by Tony Earley

Quick, now: Who was the biggest-selling crime-fiction writer in the United Kingdom in 2001, according to official industry figures? P.D. James? Ruth Rendell? Patricia Cornwell? John Grisham?

By Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Poetry is in the front hall. Music in the living room. Books on books in the dining room. Science under the piano in the family room. Classics are in the little wooden bookshelf with glass-paneled doors, but only run through Aristotle before they spill over into the den. There are 4,000 books inside the house, 10,000 more in storage. Once, the pantry held cans and plates and no books. Now, the shelves are filled with pages.

Ask Solomon Jones, author of Pipe Dream, (Random House/Striver's Row) what finally turned him away from a crack-addicted life that began in 1990 and he will answer quickly, "I turned to the Lord." Taking pages out of his own life, his novel Pipe Dream catapults readers inside Philadelphia's underground drug world to solve a murder mystery.

Last spring, out of the masses of books energetically offered at BookExpo America 2001, Jim Harris, owner of Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, Iowa, found himself compelled to pick up and read an advance copy of The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout (Ruminator), he recently told BTW.

"Books saved my life," said author Luis J. Rodriguez in a recent interview. The 47-year-old author is a former Los Angeles gang member whose love and talent for poetry and prose convinced a judge to give Rodriguez a crucial break 26 years ago when he placed him, not back in prison, but on the road to a writer's life.

Eventually a newspaper job took Rodriguez to Chicago. There, he started his own poetry publishing house and wrote the award-winning 1994 memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (Touchstone Books).

Syndicated Columnist Sharon Randall's Essays on Life and Family Find Book Sense Fans

Birdbaths and Paper Cranes, a collection of personal essays by syndicated columnist Sharon Randall, is making friends among booksellers. The Sleeping Bear Press title is a January/February Book Sense 76 selection, nominated by Bob Spear of The Book Barn in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver this week issued an open letter to independent booksellers. She wrote in the wake of a November 5 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Gregg Easterbrook, which had criticized the writer for an essay published in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 25.