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In their new book, Annoying: The Science Of What Bugs Us, NPR Science Correspondent Joe Palca and Science Friday's Flora Lichtman set out to examine why certain things — and people — drive us bananas.

Based on The Count of Monte Cristo, Alfred Bester's saga The Stars My Destination will transport you off the couch and into a roiling world of futuristic teleportation. Author John Baxter says the book injects new life and energy into a classic tale.

Ever wonder why supermarket tomatoes taste like nothing? Food writer Barry Estabrook's new book traces the troubled history of the modern commercial tomato.

Veteran cartoonist Jules Feiffer has just written his first graphic novel, the noirish Kill My Mother. Reviewer Alan Cheuse is discovering graphic novels equally late, but still finds it a good read.

Great people do great things, says author Mark Shriver, but they're often not good people. Shriver's new memoir of his father, R. Sargent Shriver, is a loving look at a man he says managed to be both great and good.

NPR commentators favor Jennifer Close's look at women facing marriage and Amanda Hodgkinson's post-World War II family drama. There are also memoirs by actor Christopher Plummer and nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei, plus Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams re-evaluate universities for the digital age.

Iain Sinclair wishes London had never won the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. In his new book, Ghost Milk, the longtime East London resident writes about the toll that the massive and pricey development is taking on locals.

The Swedish Academy praised the Chinese writer's work, which "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." The award is a cause of pride for a government that disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award, an exiled critic.

David Remnick has a nearly impossible task in his new biography of Barack Obama: writing "the most complete account yet" of the most famous man on the planet. The well-written and well-researched book may be ahead of its time; the events in it are so familiar right now that its scholarship may resonate better in 20 years.

In James' Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is wise enough to understand that if you're not happy without a man, you certainly won't be happy with one. Writer Rhoda Janzen loves the book because it shows what a woman does once she acknowledges her own complicity in the life she has chosen.