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This book, just out, sold more than a quarter million copies in the United States on its first day. It has sparked huge Internet debates between members of Team Edward and Team Jacob over how it resolved the lives of its characters in this fourth installment. For those of you late to the party, Breaking Dawn is the final book (well, other than the official guide coming out in December) of the young adult Twilight series written by Stephenie Meyer that tells the story of high school student Bella and her two loves: Edward the vampire and Jacob the werewolf.

This book is heftier than the others, 754 pages of narrative and it’s slow going at first with Bella’s pre-marriage jitters. Hadn’t we already been through this in the earlier books? Anyhow, she’s about to be married to Edward, the frozen-in-time 17-year-old who doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. He also doesn’t drink human blood, but is part of a local coven whose members have redirected their energies toward large wild animals. Meanwhile, signs are up all over town for the missing Jacob, although his own father doesn’t seem too upset about his disappearance.

The Night of the Gun, New York Times columnist David Carr’s memoir that came out yesterday, has received tons of attention. This partly could be because the media is fascinated by its own, but it’s also because the book is absolutely riveting.

Carr has lived an extraordinary life – drug addict and woman beater, cancer survivor and single father of twin girls – that makes for great, if disturbing, reading. He holds nothing back as he tries to get a handle on his life, how he seemingly went from being one person to another one.

The reader learns about him snorting coke at work, smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend, threatening his friends, smelling like vomit, forgetting where his car is (it is never seen again), choking his girlfriend, crawling on the floor looking for lost drugs, leaving his babies in the car while he did coke. It is the narrative of a downward descent and the trip back up – one we may have heard before, but compelling all the same. “As a friend of mine put it,” he writes, “‘Sure, it’s all been said, but it hasn’t been said by you.’” And he is one hell of a writer.

Half Hispanic, half white, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, has spent most of her life being asked which she was.

“I had no answer to this. Both? Neither? Either?” she writes.

Griest grew up just south of Corpus Christi speaking very little Spanish, and admits she went from checking “white” on forms to “Hispanic” when a guidance counselor told her it might help her win college scholarships. (It did, she won a full-ride to UT Austin and later became a Hodder Fellow at Princeton.) Her first book, Around the Bloc, was her diary as a young American woman traveling alone through China, Russia and Cuba. Her latest book, Mexican Enough, is set a little closer to home.

A monkey has escaped from a bedroom and attached itself to the head of a past-her-prime former singing star and proceeds to hump her head, leaving behind a dollop of some substance that probably isn’t hair gel.

This is classic Janet Evanovich and however improbable, it’s tough not to laugh at it. It’s a variation on the theme that has carried this now 14th Stephanie Plum novel to the best seller lists once again.

The plot of Fearless Fourteen, which really just provides setups for slapstick and sexual innuendo, is that this guy named Dom Rizzi stole a bunch of money from a bank, went to prison where he kept his mouth shut and is now out, ready to cash in on his ordeal. The complication: Dom may have hidden the money in the house his cousin Joe Morelli inherited from their aunt Rose. Dom thought he was getting the house, but Aunt Rose changed her will after his conviction.

As a headline from last week’s Time states, smoking pot is an “American Pastime.”

The article was reporting on a survey that determined that “Americans were more likely to have tried marijuana or cocaine than people in any of the 16 other countries, including France, Spain, South Africa, Mexico and Colombia, that the survey covered.” Forty-two percent of Americans have tried pot. So yeah, we like our drugs. Is this cause for worry?

A Russian journalist dies and once more Gabriel Allon, the mysterious Israeli agent/fine picture restorer, ends up back in Moscow, a place he loathes, a place where he almost died once.

Bestselling thriller writer Daniel Silva has gone to the new Moscow, one of sudden self-made millionaires working at the same level of intrigue as the old KGB. Allon has just gotten married to Chiara and is on his honeymoon in Italy, happily restoring a painting under an alias, when his employers call, asking for a favor. It seems a second Russian journalist wants to tell Allon and only Allon why the first journalist, his co-worker, was killed.

This meeting never takes place – the second journalist is killed right before Allon can get to him – and in short order, Allon has a full-fledged case on his hands. Rather than coming back the next night, Allon enters into an extended absence from the Old Master and his new wife.

Pulitzer-Prize winner Tony Horwitz hit the best-seller lists a while back with the critically praised Confederates in the Attic, but since I’m not much of a Civil War buff I took a pass on it.

Now that I’ve read his new book, A Voyage Long and Strange, I definitely understand the charm.

The subject of this book may turn off some people, too – the history of the pre-Mayflower exploration of the North American continent.

Tedious descriptions of starving conquistadors and vain searches for golden cities, right? Not in Horwitz’ hands.

Anyone who has experienced identity theft knows that there is no simple way to clear it up; there is no one-call-solves-all approach and that, in fact, it may take weeks, months or even years to get your life straightened out.

Bestselling murder mystery writer Jeffery Deaver taps into this for his latest fast-paced Lincoln Rhyme story and gives it a twist: what if someone is stealing other people’s identities not necessarily to make money, but to enjoy a) killing people and b) making other people miserable by unending their lives?

Stephenie Meyer, queen of the vampire books -- Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse – marketed to teens, has ventured into adult and science fiction with The Host, and almost instantly scored a No. 1 bestseller.

In this book, Earth has been invaded by another species, known as “souls.” A soul, which bears no small resemblance to a silvery centipede with thousands of antenna, is inserted into an opening cut into the back of a living human’s neck and then takes over the host’s mind, driving out the original inhabitant.

As the story begins, a special soul, one who has lived on several other planets in several other life forms (a flower, a bear, a dragon, to name a few) is being inserted into the body of a young woman. Once there, the soul will take on all the human’s memories and begin life on Earth in a calmer, safer manner. Earth people have been deemed suitable for replacement because we are all too violent.

Here’s all you need to know: There’s a new Alan Furst novel out, and he’s at the top of his game.

Furst has become the absolute master of evoking a singular period in time and place: that murky, shifting, ominous period right before World War II, as lived in the various capitals of Europe.

His plots can be wispy; if you’re looking for supposedly thrilling final scenes of shootouts or ticking bombs that need to be defused while busty blondes look on, you’re in the wrong place. But his descriptions of 1930s Europe – the people, the hotels and the trains (always the trains) – are entertaining and enthralling as hell.

It is the Rodney Dangerfield genre of the art world: demeaned, dismissed and definitely not getting any respect with subject matter like crying Elvises, fang-bearing jungle panthers, Jesus with various apostles, and full-frontal nekkid Hawaiian girls.

But for Caren Anderson and Carl Baldwin, there is no greater art than that done on fine black velvet—and fuck the critics! The pair’s passion has led to their travels on the “Velvet Trail,” with a still-growing collection of more than 1,200 works mainly culled from garage sales, defunct shops and Mexican flea markets.

Hundreds are on display in their Portland museum, The Velveteria, and they’ve just co-authored Black Velvet Masterpieces. The book traces the history of velvet painting, highlights some of the genre’s key artists, and features photos and commentary on many of their collected. Houstoned spoke with the pair about fate and fuzzy canvases..

You both started on the "Velvet Trail" shortly after reconnecting after nearly 30 years since you’d last seen each other in high school. Was it destiny?

Baldwin: It was the misbegotten union of Jack Daniels and Ma Bell. Actually, an unseen hand from the other side has guided us since the beginning. I was trying to find out what happened to an ill-fated classmate when I called Caren. Once we stepped onto the Velvet Trail, our fate was sealed. There is no turning back.

For decades now, the Central Intelligence Agency has reacted to most criticism by saying the agency’s successes are secret while their foul-ups are public.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tim Weiner puts the lie to that assertion in Legacy of Ashes, a comprehensive, chronological study of the past 60 years of the CIA. It won the National Book Award last year and has just come out in paperback.

In 600-plus eminently readable, utterly convincing pages, Weiner lays bare an agency that has long acted ineptly and illegally, one that casually lied to Presidents and any other officials who were occasionally dispatched to figure out why the CIA could never live up to its mission.

The good thing about mystery books is that there’s a genre for everyone. Want a tangled thriller? Got it. Want vampires who are good guys? Got it. Want a chef who cooks up a great meal while solving a murder? Got it, too.

Maggie Sefton’s Dyer Consequences belongs in that last category – that is, a mystery built around an occupation or hobby. Dyer Consequences is built around knitting. (Lots of room to talk about dropping a stitch or getting tangled as metaphors for missing clues or being confused.) In it, lead character Kelly and her friends hang around a knitting store. Most of the time they knit, but when a bungled break-in goes bad, one of them is killed and Kelly, who has had a little experience in being an amateur sleuth, is on the case.

Remember Green Acres, about a chic New York wife who gets carted off to live in the country? The Unlikely Lavender Queen: A Memoir of Unexpected Blossoming is like that, but without Arnold the pig. Oh, and Lavender Queen is true.

Jeannie Ralston ended up in Texas Hill Country as part of a deal she made with her husband. He wanted to give up city life and live in a quiet, rural community. She wanted to start a family. They moved to the Hill Country and Ralston got pregnant. Everyone’s happy, right?

Well, not exactly. Her husband was a busy National Geographic photographer whose job took him all over the world, leaving Ralston at home alone. That home, by the way, was a rundown barn and it was up to Ralston to throw out the scorpions, suffer the famous Texas summer heat and raise the couple’s two small children. Ralston is left wondering if she got the raw end of the deal, staving off anger at her happy, successful husband who lives an exciting life when she’s stuck with diapers and snotty noses.

The tattoo is the result of a bet. A dolphin with a tribal tattoo props its fin up on an old La-Z-Boy while it smokes a bong. It’s a meta-tattoo, and it’s hilarious. Or, as the caption in No Regrets: The Best, Worst, & Most #$%*ing Ridiculous Tattoos Ever, by Aviva Yael & P.M. Chen, with a forward by David Cross (!), reads, “I can’t decide who I want to give an awesome beej to more: the dude who thought of it or the dude who actually got it.”

Yael and Chen looked at thousands and thousands of tattoos before choosing the most entertaining ones for this book. The idea was born over drinks, of course, when one of their friends told the story of a girl he dated who had a lower-back tattoo of an “alien sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah.”

In his foreword, David Cross wonders when the tattoo “stopped being the sole province of the badass.” Tattoos are so ubiquitous, he fully expects to see “a twenty-color tableau of Bea Arthur giving Alex Trebek a hand-job on the calf of the professional dog walker ahead of us in line at the community garden’s bike repair shop.” Even though it hasn’t happened yet.