Jim Lehrer of PBS's "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer" has written his 17th novel, none of which have been read by me. The latest, Eureka (Random House, 240 pages, $24.95), has been sitting on my desk for a couple months — a couple of months where I've looked at it every other day, thought about reading it and put it off.

I'm two and a half chapters in and — what do you know — I like it...

We finally get to a best-seller on the blog. John Grisham, known the world over for his courtroom thrillers, takes a U-turn of sorts this time around and writes about football and Italy. I have not read the book but I recently gave a copy — a birthday gift — to my father, a longtime Grisham fan and even longer football fan and, of course, he's been Italian all his life. Here's a review from the Associated Press:

BY SARA ROSE

John Grisham’s newest novel, Playing for Pizza, (Doubleday, 258 pages, $21.95) is definitely not what you would expect from the master of courtroom suspense. Grisham leaves the lawyers and intrigue behind and instead focuses on football. American football. In Italy...

Despite British bookmakers making the race between Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Lloyd Jones' Miister Pip, Anne Enright has emerged victorious — unanimously — to win the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering (272 pages, $14), published in the United States in September by Black Cat, a paperback original imprint of Grove Press...

Dysfunctional families always make for a good story. In Eliot Schrefer's follow-up to his 2006 debut, Glamorous Disasters, the author mines similar themes having to do with the upper and lower classes.

In The New Kid (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $25), Humphrey and Gretchen are half-siblings who share the same mother...

A businessman, a personal shopper, a grandmother, a gay interior designer and a widowed candy store owner meet in purgatory ...

Sounds like the start of a joke, doesn't it?

It's actually the start of an intriguing little novel, I Never Saw Paris (Carroll & Graf, 196 pages, $23) by Harry I. Freund...

Do you love medical shows? Personally I've been hooked on "CSI" reruns for a couple of months. The procedurals can get a little boring, however, without the mix of human interaction and emotional attachments to keep us coming back. Thankfully, shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "ER" fill that bill and more, as the human element is always front and center.

Much the same could be said for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books, 352 pages, $23.95) by first-time author Vincent Lam, who mined his own experiences as a doctor to write these heartfelt, interweaving stories...