Al Roker’s Today book club returns from months of dormancy to promote a book that perhaps needs no promotion: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The book has all the trappings of a children’s fantasy novel: orphaned English child; ambiguously ominous uncle; giant animal ally, and so on.

The book’s protagonist is Lyra Belacqua, whose pleasantly unfettered life is shattered by the arrival of her uncle, Lord Asriel, who talks crazy talk of a natural phenomenon called “Dust”, and the outlines of a city in the Aurora Borealis that he has surmised is part of an alternative universe. Meanwhile, children have begun to disappear, the victims of “Gobblers”, a bizarre race that uses the kids for terrible experiments. When Lyra’s playmate Roger goes missing, Lyra runs away to find him, heading North into a dangerous land where she’ll meet up with mercenary polar bears, a vagabond troop of gyptians (gypsies), witches and a Texan in a hot air balloon.

Somehow, her uncle is involved.

Sound like your cup of tea? Read the excerpt, and don’t forget to watch the trailer for a movie adaptation staring Nicole Kidman and that hottie Daniel Craig.

It’s that time of year: the kids go back to school. For some, its a period of rejoicing and rekindled marriage, and for others, it marks what they fear might be the end of their life’s usefulness. They wander listlessly from room to cavernous room, desperate for something to clean, something to yell at. Are you one of the latter? Loading up the minivan with dorm room essentials and weeping as your babies disappear into the sinful, corrupting world of higher education? Carin Rubenstein was, until she realizes that “most of us will learn not only to live with our children’s absence but to love it.”

Rubenstein continues on in her newest book Beyond the Mommy Years, “Our time with our children is borrowed, leased, rented out to us, and there comes a point at which we have to realize that it’s mostly over…Your child is a child for barely eighteen years; but your grown child is an adult for decades. So we have to prepare ourselves to be mothers of adult children for the rest of our lives.”

Sound cold and callous? Don’t discount Rubenstein’s book just yet. Read the excerpt posted on Today’s website and then think twice about paying for Timmy’s bus ticket home at Thanksgiving.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden is late. John Edwards has three books out. Obama has two. Hillary has at least one and dozens more written about her. Even Mitt Romney got a book out before Biden did. But slow and steady does win the race, I suppose. Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, the Delaware Senator’s first memoir has just recently been released, and was featured on Today yesterday. Having been in the Senate since 1973, Biden has seen his fair share of congressional combat, and lovingly renders every moment of it, from the tail-end of Vietnam through the fall of the Soviet Union up to the current conflict.

Watch the interview and read the excerpt.

“Life is not a fairy tale, and even the most perfect spouse can not be your all-in-all,” says Denise Jackson, wife of country singer Alan Jackson. “We all have our faults, and every adult alive has regrets.”

(Cue Je Ne Regrette Rien.)

Denise’s latest tome It’s All About Him: Finding the Love of My Life touches elaborately details how the pressures of fame contributed to the slow disintegration of her marriage with the country star. He was unfaithful, she was too controlling and neither would give in, so they separated. Some three months later, she had an epiphany: “I just remember driving home and just crying out to Him, and saying I can’t take this anymore,” she told Today’s Ann Curry. “‘I can’t believe You want my family to be apart. But if You do, I just give it all to You. I know You’ll take care of me.’ It wasn’t that things changed immediately. But I had just this sense of peace.”

But things did change, and now the high school sweethearts are together again and closer than ever!

Denise did note warily some moments later, “I’m not saying every marriage should be saved.”

Watch the full interview, in which she reveals who the “Him” in the title really is. And don’t miss Alan performing his newest song, “It’s All About Him”, which he wrote to honor his wife’s book. Aw.

Jewish terrorism analyst Solomon Rosner lies dead in a hotel in Amsterdam, and it is Gabriel Allon’s job to sift through Rosner’s files. It’s in doing this that Allon discovers two things:

1. Rosner had requested an emergency meeting with Allon’s employers, Israeli Intelligence, not twenty-four hours before his death.
2. The target is the daughter of an American ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Allon appears seconds to late to save the girl from being brutally kidnapped, but reveals his face to her captors, setting in motion of chain of events that ties Allon forever to the girl and places in his hands the fate of Western Europe.

Dan Silva is routinely hailed as one of the most gifted spy novelists alive, and Gabriel Allon, the art-restorer/part-time spy/”the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence”, is perhaps his best known character. Appearing in no less than seven books so far, Allon has gone to hell and back to give us a thrill, and the seventh, The Secret Servent, is no exception, addressing relevant but touchy issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and the moral boundaries of intelligence and interrogation.

Silva’s been in the news a fair amount this week. NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse says nice things about him here, and Today has , posted the first chapter on its website.

It’s hard to believe Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum has been with us for thirteen books now. Have no idea who that is? I didn’t either, until I read a Today excerpt from author Janet Evanovich’s latest book, Lean Mean Thirteen. We find series heroine Plum reunited with her lousy lawyer husband, Dickie Orr, albeit briefly, though, as Orr disappears not fifty pages in, leaving only bloodstains and bullet holes. At the logical top of the list of people who might want Orr dead, Plum sets out to clear her name, and with the aid of super hunky, on-again off-again boyfriend officer Joe Morelli, she discovers just how deep Orr’s lousiness goes.

Need a better reason to read Thirteen? This is a description of Lula, a woman who works in Plum’s cousin’s bail bonds office.

Lula is a black woman with a Rubenesque body and a Vegas wardrobe that’s four sizes too small. She is a former ‘ho, currently working as a file clerk for the office and a wheelman for me … when the mood strikes. Today, she was wearing big fake-fur Sasquatch boots, and her ass was packed into poison-green spandex pants. Her pink sweatshirt had Love Goddess spelled out in sequins across her boobs.

Today calls the novel “daring”, and who am I to disagree?

Jazz Great Wynton Marsalis called it “ghetto minstrelsy” while rapper Snoop Dogg said “hip-hop is what makes the world go around”. Some have said that it simply perpetuates countless age-old stereotypes while others insist that hip-hop gives a creative outlet to urban youth. If the genre has done one thing over the course of its twenty plus year existence, it has sparked controversy. Its lyrical content and legitimacy as an art form have been questioned again and again, but those who sing its praises say it is a product of it’s inner-city environment. Regardless of what they say, hip-hop has become one of the most popular genres of music on the planet and shows no signs of waining. It must be on to something…

Michael Eric Dyson certainly thinks so. A Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dyson has become one of the foremost thinkers of the “hip-hop intelligentsia”, and was voted one of the 100 most influential black Americans by Ebony. His latest project is Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop, a series of essays that consider some of the pertinent issues surrounding the genre, from its often times profane and sexist lyrical content to the inadvertent self-parody caused by its rampant commercial success. The book also features an intro by Jay-Z and an outro by Nas.

Watch the Today interview, and read the prelude>.

I really have no idea how you could not know this by now, but just in case, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel is being released worldwide on July 21. The series is by far the most popular in the history of publishing, so successful in fact that its author, J.K. Rowling, is now worth an estimated 1.1 billion pounds, significantly more than the net worth of the Queen of England. It seems as though literally everyone has at some point picked up a Harry Potter book, seen one of the five movies, or dressed up as Dumbledore and appeared in public. Now, on the eve of the grand series finale, literally everyone is trying to make sense of it all.

Scholastic editor Arther A. Levine spoke with NPR recently about how he first discovered the Harry Potter phenomenon, and how it has ballooned into more than he could ever imagine. Listen to the full interview here. Under that same link, you will also find an interview Rowling did with NPR in 1998, before the books struck it big, in which she discussed the origins of the idea.

On The Diane Rehm Show yesterday, an author, a movie critic, and the headmistress of a Harry Potter fan site gathered to trace the ten year history of Harry in all its various forms, and to offer predictions for the final book, ominously titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Listen to that interview here.

And finally, Today has devoted an entire section of its website to the books. It boasts various interviews with Rowling herself, the stars of the movies, and pillars of the publishing industry, who are making gleeful predictions of how well The Deathly Hallows will sell. Find out more than you ever wanted to know here.

Intrepid nice guy and environmentalist David de Rothschild’s The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is the latest in the parade of Green literature, and perhaps the most informative, too. Published to coincide with the Live Earth concert this summer, de Rothschild’s book offers 77 ways for the common household to combat the ever-looming threat of global warming, ranging from the obvious — start a compost pile, go vegetarian — to the downright bizarre: mutate, burrow underground.

The Today Show, perhaps the greenist of all the morning shows, hosted de Rothschild this morning, and the results are stunning. Watch the interview.

Lucky Santangelo is back, and you should be excited.

Jackie Collin’s mafia-princess-turned-Vegas-mogul makes a most triumphant return in Drop Dead Beautiful, a sequel to 1999’s Dangerous Kiss. The latest finds Santangelo simultaneously planning a mega-resort and her father’s 95th birthday, unaware that family-rival Anthony Bonnar is plotting revenge! From there, Collins takes the reader through a whirlwind of mafia justice, double-crossings, Internet predators, and, if Dr. Pepper isn’t enough for you, some supposedly fantastic sex scenes involving Bonnar’s wife, their Mexican gardener and a federal drug enforcement agent, though not necessarily at the same time.

Collins appeared on The Today Show yesterday, flustering Matt Lauer and discussing the plot of the book in more detail, the history of Lucky Santangelo, the sex scenes and Wolfgang Puck’s newest drink, The Jackie Collins.

Watch the interview here, and read more about Collins herself here.