All booked up

>> This autumn, read up on motherhood, our Poutine Nation, lucky bastards and more

by JULIET WATERS

One book you won't see a review of this fall is a recently released anthology by Brenda Knight called Women Who Love Books too Much, and its companion Journal for Women Who Love Books. Frankly, every fall book season I'm grateful I haven't become someone who hates books too much. After many years of joys and disappointments, however, I think I've reached the state of loving books just the right amount. So, from this enlightened perspective, here's a fall preview of books to look forward to.

There are personal reasons for my first choice, Motherhood Made a Man out of Me, by Karen Karbo, having recently become a mother myself. But regardless of its subject, this blackly comic memoir of surviving pregnancy and raising an infant has had some strong reviews as a great piece of writing. There's much buzz around Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec, by Taras Grescoe. A British Columbia native, Grescoe moved here in 1996 after a few years in Paris. He looks at Quebec from Poutine Nation to Extinct Society. And in The Water Gods, an intriguing memoir by Montrealer Anna Paskal, a 22-year-old student travels with international environmental activists and a Cree leader, to survey a proposed $2.1-billion World-Bank-funded dam.

Pop culture, boxing and destiny

It wouldn't be a book season without something by philosopher/pundit Mark Kingwell. This season he turns his talking head away from pop culture and towards his actual area of expertise, political philosophy, with a book about citizenship, The World We Want. Which is fine because, as always, there's plenty in the pop-culture category. Donald Bogle's Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television looks good. Carol Pope's autobiography Anti-Diva looks bizarre, but interesting. And Getting Away With It: Or the Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw, a dialogue between directors Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape, Erin Brockovitch) and Richard Lester (Help!, A Hard Day's Night), looks wise and witty.

Seventy-year-old writer F.X. Toole brings 50 years of boxing experience to his first collection of short stories, Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner. Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up is a collection of essays on contemporary sexual mores and includes a novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg. The Spinster & the Prophet, by A.B. McKillop, claims that H.G. Wells may have ripped off some of his ideas from an Ontario woman. And for those who haven't had enough of American politics, Hats in the Ring: An Illustrated History of American Presidential Campaigns, by Evan Cornog and Richard Whelan, actually looks quite entertaining.

Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell, is one of the most anticipated debut novels. Mitchell links the destinies of a gallery attendant at the Hermitage, a young jazz buff in Tokyo, a crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong, a DJ in Manhattan, a physicist in Ireland, an elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China, a cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa, a musician in London and transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. And master novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled comes out with his first novel in five years When We Were Orphans.

Vampires and waterproof erotica

My Juliet by John Ed Bradley is billed as Tennessee Williams meets Body Heat in a scorching literary tale of a New Orleans artist's dangerous obsession with a femme fatale. Turning on the Girls, by Cheryl Benard, creates a satiric brave new world where women have taken over, and one of the ministries of "mental revolution" are trying to censor women's fantasies. Montrealer Nancy Kilpatrick graces us with a collection of vampire stories in the appropriately titled The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick.

Fun anthologies include Aqua Erotica: 18 Stories for a Steamy Bath,edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj, the first-ever waterproof book for adults. and Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex, edited by Melvin Jones Bukiet, which is pretty much self-explanatory.

In the thriller/noir category, John Williams follows up his first novel Five Pubs, Two Bars, and a Nightclub with Cardiff Dead, and may be doing for the Welsh capital, Cardiff, what Trainspotting did for Glasgow. Elmore Leonard returns with a new bestseller Pagan Babies, a fast-paced story set in Rwanda during the genocide. Bob Tuluck comes out with my kind of P.I. in Street Level, slacker detective Duncan Sloan, "he works when he feels like it."

Up-and-coming American literary star Michael Chabon releases The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel about two misfit young men who make it big creating comic-book superheroes. And finally for the superenlightened, adult-comic genius Chris Ware releases the collected stories of his anti-hero, Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth. :

Cyberselfish, by Paulina Borsook, PublicAffairs/Perseus, hc, 276pp, $36.50