A ferocious portrait of creative and spiritual frustration, "The Woman Upstairs" begins by linking Nora's fury to her gender, a connection reinforced by the name she shares with the heroine of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." "It was supposed to say 'Great Artist' on my tombstone," she explains, "but if I died right now it would say 'such a good teacher/daughter/friend' instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same?"

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Apart from flashing my curmudgeon credentials, I'm trying to say that in this department, my bar is set pretty high. There are three food writers I will listen to. Two are true cooks (not chefs): the peerless Mark Bittman, who understands what does and does not matter about how we cook and eat, and Martha Stewart, who -- say what you will! -- taught me everything I know about baking. (Julia Child seems delightfully down-to-earth, but I'm not very interested in French cooking.)

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She hated it. As Aldrich recounts in her new memoir, "The Astor Orphan," "I had always wished I could have grown up in a three-bedroom ranch house with employed parents, siblings, cable TV and functional cars." She might also have added "regular meals," since the pantry in her family's section of Rokeby, the ancestral mansion where her people have lived for almost two centuries, was often bare. If her father couldn't snag a free batch of rejected TV dinners from a nearby pie factory, he'd have to borrow money from the local gas station proprietor for groceries. Her mother, a solitary (and, by all signs, depressed) Polish fiber artist -- who had thought she was marrying into a wealthy urban clan -- would only shout from the kitchen, "You'll have to eat shit for dinner if you can't dig up any cash!"

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The title of Moore's book, "How to Create the Perfect Wife," explains what Day was up to. From an early age -- sniffing at the revelry in that 18th-century party school, Oxford -- Day knew exactly how he intended to live. He planned to commit himself to "the unremitting practice of the severest virtue." He would adopt an austere existence in the country, thinking, reading, writing and doing good works, while receiving few visitors. The one thing he required to achieve this nirvana was a mate, and for that, too, he had something very particular in mind.

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Ursula Todd, the novel's main character, lives any number of lives in the course of the book. It's as if the providential force that commandeered Bill Murray's Feb. 2 in "Groundhog Day" has taken over her entire existence. She is stillborn in an English country house in 1910, or the doctor arrives on time and she survives. She drowns with her big sister, Pamela, during a seaside holiday at age 4, or they are both rescued by an amateur painter. She falls out a window the next year or, eluding that fate, succumbs to the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her various possible means of demise include domestic violence, the Blitz, suicide and a stroke. No wonder Atkinson gave her heroine a name that means "death" in German; the downside of getting a seemingly infinite number of chances at life is having to die an equal number of deaths.

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For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

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But as Monte Reel persuasively argues in his equally ripping (and far more intellectually satisfying) "Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm," another likely model for Challenger is Paul Du Chaillu, the first modern naturalist to observe gorillas in their native habitat. This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world.

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Cordain, who has a Ph.D in exercise physiology, assured Zuk that human beings had not had time to adapt to foods that only became staples with the advent of agriculture. "It's only been ten thousand years," he explained. Zuk's response: "Plenty of time." He looked at her blankly, and she repeated: "Plenty of time." Zuk goes on to write, "we never resolved our disagreement."

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Laura Miller was deeply moved by  Sonali Deraniyagal's incredible, spare memoir, “Wave,” about losing her parents, husband and children in the 2004 tsunami during a family vacation:

Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years.

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Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband's face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

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Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss' scholarly work on Christianity's obsession with martyrdom, titled "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom." She writes:

"Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. 'The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,' she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become 'politically secure,' thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film."

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Although Candida Moss' new book, "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," is about the three centuries following the death of Jesus, she makes a point of citing this modern-day parallel. What Bernall truly said and did in the moments before her death absolutely matters, Moss asserts, if we are going to hold her up as a "martyr." Yet misconceptions and misrepresentations can creep in so soon. The public can get the story wrong even in this highly mediated and thoroughly reported age -- and do so despite the presence among us of living eyewitnesses. So what, then, to make of the third-hand, heavily revised, agenda-laden and anachronistic accounts of Christianity's original martyrs?

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Also on the list of things that bug Paul: the waiter's insistence on elaborately recounting the provenance of every item they order ("Did you notice how he points with his pinky all the time?" Paul hisses to Claire), the "yawning chasm between the dish itself and the price you have to pay for it," and the "vast emptiness" of the plates when they arrive bearing their dainty portions of food.

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Laura Miller can not put down James Lasdun's haunting memoir, "Give Me Everything You Have," which recounts being stalked by a former protégé:

"In his remarkable 2002 novel, 'The Horned Man,' an academic estranged from his wife goes quietly mad while serving on his college’s sexual harassment committee, imagining that the department’s most legendary womanizer is secretly living in his office and sabotaging his life. Take a writer like this, one who specializes in the surreal, inward spiraling of paranoia, and make him the target of a clever stalker: It sounds like the premise of a James Lasdun novel, right? However, 'Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked,' Lasdun’s new book, is not a novel, but a memoir."

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Basinger, chair of film studies at Wesleyan University and best known for the marvelous book "A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960," specializes in the movies of the studio era; her romp through that period takes up well over two-thirds of this new volume -- the most knowing and illuminating portion. This focus is both an asset and a shame because so many of today's young cineastes are unfamiliar with or put off by movies made before 1960, and for this reason they may not appreciate "I Do and I Don't." Sometimes it's the black-and-white imagery they reject, but more often they're simply unable to read or adjust to the stylized codes of an era in popular culture that's vanishing in our collective rear-view mirror.

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Over and over, when imagining a childhood source for an individual's problems, Hubbard spins tales of unfaithful wives and husbands who beat and verbally abuse them, sometimes kicking their pregnant bellies. Perhaps we can attribute some of this to a preoccupation with prenatal trauma; "Dianetics" insists that fetuses can understand damaging statements made to the women carrying them. Nevertheless, to me, the most striking thing about the book -- besides Hubbard's belief that it is "not uncommon" for women to make "twenty or thirty" attempts at a self-induced abortion with orange sticks and other implements -- is its author's assumption that such beatings are a commonplace aspect of most people's home lives.

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