There's also danger, anxiety, ill will and heaps of bad attitude, and "The Half-Blood Prince" doesn't skimp on any of it. The director is David Yates, who also made the 2007 "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." (Yates is currently finishing the final two movies in the series, adapted from Rowling's seventh and last Harry Potter book, the 2007 "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." His previous credits include the BBC series "State of Play.") "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" felt both truncated and sprawling, perhaps partly because Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg were faced with the tough task of trimming and adapting the longest of the Harry Potter books. But "The Order of the Phoenix" yielded some lovely moments, including one in which Daniel Radcliffe's Harry tries to describe his first kiss to Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione, only to find words inadequate.

With "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" -- which, like the first four "Harry Potter" movies, was adapted by Steve Kloves, who is also at work on "Deathly Hallows" -- Yates has become even more sure-footed. He's better at framing and connecting the movie's big, dramatic sequences (including a near-perilous journey Harry takes with Michael Gambon's Dumbledore, in which the former is set upon by an army of terrifying water-dwelling zombies), while he's as skillful as ever at shaping the story's quieter moments into moving, vital miniatures. "The Half-Blood Prince" -- with the help of Bruno Delbonnel's cautiously majestic cinematography and Stuart Craig's reliably gorgeous production design -- is a beautifully paced feat of filmmaking, one that navigates potentially choppy shifts in scale with grace and ease.

The movie opens just as a trio of Death Eaters descend upon the Muggle world in London, swooping down -- clearly at the behest of their boss, Lord Voldemort -- to destroy the Millennium Bridge. Harry is just finishing up his summer vacation, chatting up an extremely cute girl at a modest cafe, when Dumbledore pops onto the scene. (He makes his appearance in front of an Underground advertisement for a brand of perfume; the words "Divine Magic" stretch behind him like an introductory banner.) It has become increasingly clear that something really, really bad is going to happen at Hogwarts, something that will affect the whole world, and it's Harry's responsibility to stop it, with Dumbledore as his guide. Then there's that other business of actually growing up, which is also fraught with dangerous hiccups. Harry does have the help of his best friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, but they have troubles of their own: Hermione is in love with Ron, but he doesn't know it; Ron has become a quidditch star and, as such, has attracted the fawning attention of a dippy classmate, Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave). Meanwhile, Harry and Ginny Weasley (played by the suitably composed and serene Bonnie Wright) circle each other warily: Harry clearly has a crush on her, but she's dating someone else, and Ron's hovering protectiveness doesn't help, either.

In "The Half-Blood Prince" there are obvious villains (like Bellatrix Lestrange, played by crazy-eyed, pint-sized Helena Bonham Carter), possibly ambiguous villains (like Alan Rickman's stately, creepy, sexy Severus Snape and Tom Felton's Draco Malfoy, who's grown into a tall, sneering blond straight out of Duran Duran) and random figures who are essentially decent but who haven't always taken the right path (like Potions professor Horace Slughorn, played by Jim Broadbent, an affable tippler who "collects" star students so he can drop their names later). There's also the usual assortment of classmates, including one of my personal favorites, the flaxen-haired space case Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch), who drifts through the movie like a pale Victorian ghostie. (She has a fine moment in which she appears, as if out of nowhere, in a lion headdress, ready to cheer the Gryffindor House quidditch team to victory.)

Rowling's Harry Potter novels begin as children's books and gracefully evolve into young-adult fiction, and it's in "The Half-Blood Prince" that the suffering and frustration of adolescence really begin to emerge with great clarity. Yates contrasts those small moments of terror with bigger ones: One of the most unnerving sequences features an image borrowed directly from J-horror. But Yates is attuned to all kinds of emotional pain, and his youthful actors -- who have become both stronger and more relaxed as performers with each successive movie -- are right in step with him. In one scene, Hermione suffers as she watches Ron willingly cuddle up to Lavender. She's conjured a circle of swirling little birds -- as she tells Harry, in whom she tentatively confides her heartbreak, they're the result of a charm spell she's practicing. When Ron clumsily fails to grasp that he's hurt her, she sends the birds hurtling toward his head -- they narrowly miss his head and shatter in a mist of feathers on the wall behind him, tiny, floating remnants of her fury and pain. Yates also guides his actors through a scene of astonishing erotic beauty, an encounter between two characters that's more tender than it is overly sexualized. The moment takes place amid a jumble of old, magical artifacts: Romantic love, as an idea, may technically be very old, but it's the young who keep it new by continually breathing life into it.

Yates handles the movie's most devastating scene -- a moment of swift but incalculable loss -- so deftly that you almost can't believe the unthinkable is actually happening. "The Half-Blood Prince" is partly a story about the old ceding the world to the young, even before the young are ready for it. At one point Gambon's Dumbledore summons Harry to his chambers, needing to speak to him about some very serious business. But first, he cautiously mentions that he's noticed how much time Harry spends with Hermione. Are the two of them, perhaps ...? Dumbledore doesn't even have to finish the question. Gambon plays the moment with a wonderful, shy delicacy.

Harry tells him that he and Hermione are just friends, but the idea is clear. Dumbledore wants Harry to find love -- to find all the things that might give him pleasure in life, in addition to all the heavy-duty responsibilities he's already carrying. One of the pleasures of watching the emerging mosaic of the "Harry Potter" movies has been seeing how each director puts his own stamp on the source material: Alfonso Cuarón gave us a brooding, beautiful "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"; Mike Newell's "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was more pastoral but hardly comforting.

By the series' completion, Yates will have directed half of the "Harry Potter" movies, and that mutes the surprise element a bit. But "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" at least ensures that the franchise's remaining movies are in good hands. Yates understands the bond, and the continuity, that's so essential between the old and the young. In one of the movie's loveliest scenes, Broadbent's professor Slughorn, slightly sozzled, describes to Harry a piece of magic worked by one of his former students. He describes this wonderful, delicate feat so vividly that his words are more effective than visuals would be. And, as it turns out, this bit of magic had been worked by Harry's long-dead mother, Lily. It was, Slughorn tells Harry, peering at him as if through mist, "the most beautiful magic." That's a measure of how subtle a spectacle Yates has given us with "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." The most beautiful magic in it is left unseen. And still, it emerges with absolute clarity.

"Eden," a modestly scaled but powerful marriage drama set in a backwater Irish town, pulls the Emerald Isle's cinema into the 21st century in impressive fashion. Director Declan Recks and screenwriter Eugene O'Brien (who adapts his own play) admirably capture the blend of cosmopolitan culture and traditional folkways that has defined Irish society during its recent economic boom, but the heart and soul of the film is Eileen Walsh's vulnerable, startling and sexy performance as Breda, a 30ish wife and mother who's increasingly starved for affection and attention. Walsh won the Tribeca festival's best-actress prize, and you'll see why.

Breda's husband, Billy (Aidan Kelly), is slipping into early-midlife alcoholism and lechery, convinced that the town's teenage tart is warm for his form. Breda must do battle with familiar varieties of small-town snobbery and bitchiness, along with the totally unexpected arrival of a potential lover. Thrumming with anguish and erotic vitality, "Eden" paints a heartbreaking portrait of a newly affluent country (freed from dour priests, whiskey-soaked revolutionaries and shawl-clad women) afflicted with emotional growing pains. (Now playing at the Sunshine Cinema in New York. Opens Nov. 21 in Boston and Los Angeles, Dec. 5 in San Francisco, Dec. 12 in Philadelphia and San Diego, Dec. 19 in Washington and Jan. 9 in Houston, with more cities to follow.)

"We Are Wizards," Josh Koury's documentary about the wide-ranging DIY pop-culture universe that has sprung up around the Harry Potter books and movies, was among the delights at last spring's South by Southwest festival. It's highly enjoyable even if (like me) you're not much of a Potterphile. Starting with the "Wizard Rock" scene that has produced the warring indie bands Harry and the Potters (representing the forces of good, quite obviously) and their evil counterparts Draco and the Malfoys, Koury gradually moves on to more extreme phenomena like the self-described "Partridge Family of Wizard Rock," actually a noise-metal band whose lead singer was 7 years old at the time of filming. Then there's the genuinely inspirational saga of Heather Lawver, a teenage Web entrepreneur who has battled both Warner Bros. and a life-threatening cancer, sparking a worldwide boycott of Potter products.

Strangest and most delightful of all is Austin, Texas, comic artist Brad Neely (known for his widely disseminated animation "George Washington," a profile of "the most bad-ass of all people who have ever existed"), whose profoundly unauthorized audio work "Wizard People, Dear Reader" offers an alternate soundtrack to the first "Harry Potter" film. It's a vast improvement. I continue to believe that J.K. Rowling's actual books are not all that great. But the outburst of unquenchable self-invented creativity the Potter volumes have spawned, as seen here, is undeniable and completely irresistible. (Now playing at Cinema Village in New York. Opens Nov. 26 at the Denver Film Society, with more cities, and DVD release, to be announced.)

Sometimes the perfect thing to round out your weekend is a little pseudo-arty Eurosleaze. You know what I'm talking about, those of you out there with your Criterion Collection "Night Porter" DVDs, your hoards of Nicolas Roeg and Lina Wertmuller treasures. German actor-writer-director Vadim Glowna's new "House of the Sleeping Beauties" (adapted from the novel by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata) doesn't quite measure up to that standard, but from the sultry-jazz opening soundtrack to the bevy of slumbering nudes, it's got all the moody pretentiousness of European A-minus erotica at its finest. Plus it's got hubris to burn, since the 67-year-old director and star gives himself numerous nude scenes (one of them full-frontal) alongside a half-dozen or so unclad hotties.

Glowna plays Edmond, a widowed and depressed businessman, whose best friend (German screen legend Maximilian Schell) ships him off to an unusual brothel: Through some unexplained medication or mechanism, the assortment of lovely young things are always asleep, and won't wake up no matter what you do to them or with them. The house madam (Angela Winkler), a sexy but sinister dame close to Edmond's age, suggests flirtatiously that certain things are off limits and that punishment may attend violations. But since this is pretentious European erotica, nothing can actually be made clear. In fact, your first idea about exactly what brew of Eros and Thanatos is being cooked up here will likely be correct; Edmond figures it out too, which doesn't stop him from coming back. A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive. (Now playing at the Quad Cinema in New York. Opens Dec. 12 in San Diego and Jan. 9 in Chicago, with other cities to be announced and DVD release to follow.)

The preceding three installments in the series -- "Twilight," "New Moon" and "Eclipse" -- occupy the top slots in Publishers Weekly's bestseller list for children's fiction (they are categorized as Young Adult, or YA, titles), and are among the top five overall bestsellers on USA Today's list. In May, Publishers Weekly reported that 5.3 million copies of the Twilight books had sold in the U.S. alone. When a movie based on the first novel comes out in December, expect to see book sales jump to numbers that approach Rowling's eight-figure numbers.

No wonder the media has heralded Twilight as the next Harry Potter and Meyer as the second coming of J.K. The similarities, however, are largely commercial. It's hard to see how Twilight could ever approach Harry Potter as a cultural phenomenon for one simple reason: the series' fan base is almost exclusively female. The gender imbalance is so pronounced that Kaleb Nation, an enterprising 19-year-old radio show host-cum-author, has launched a blog called Twilight Guy, chronicling his experiences reading the books. The project is marked by a spirit that's equal parts self-promotion and scientific inquiry -- "I am trying to find why nearly every girl in the world is obsessed with the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer" -- and its premise relies on the fact that, in even attempting this experiment, Nation has made himself an exceptional guy indeed.

Bookstores have been known to shelve the Twilight books in both the children's and the science fiction/fantasy sections, but they are -- in essence and most particulars -- romance novels, and despite their gothic trappings represent a resurrection of the most old-fashioned incarnation of the genre. They summon a world in which love is passionate, yet (relatively) chaste, girls need be nothing more than fetchingly vulnerable, and masterful men can be depended upon to protect and worship them for it.

The series' heroine, Bella Swan, a 16-year-old with divorced parents, goes to live with her father in the small town of Forks, Wash. (a real place, and now a destination for fans). At school, she observes four members of a fabulously good-looking and wealthy but standoffish family, the Cullens; later she finds herself seated next to Edward Cullen in biology lab and is rendered nearly speechless by his spectacular beauty. At first, he appears to loathe her, but after a protracted period of bewilderment and dithering she discovers the truth. Edward and his clan are vampires who have committed themselves to sparing human life; they call themselves "vegetarians." The scent of Bella's blood is excruciatingly appetizing to Edward, testing his ethical limits and eventually his emotional ones, too. The pair fall in love, and the three books detail the ups and downs of this interspecies romance, which is complicated by Bella's friendship with Jacob Black, a member of a pack of Native American werewolves who are the sworn enemies of all vampires.

Comparisons to another famous human girl with a vampire boyfriend are inevitable, but Bella Swan is no Buffy Summers. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was at heart one of those mythic hero's journeys so beloved by Joseph Campbell-quoting screenwriters, albeit transfigured into something sharp and funny by making the hero a contemporary teenage girl. Buffy wrestled with a series of romantic dilemmas -- in particular a penchant for hunky vampires -- but her story always belonged to her. Fulfilling her responsibilities as a slayer, loyalty to her friends and family, doing the right thing and cobbling together some semblance of a healthy life were all ultimately as important, if not more important, to her than getting the guy. If Harry Potter has a vampire-loving, adolescent female counterpart, it's Buffy Summers.

By contrast, Bella, once smitten by Edward, lives only for him. When he leaves her (for her own good) at the beginning of "New Moon," she becomes so disconsolate that she resorts to risking her own life, seeking extreme situations that cause her to hallucinate his voice. This practice culminates in a quasi-suicidal high dive into the ocean, after which, on the brink of drowning, she savors visions of her undead boyfriend: "I thought briefly of the clichés, about how you're supposed to see your life flash before your eyes. I was so much luckier. Who wanted to see a rerun, anyway? I saw him, and I had no will to fight ... Why would I fight when I was so happy where I was?" After Edward returns, the only obstacle she can see to her eternal happiness as a member of the glamorous Cullen family is his stubborn refusal to turn her into a vampire: He's worried that she'll lose her soul.

Otherwise directionless and unsure of herself, Bella's only distinguishing trait is her clumsiness, about which she makes frequent self-deprecating jokes. But Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she's more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible in order to render her a vacant, flexible skin into which the reader can insert herself and thereby vicariously enjoy Edward's chilly charms. (His body is as hard and cold as stone, an ick-inducing detail that this reader, for one, found impossible to get past.) Edward, not Bella, is the key to the Twilight franchise, the thing that fans talk about when explaining their fascination with the books. "Perfect" is the word most often used to describe him; besides looking like a male model, Edward plays and composes classical music, has two degrees from Harvard and drives several hot cars very, very fast. And he can read minds (except, mysteriously, for Bella's). "You're good at everything," Bella sighs dreamily.

Even the most timorous teenage girl couldn't conceive of Bella as intimidating; it's hard to imagine a person more insecure, or a situation better set up to magnify her insecurities. Bella's vampire and werewolf friends are all fantastically strong and fierce as well as nearly indestructible, and she spends the better part of every novel alternately cowering in their protective arms or groveling before their magnificence. "How well I knew that I wasn't good enough for him" is a typical musing on her part. Despite Edward's many protestations and demonstrations of his utter devotion, she persists in believing that he doesn't mean it, and will soon tire of her. In a way, the two are ideally suited to each other: Her insipidity is the counterpart to his flawlessness. Neither of them has much personality to speak of.

But to say this is to criticize fantasy according to the standards of literature, and Meyer -- a Mormon housewife and mother of three -- has always been frank about the origins of her novels in her own dreams. Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.

Bella and her world are barely sketched -- even Edward himself lacks dimension. His inner life and thoughts are known to us only through what Bella sees him say or do. The characters, such as they are, are stripped down to a minimum, lacking the texture and idiosyncrasies of actual people. What this sloughing off permits is the return, again and again, to the delight of marveling at Edward's beauty, being cherished in his impermeable arms, thrilling to his caresses and, above all, hearing him profess, over and over, his absolute, unfailing, exclusive, eternal and worshipful adoration. A tiny sample:

"Bella, I couldn't live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don't know how it's tortured me ... you are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever."

"I could see it in your eyes, that you honestly believed that I didn't want you anymore. The most absurd, ridiculous concept -- as if there were any way that I could exist without needing you!"

"For this one night, could we try to forget everything besides just you and me?" He pleaded, unleashing the full force of his eyes on me. "It seems like I can never get enough time like that. I need to be with you. Just you."

Need I add that such statements rarely issue from the lips of mortal men, except perhaps when they're looking for sex? Edward, however, doesn't even insist on that -- in fact, he refuses to consummate his love for Bella because he's afraid he might accidentally harm her. "If I was too hasty," he says, "if for one second I wasn't paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I'm with you." As a result, their time together is spent in protracted courtship: make-out sessions and sweet nothings galore, every shy girl's dream.

Yet it's not only shy girls who crush mightily on Edward Cullen. One of the series' most avid fan sites is Twilight Moms, created by and for grown women, many with families of their own. There, as in other forums, readers describe the effects of Meyer's books using words like "obsession" and "addiction." Chores, husbands and children go neglected, and the hours that aren't spent reading and rereading the three novels are squandered on forums and fan fiction. "I have no desires to be part of the real world right now," posted one woman. "Nothing I was doing before holds any interest to me. I do what I have to do, what I need to do to get by and that's it. Someone please tell me it will ease up, even if just a little? My entire world is consumed and in a tailspin."

The likeness to drug addiction is striking, especially when you consider that literary vampirism has often served as a metaphor for that form of enthrallment. The vampire has been a remarkably fluid symbol for over a hundred years, standing for homosexuality, bohemianism and other hip manifestations of outsider status. Although the connection between the bloodsucking undead and romance fiction might seem obscure to the casual observer, they do share an ancestor. Blame it all on George Gordon, aka Lord Byron, the original dangerous, seductive bad boy with an artist's wounded soul and in his own time the object of as much feminine yearning as Edward Cullen has been in the early 21st. Not only did Byron inspire such prototypical romantic heroes as Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester (a character Meyer has listed as among her favorites), he was the original pattern for the vampire as handsome, predatory nobleman. His physician, John William Polidori, wrote "The Vampyre," a seminal short story that featured just such a figure, Lord Ruthven, patently based on the poet. Before that, the vampires of folklore had been depicted as hideous, bestial monsters.

Bram Stoker's Count Dracula was the English bourgeoisie's nightmare vision of Old World aristocracy: decadent, parasitic, yet possessed of a primitive charisma. Though we members of the respectable middle class know they intend to eat us alive, we can't help being dazzled by dukes and princes. Aristocrats imperiously exercise the desires we repress and are the objects of our own secret infatuation with hereditary hierarchies. Anne Rice, in the hugely popular Vampire Chronicles, made her vampire Lestat a bisexual rock star -- Byron has also been called the first of those -- cementing the connection between vampire noblemen and modern celebrities. In recent years, in the flourishing subgenre known as paranormal romance, vampires play the role of leading man more often than any other creature of the night, whether the mode is noir, as in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series of detective novels or chick-lit-ish, as in MaryJanice Davidson's Queen Betsy series.

The YA angle on vampires, evident in the Twilight books and in many other popular series as well, is that they're high school's aristocracy, the coolest kids on campus, the clique that everyone wants to get into. Many women apparently never get over the allure of such groups; as one reader posted on Twilight Moms, "Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love," a mix of adolescent social aspirations with what are ostensibly adult longings.

The "underdog strange girl" who gets plucked from obscurity by "the best guy in school" is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join. Unlike Buffy, Bella is no hero. "There are so many girls out there who do not know kung fu, and if a guy jumps in the alley they're not going to turn around with a roundhouse kick," Meyer once told a journalist. "There's a lot of people who are just quieter and aren't having the Prada lifestyle and going to a special school in New York where everyone's rich and fabulous. There's normal people out there and I think that's one of the reasons Bella has become so popular."

Yet the Cullens, although they don't live in New York, are rich and fabulous. Twilight would be a lot more persuasive as an argument that an "amazing heart" counts for more than appearances if it didn't harp so incessantly on Edward's superficial splendors. If the series is supposed to be championing the worth of "normal" people, then why make Edward so exceptional? If his wealth, status, strength, beauty and accomplishments make him the "best" among all the boys at school, why shouldn't the same standard be applied to the girls, leaving Bella by the wayside? Sometimes Edward seems to subscribe to that standard, complaining about having to read the thoughts of one of Bella's classmates because "her mind isn't very original." But then, neither is Bella's. In a sense, Bella is absolutely right: She's not "good enough" for Edward -- at least, not according to the same measurements that make Edward "perfect." Yet by some miracle she -- unremarkable in every way -- is exempt from his customary contempt for the ordinary. Then again, by choosing her he proves that she's better than all the average people at school.

Such are the tortured internal contradictions of romance, as nonsensical as its masculine counterpart, pornography, and every bit as habit forming. Search a little deeper on the Internet and you can find women readers both objecting to the antifeminist aspects of Twilight and admitting that they found the books irresistible. "Sappy romance, amateurish writing, etc.," complained one. Still, "when I read it, I just couldn't put it down. It was like an unhealthy addiction for me ... I'm not sure how I could read through it, seeing how I dislike romances immensely. But I did, and when I couldn't get 'New Moon' I almost had a heart attack. That book was hypnotizing."

Some things, it seems, are even harder to kill than vampires. The traditional feminine fantasy of being delivered from obscurity by a dazzling, powerful man, of needing to do no more to prove or find yourself than win his devotion, of being guarded from all life's vicissitudes by his boundless strength and wealth -- all this turns out to be a difficult dream to leave behind. Vampires have long served to remind us of the parts of our own psyches that seduce us, sapping our will and autonomy, dragging us back into the past. And they walk among us to this day.

What makes the McClellan book news is that he's a loyalist breaking ranks with the Bush administration. That's premise enough to spawn hours of cable-news debates, but not enough, perhaps, to merit a full-length review, as a couple of newspaper book review editors (asking not to be identified) complained this weekend. Making matters worse, the publication schedules of most newspaper book sections dictate that, since advance copies were not available, any review would have to run at least two weeks after the book's release date, long after the hyped-up news cycle has moved on. In a cultural climate that mostly consists of simple sound bites followed by endless opinionating, the book -- ideally, a work of sustained thought -- seems almost anachronistic.

Hillel Italie, who writes about publishing for The Associated Press, and Geoff Shandler, editor in chief of Little, Brown, were discussing this intently on the exhibit floor Friday morning. Italie speculated that the pace of modern life was a problem. "A four-day work week could make a difference," he said. Shandler saw cause for hope in the notion that readers can be encouraged to use books to escape the jittery pressures of modern life. But that's only likely to happen, he added, if they develop a relationship with books at an early age. "Harry Potter has been great for showing kids the kind of experience a book has to offer," he said. "So here's my recommendation for how to save reading: make children's books tax deductible."

A panel earlier that day, "To Read or Not to Read," took up the same topic. The panel was kicked off with the release of further data from the National Endowment for the Arts' 2007 report on American reading habits, a litany of depressing figures that have become all too familiar of late. There was one bright spot, however: Nine-year-olds are apparently reading more and at a higher level than has been previously recorded. Since the same survey revealed that "proficient readers" are also more likely both to vote in general elections and to volunteer their time to worthy causes, perhaps J.K. Rowling will someday take credit for single-handedly preventing America from degenerating into a nation of selfish, apathetic dullards.

In general, "juvenile" publishers and authors did seem more upbeat. Sherman Alexie, who has written several adult titles and last year won the National Book Award for his first Y.A. (young adult) novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," is a case in point. "No one in Y.A. is talking about that," he said when asked about the dire forecasts on the future of reading. "They're talking about how the genre is booming. Maybe writers for adults can learn something there: write more like the Y.A. writers." What did Y.A. fiction offer? Stronger stories and less ornate prose? That and more, Alexie concurred. "The audience doesn't tolerate bullshit," he added.

"I'm not actually pessimistic," said David Ulin, editor of the L.A. Times Book Review, in an aisle seething with convention-goers snapping up free tote bags and advance reader's copies of forthcoming novels by such authors as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Dennis Lehane. "I think people will still go on reading books." Times employees are nervously awaiting a rumored round of layoffs, but Ulin believes that his section, the survivor of much-lamented cutbacks last year, is safe for now. The future of newspaper book sections remains uncertain, however, given the distressed state of newspapers in general. One publisher noted that some papers in major West Coast cities like San Francisco and Seattle didn't even send their book editors to the convention this year, a bit of economizing that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Things didn't look so bad at BEA, what with attendees lining up into the aisles to score autographed books. True, some of the most popular authors had earned their celebrity in other fields: Billie Jean King, John Dean, Brooke Shields, both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (in separate booths) and Barbara Walters. There were parties for Alec Baldwin and Prince -- the latter, thrown at the artist's Los Angeles home, constituted the hot ticket of the weekend. Actual writers still managed to command crowds, however, with crime novelists Michael Connelly and Brad Meltzer generating some of the longest lines. (Even this usually jaded reporter was thrilled to stumble upon Neal Stephenson autographing galleys of his new novel, "Anathem," in the William Morrow booth.)

In unguarded moments, however, publishers complained that they received more pitches than they had a chance to deliver. "It's relentless," one sales rep sighed at a party for Connelly in L.A.'s Union Station. "Every time you turn around, someone's shoving a manuscript into your hands. I keep telling them I'm not an editor, but they don't seem to understand the difference." Aspiring writers planted themselves in autograph lines in a bid to pass unpublished manuscripts to established authors or to beg celebrities to plug their book on TV. (Apparently, all those Americans who claim to be too busy to buy or read books can still find plenty of time to write them.)

Of course, book publishing has always been a rather gloomy profession, predicting its own demise for as long as anyone can remember. This outlook may, for a change, put it in tune with the rest of the nation -- but not for long, if one author's predictions come true. The celebrated novelist Ethan Canin, at the expo to promote his new book, "America America," believes the staggering economy will foster interest in books. "Movies cost half as much, but books last five times as long, so they're a bargain," he said. "I think this could be good for everyone, in a way. What with the price of gas, everyone I know is riding bicycles more, and even the teenagers I know are backing away from Facebook and MySpace and all that stuff, saying they want something more substantial. Who knows? This recession could be a blessing in disguise for books and for people in general."

The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger. The displays of personalities such as Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter ... as well as the irregular importation of unsanctioned computer games and movies are all warning bells to the officials in the cultural arena. Undoubtedly, the personality and identity of the new generation and our children, as a result of unrestricted importation of toys, has been put at risk and caused irreparable damages.

Of course, Iran has long fought Barbie's invasion. In 1992, the country unsuccessfully attempted to seize the doll from all toy stores and tried to provide a culturally acceptable alternative with Sara, a brown-haired doll that comes with a head scarf; and in 1996, Iran's children's agency deemed Barbie a "Trojan horse" designed to sneak in sexualized Western fashions. So, let's lay down some bets -- who thinks this time Iran will actually go so far as to banish Barbie?