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Catch up on this novel before Margaret Atwood's newest, "The Year of the Flood," comes out next month -- the two books are set in the same world. It's a world much like ours, but taken to a certain extreme. This is speculative fiction of the most intelligent and searching type. Atwood is one of our most devastating writers, and she's in top form in this ultimately touching novel about a possible future in which biotechnology is running amok -- literally.

Guy meets girl, guy stalks girl, girl likes it. This novel -- about a Manhattan director of television advertisements and the on-the-verge singer to whom he anonymously passes advice -- isn't just about love and deciding the course of destiny for ourselves. It's the perfect book for any music-obsessed person who believes life needs just the right soundtrack. The director's estranged wife isn't very well drawn, and the writing can be a bit show-offish at times, but this is a very good book about the iPod generation, grown and growing up.

The back-and-forth narrative of this novel -- between the intersecting lives of real, maybe-mad scientist Nikola Tesla and a fictional chambermaid in the hotel in which he spent he last days -- takes some getting used to at first. But once you do, you'll find yourself transported to early 20th-century New York and the life of one of its most interesting inhabitants. The life of the chambermaid isn't nearly so interesting as that of the man she serves, but her story does tie together some of the themes Tesla spent his life thinking about. This slim novel packs in a lot of history, all told with a sense of magic in often beautiful prose. Samantha Hunt brings one of history's strangest and most important men to life in this moving meditation on invention and love.

An interesting -- and on the whole successful -- hybrid of serious scholarship, historical biography, and, yes, chick lit. Princeton professor Sophie Gee imagines the real-life story behind Alexander Pope's poetic masterpiece, "The Rape of the Lock." You'll find the story of the affair behind the poem either deliciously sexy or eye-rollingly over-the-top. But the portraits of ambition in various forms -- whether the person is seeking fame and fortune through art (Pope), marriage (the woman who inspired "Rape") or glory (her Jacobite paramour) -- are, without doubt, full of insight.

This short novel is the perfect introduction to the Booker Prize-winning novelist. It's all here -- his florid, overflowing but somehow chilly style, the inexplicable sense of loss, and dark irony -- but in just over a concentrated 100 pages.

The classic introduction to art history, now in a convenient (and handsome!) pocket edition. All of the illustrations are now in full color with this edition. And Gombrich's lucid prose is as accessible as ever. This would certainly make a wonderful gift.