WalMart.com, where it’s selling for $13.52. Large libraries are showing holds ratios ranging from 3:1 to 7:1.

The Lacuna: A Novel Barbara Kingsolver Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Harper – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0060852577 / 9780060852573

HarperAudio; 9780060853563; $44.99
HarperLuxe; 780061927560; pbk; $26.99
Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive

Two names you may not have expected to hear in the same sentence — Glenn Beck and Oprah Winfrey. Nonetheless, Motoko Rich’s headline in the NYT today says that “Glenn Beck Is Becoming New Oprah.”

But a Beck book is quite different from an Oprah book. Beck likes thrillers, especially ones that reflect his own political stances (Brad Thor, James Rollins, Vince Flynn). He’s also picked some authors who, as Beck delicately puts it, are “on the liberal side of things, which is, you know fine.”

Andrew Gross, for instance, tells Rich that the Beck attention gives with one hand and takes away with the other; conservatives who bought the book based on Beck’s recommendation are angry that they were duped into buying a “bunch of lefty” garbage. Meanwhile, his liberal fans are suspicious of his association with Beck.

Coming in this Sunday’s NYT Book Review — their selection of the ten best illustrated books (via Publishers Lunch). Only a few of the selections overlap with other lists.

We generally think of this list as being about childrens picture books, but there’s another kind of illustrated book out there, those in graphic format. This year’s list includes Tales from Outer Suburbia, a graphic format title that is shelved in YA by many libraries (although it appeals to a broader age range).

The only title that is not represented in most libraries is the pop-up book, White Noise.

Only a Witch Can Fly Alison McGhee Retail Price: $16.99 Hardcover: 32 pages Publisher: Feiwel & Friends – (2009-08-04)

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Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 (Richard Jackson Books (Atheneum Hardcover)) Brian Floca Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 48 pages Publisher: Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books – (2009-04-07) ISBN / EAN: 141695046X / 9781416950462

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The Odd Egg Emily Gravett Retail Price: $15.99 Hardcover: 32 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing – (2009-01-27) ISBN / EAN: 1416968725 / 9781416968726

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A Penguin Story Antoinette Portis Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 40 pages Publisher: HarperCollins – (2009-01-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061456888 / 9780061456886

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The Lion & the Mouse Jerry Pinkney Retail Price: $16.99 Hardcover: 40 pages Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers – (2009-09-01) ISBN / EAN: 0316013560 / 9780316013567

On PW‘s Best Childrens Books list and #8 on Amazon Editor’s Picks, Top Ten Picture Books

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Snow Day Komako Sakai Retail Price: $16.99 Hardcover: 32 pages Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books – (2009-01-01) ISBN / EAN: 0545013216 / 9780545013215

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Tales From Outer Suburbia Shaun Tan Retail Price: $19.99 Hardcover: 96 pages Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books – (2009-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 0545055873 / 9780545055871

Also on PW‘s Best Childrens Books list

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Yummy: Eight Favorite Fairy Tales Lucy Cousins Retail Price: $18.99 Hardcover: 128 pages Publisher: Candlewick – (2009-08-11) ISBN / EAN: 0763644749 / 9780763644741

Also on PW‘s Best Childrens Books list

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White Noise: A Pop-up Book for Children of All Ages David A. Carter Retail Price: $22.99 Hardcover: 20 pages Publisher: Little Simon – (2009-10-27) ISBN / EAN: 1416940944 / 9781416940944

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All the World Liz Garton Scanlon Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 40 pages Publisher: Beach Lane Books – (2009-09-08) ISBN / EAN: 1416985808 / 9781416985808

On PW Best Kids list

Esther Hautzig meant a lot to me. Her book, The Endless Steppe, a survival story about a family exiled to Siberia during WW II, was one that I read over and over again as a child. I must have borrowed it from the synagogue library, a small room where they trusted you to take and return books on your own. I was in the middle of a run of holocaust books like When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

Thirty years later, when I met Esther Hautzig at a celebration for Books for the Teenaged at New York Public Library, I was speechless. Then I burst into tears; that’s how real the narrator was to me.

Esther passed away on Sunday (read her obituary in the New York Times). Her funeral will be held today in New York City:

Wednesday, November 4, at 1:00
Plaza Jewish Community Chapel
Amsterdam and 91st Street

Full information is available here.

The Associated Press reports that Mark Obama Ndesandjo, President Obama’s half brother has acknowledged that his new novel about an abusive parent is based on his father, the man who was also the absent father President Obama wrote about in Dreams from My Father (by the way, there’s a great inside story about the publishing of that book in the Huffington Post today).

The book, Nairobi to Shenzhen, is being released by Aventine Press, a self-publishing company.

Libraries do not show the book on order; it is available through wholesalers.

Nairobi To Shenzhen Mark Obama Ndesandjo Retail Price: $16.95 Paperback: 358 pages Publisher: Aventine Press – (2009-10-20) ISBN / EAN: 1593306237 / 9781593306236

A book by another of the president’s half brothers, George Obama, will be published by Simon and Schuster in January 2010. It has not yet been reviewed pre-pub; it is described in the S&S Spring catalog, p 99.

Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival George Obama Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 1439176175 / 9781439176177

The AP also reports that Obama’s half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of Obama’s mother and her second husband, is working on a book as is Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother.

We’ve been tracking the amazing trajectory of the debut novel, The Help for over a year (including a giveaway of the audio back in February).

In the New York Times today, Motoko Rich writes about the book’s continuing word of mouth, which has kept it in the top five on the NYT Fiction list since August; quite a feat in normal times, but even more so in the midst of this particularly big-named-filled fall book season.

The novel, set in Mississippi in the early sixties, is about a young white writer who gains the trust of several black maids, most of whom work for her friends and family. She interviews them about their lives and how they feel about their white employers as material for a book. The young writer has to hide what she is doing, since this crossing of color lines would not be acceptable to her social circle, but the maids have even stronger reasons to keep what they are doing a secret, facing job loss an worse.

Several reviewers have been uncomfortable with the fact that the book’s author, Kathryn Stockett, who is white, portrays black women, using ’60’s southern dialect for their voices. In the NYT, Rich focuses whether this is ethical, quoting one blogger who calls Stockett a racist, while others feel she manages to walk the “racial tightrope”  (coincidentally, another recent word-of-mouth success, Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, is also by a white woman, writing in the voices of Mississippi blacks).

Rich does not successfully address the question of what makes The Help resonate so strongly with readers. Last week, on the Huffington Post, Jesse Kornbluth offered some compelling reasons:

The Help is about Something
“That is, something real. Something that matters. Most of all, something that matters to women, who are, as it happens, America’s most dedicated readers.”

It Rings True
“The maids are long-suffering, delightful, spicy; they’re a dream team of strength, wisdom and compassion. The white women — and this is the novel’s big achievement — are small-minded and pitiable, but they’re never cartoon villains.”

No Sugarcoating, But No Horror
“Smartest of all, Stockett has downplayed the horror that was Mississippi in 1962…[she] doesn’t sugarcoat racism but keeps the guns and violence always a few miles away. Smart thinking. In popular fiction like this, riling readers with false accusations of stolen silverware works just as well.”

I have another element to add to that — Stockett’s portrayal of the developing relationship among the women as they work on their project. You feel them becoming fans of each other, supporting and encouraging each other as they grow in mutual respect.

Libraries have been adding copies as the book continues to grow in popularity, but most are still showing heavy holds. Unfortunately, as the NYT points out (and we reported in mid-Sept), the paperback is being held off until June 1.

The Help Kathryn Stockett Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Putnam Adult – (2009-02-10) ISBN / EAN: 0399155341 / 9780399155345

Penguin Audio; ISBN: 9780143144182 $39.95
Downloadable from OverDrive in both eBook and audio

Actually, the Marine steals the show:

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Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine & a Miracle Brian Dennis, Mary Nethery, Kirby Larson Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 48 pages Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 031605318X / 9780316053181 Audio from Hachette Audio; 1600248713; $17.98 Also on PlayAway; 1607884313; $39.99 Book and audio downloadable from OverDrive

Amazon has just announced the final ten in their Top 100 Editors Picks countdown, close on the heels of PW‘s Top Ten released last week.

How do the two Top Ten lists compare? Unlike PW, Amazon manages to include books by women in their top ten. At #3 is this year’s Booker winner, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

At #5 is the forthcoming YA novel, Beautiful Creatures, which raises the count, since it is actually by two women, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (on Amazon, you can find a video of the authors discussing their writing process).

Beautiful Creatures Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl Retail Price: $17.99 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers – (2009-12-01)

Hachette Audio: MP3 CD; 12/1; 9781600248467; $29.98

Several libraries have not yet ordered Beautiful Creatures. Lisa Von Drasek, EarlyWord Kids, says, “it’s one of the best of the crowded field of supernatural romance out this year.” It also received a strong review in Booklist.

You can read an excerpt here.

Publishers Weekly‘s Best Children’s Books list is also in the current issue. Beautiful Creatures is not on that list, although another paranormal romance, Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater, made the cut.

The only title that appears on both Top Ten lists is the graphic format Stitches by David Small. It is also a National Book Award finalist, making it the only one to appear on all three lists. Only two other NBA titles appear on either of the lists; Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is on Amazon’s Top Ten and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin is on the PW Top Ten.

It looks like it’s that time is unpon us — we’ve set up a new Best Books ’09 links section, to the right, and will be adding to it as new lists appear.

Entertainment Weekly announces “exclusively” on their blog “Shelf Life” that those crazy folks at Quirk have come up with a new title for their Jane Austen/monster mashup series — a prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to be published in March.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls (Quirk Classics) Quirk Books Retail Price: $12.95 Paperback: 320 pages Publisher: Quirk Books – (2010-03-24) ISBN / EAN: 1594744548 / 9781594744549

Having trouble keeping up? Quirk feels your pain and has created a “fancy new web site” (their description), quirkclassics.com, with all the latest on their monster mashups.

Or, just keep reading EarlyWord; we wrote earlier, thanks to Jeffrey Gegner at Hennepin P.L., that two new Quirk Classics were in the works. Dawn of the Dreadfuls is one of those titles, we’re still waiting for information on another one:

While praising his new book, Janet Maslin gives Grisham a backhanded compliment in today’s NYT, saying the short story form frees him from “subplots and padding” and that this “vacation from whatever grueling work goes into the construction of fully rigged best sellers…invigorates him in ways that show up on the page.”

Although the is showing heavy holds, there are not nearly as many as one would expect for a full-length Grisham.

Ford County: Stories John Grisham Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2009-11-03) ISBN / EAN: 0385532458 / 9780385532457

Random House Audio; UNAB; 9780307702104; $35
Random House Large Print; 9780739377383; pbk; $24
Audio downloadable from OverDrive