The average resident of the developed world uses the Internet constantly, contemplating its impact on contemporary life and exploring its numberless delights, temptations and annoyances on a daily basis. Yet, for most of us, any notion of how all this information arrives in our homes and workplaces is weirdly immaterial. Stevens was ridiculed for his hopelessly old-fashioned reference to the physical world and the movement of palpable objects, while smart kids and late-night comics grasped that the Internet has zipped beyond all that to become the disembodied essence of human communication.

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The criticism brought to mind a lengthy discussion on Reddit last year, inspired by an anecdote from a bookstore clerk who sold copies of all four "Twilight" novels to a sheepish professor. The professor's explanation: "Every time I reference low forms of literature, I always use 'Twilight' as the example. Today a student asked if I’ve actually read them, and I had to say no. They demanded that I do."

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One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie's father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie's whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, "People Who Eat Darkness," is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

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The suggestibility of readers isn't news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, "The Sorrows of Young Werther," inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science's job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge -- if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

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As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from "Wolf Hall" declares, "He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury."

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The better question is: How easy? For if smart people who have spent their entire careers calculating how to write or publish bestsellers find it impossible to produce a surefire winner -- and they do -- chances are that you and the many, many, many other people who have had the thoughts described above are underestimating the task. Presumably aspiring authors will be the most avid readers of James Hall's new book, "Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the 20th Century's Biggest Bestsellers," and they may well learn from it. But does this title, the latest attempt to nail down the essential qualities of extremely popular books, actually wrap its fingers around the mystery?

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The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion -- which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master's "Rhetoric" is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it's their own idea) throughout his book. "He was the first person," Leith writes of Aristotle, "really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself."

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Atwood appears in the documentary; she is shown working on her manuscript and giving her talks, which were commissioned by the celebrated Massey Lectures series in Canada. Her ideas link stories that include the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Canadian mogul Conrad Black's prison stint, efforts to unionize tomato farm workers in Florida, and most memorably, a neighborhood feud in Albania that resulted in a family being unable to leave their home for fear of being killed by their enemies.

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The new app for the Design Museum in London is, unsurprisingly, beautifully designed. It features 59 exemplary objects from the museum’s collection, everything from iconic chairs and the original, candy-colored iMac to the first plastic-covered nappy (diaper), devised by an American housewife in 1946 and celebrated in the accompanying text as an example of ingenious “design without designers.” Others are simply beautiful.

The items are presented on a grid, with each column and row scrollable either vertically or horizontally. Select an object and the entry expands to reveal a gallery of photographs from various angles, text explaining the object’s provenance and the reasons for its inclusion, and a brief video of museum director Deyan Sudjic talking about why it’s notable. Although Deyan has a pleasant voice and extemporizes comfortably, the videos are the weakest part of the app because they are superfluous. There’s nothing in them you can’t already find in the text or photographs. Occasionally, they miss an opportunity, such as not including the sound of Alberto Alessi’s famous Whistling Kettle, which was designed to sound like an American freight train, and since many of these objects are praised for their functionality, it would be nice to see some of them in action.

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An FBI agent from Dallas, Danny Coulson, knew better. As Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles relate in their impressive new book, "Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed -- and Why It Still Matters," Coulson jumped in his car and headed to Oklahoma City as soon as he heard about the bombing, fielding a call from a CBS correspondent along the way. She told him "everybody in Washington" said the perpetrators were Middle Eastern, but he said no way. "It's a Bubba job," he told her. "It's Bubbas."

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I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn't mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn't suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.

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So begins William Boyd's new novel, "Waiting for Sunrise." Of course, Vienna in 1914 was also the stomping ground of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalysis had just become popular among Europe's educated classes. Lysander arrives in town to seek treatment for a somewhat unusual sexual dysfunction: He can't reach orgasm during intercourse. Vienna fixes that right up, though whether his therapist's treatment works this miracle or it's accomplished thanks to the ministrations of that seductive sculptor remains one of the novel's many mysteries.

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Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of "natural causes." This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman's breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, "This one's for you, Walt!" There were DUI arrests. Also, his manufacturing company declared bankruptcy two years ago, and former franchisees of the once-ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries won settlements against him for fraud.

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As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity's deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long's new book, "Darwin's Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology," is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.

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Martin has always maintained that he's been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called "A Song of Ice and Fire") are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.

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Well, yes. But also: no. "The Hunger Games" series was already hugely popular, long before the movie was even shot. The first book alone has spent well over two years on the USA Today bestseller list. The films will doubtlessly promote the sales of even more books, but isn't that a bit beside the point? The books made the movie a hit, not the other way around. The real story of this weekend's record-breaking box office returns for the movie version of "The Hunger Games" is the awesome cultural power of young readers, especially young girls.

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A year abroad is far from a rare experience for American college students these days, but it's a surprisingly undercontemplated custom; Kaplan -- a professor of French at Yale and the author of a memoir and several prize-winning books on French history -- singles out a recently-published academic study by Whitney Walton. However, most attempts to understand the transformative visits of young Americans to other countries have come in the form of coming-of-age memoirs and autobiographical first novels. About Paris, above all, American youth has spun extravagantly romantic fantasies of self-discovery, blossoming cosmopolitanism and creative ferment.

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