Knopf

Fiction Weeks on list 1. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (Doubleday: $25.99) Harvard professor Robert Langdon uses his symbology skills to find a missing Freemason in Washington, D.C. 4 2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam: $24.95) The lives of a maid, a cook and a college graduate become intertwined while changing a Mississippi town. 19 3. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (Riverhead: $25.95)

"Writers," Joan Didion observed in 1968, "are always selling somebody out. " It's one of those classic Didion statements, epigrammatic yet personal, a line that unpacks itself the more we consider what it implies. Didion may have been referring to journalism when she wrote that in the preface to "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," but she was also, as directly as can be imagined, addressing herself. "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.