Oh lord, I love to read. I love to read and I love hardback books. While I'm reading a book I really like, I copy interesting words that I know I should remember the definitions of but don't (due to advanced maternal-onset senility) onto the empty back pages. I also make little carat marks, in pen, around felicitous phrases and passages and write the page numbers in the back of the book so that I can look them up later. (And I do, in fact, look up those phrases later for a momentary thrill before they sink like stones to the black, lightless bottom of my mind.) Sometimes late at night I wake up in a compulsive sweat, wondering what happened to my annotated copy of "Anna Karenina" or Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" or Giono's "Joy of Man's Desiring" -- did I lend it out and forget about it? Did someone steal it? Will I ever see it again? I keep an accusatory list of "lost" books in my purse, where I also have an assortment of postcard-cum-bookmarks, Post-its and the latest printout of my ongoing bookstore shopping list.

I love to read, but I find it increasingly hard to sniff out the books that won't waste my time, thanks to the increasingly slick and shrewd and hyperbolic publishing publicity machine. The marketers of lousy stories and self-deceived diarists have caught on to the clues I used to rely on to separate the titles that I was likely to appreciate from the ones that obviously wouldn't do. "Literary," which used to be considered a book's kiss of death for all but a lonely clutch of eggheads, is now applied with hopeful ubiquity, just as enterprising souls appropriate the term "art gallery" for every cat-painting tourist trap in America.

It used to be pretty easy to assume that any book that got a lot of publicity had to be bad. That's no longer a useful rule to follow, as Arundhati Roy's spectacular "God of Small Things," Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" (both Booker Prize winners) and David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" serve to attest. Neither does it follow any longer that books with no publicity budget are dogs. Maybe you never heard of Tim Pears' first novel, "In the Place of Falling Leaves," but it's no less artful than Roy's critically hailed book, though it faded quietly into relative oblivion, as did poet Denise Levertov's gemlike memoir, "Tesserae."

Choosing a book that will make you glad you stayed awake is more of a leap of faith than ever before. And since it's probably true that there's no accounting for taste, why should you take our word for anything? Nevertheless, we offer a few recommendations. Just don't expect to borrow a copy from me.

- - - - - - - - - -

"All Around Atlantis" by Deborah Eisenberg
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 244 PAGES

BY LAURA MILLER | If you ordinarily shy away from contemporary short stories because they're so often no more than allusive, melt-away wafers of fiction that leave you unsatisfied and/or scratching your head, take heart and take up a copy of Deborah Eisenberg's "All Around Atlantis." Each of the seven stories collected here is remarkably meaty, with characters and situations so richly developed you feel like you've read a whole novel each time you finish one. The best of them concern little girls or young women soldiering through the often absurd trials life throws at them with a winning mixture of naiveté and gimlet-eyed irony. A shy former drug addict observes that "Why did you start taking drugs?" isn't "a real question; it's just a sticky juicy treat. Pornography ... The real question: Why did you stop? ... high, she was as strong as wire, she needed nothing and she never had to pretend a thing." A daughter of a Holocaust survivor responds testily to her husband's pop-psych analysis of her "personal problems" thus: "I suppose I've had my share of 'personal problems.' But what other kind of problem can a person have?" This is a writer with ideas, wit and a fathomless, loving curiosity about the strange project of being human.

Read a review of this book in Salon's Sneak Peeks.

- - - - - - - - - -

"The Body Project" by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
RANDOM HOUSE, 267 PAGES BY LORI LEIBOVICH | As much as we'd like to forget parts of our adolescence -- the zits, the blood-stained white pants, the leg gashes carved with pink Daisy razors -- Joan Jacobs Brumberg makes us remember. In her revealing new book, "The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls," Brumberg explores the phenomenon of American girlhood and asks why, at the dawn of a new century, American girls are more obsessed with their physical selves then ever before. Brumberg answers this question by looking backward -- at the social, medical and sexual currents that have contributed to the fetishization of the adolescent female. Increasingly, girls view their bodies as the enemy, Brumberg says, entities to be molded and controlled. And more and more, they are appealing to consumer culture for panaceas.

Brumberg's thesis is nothing new -- feminists have decried the consumerization of femininity ad nauseam. It's the way Brumberg presents her findings that is refreshing. In an even (at times overly professorial) tone, Brumberg documents the "body projects" that girls undertake -- slimming their figures, clearing their skin, controlling menstruation with an array of products -- by citing advertisements and magazine articles and, most effectively, by peppering her text with the journal entries of young women. Brumberg stresses the need for intergenerational dialogue among women and laments that girls often learn about major life events like their first "period" from pamphlets. With "The Body Project," Brumberg provides a point of reference for mothers and daughters (and sisters and nieces and aunts and girlfriends) to advance this dialogue, to talk about the rigors of being female, about the bodies we all inhabit.

Read a review of this book in Salon's Sneak Peeks.

- - - - - - - - - -

"The Innocent Eye" by Jonathan Fineberg
PRINCETON UNIV. PRESS, 248 PAGES

BY KAREN TEMPLER | Jonathan Fineberg had a great idea: Place the works of many of the most popular painters of the century (Miró, Kandinsky, Picasso, et al.) alongside the children's works that inspired them. He has compiled an attractive and thought-provoking book. Unfortunately, he wants it to be more than a great idea. He wants it to be Groundbreaking.

Fineberg, a professor and winner of the Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing, spends the first few chapters of "The Innocent Eye" patting himself on the back for his "discovery" that the artists in question 1) knew how children drew, 2) had seen and collected the works of children and 3) had deliberately emulated their style. The problem is, it doesn't take a Pulitzer Fellow to know that much modern art was heavily influenced by children's art: It has been a common point of discussion among art enthusiasts for years. Even while Fineberg is hailing his own insights, he acknowledges that "Klee's interest in child art was well known at the time." He quotes Gauguin saying, "In order to produce something new, one must return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind," and Picasso saying, "When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael. It took me many years to learn how to draw like these children." He offers details of documented exhibits of children's work curated by these artists. And yet, he still seems convinced that he is breaking new ground.

Despite his efforts at academic transcendence, "The Innocent Eye" is basically a big, beautiful coffee-table book. Visually, it is both unique and stunning. Most successful are the chapters in which Fineberg compares the specific works of the artists to those of their own and other children, as well as their own childhood drawings (though there are none of those Raphaelite drawings Picasso claims to have made). What "The Innocent Eye" does successfully is reproduce a wealth of wonderful art by some of the masters accompanied by impressive children's works that they had shown and/or collected. It is fascinating to look at these inspired children's drawings and see them manifested in the artists' work.

Fineberg neither condones nor condemns what is essentially (in many cases) plagiarism of children's work. He does, however, criticize museum-goers who say things like, "That looks like a kid did it" as hypocrites. Since we all revere the child's wide-eyed, innocent presentation of the world, he argues, why should we disdain the same thing from a grown-up? Yet when a mature artist with a fully developed sense of form and shadow and perspective chooses to draw like a child, surely questions can be asked. After all, what child who could draw "better" would choose not to?