It could have been a heartfelt conversion or sheer effrontery, but whatever the reason, there was President Bush making a balanced budget a priority in his State of the Union address.

When Will Ferrell calls, it’s hard to know what to expect. Maybe he’ll be an unpredictable comedic maniac who spews jokes faster than Robin Williams and Jim Carrey combined. Or perhaps he’ll assume the arrogant attitude of a $20 million-a-movie star with little time for inane questions. It turns out Will Ferrell is none of those things.

So, weeknight reruns of the animated sitcom “The Simpsons” are outdrawing five out of the six Phoenix 10 p.m. TV news shows.

NEW YORK - Geraldine Brooks has taken a minor character in a major American novel and transformed his story into the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

DENVER — The Christian book business, optimistic that a little literary escapism might be an antidote for readers in hard times, is turning to bonnets, buggies and bloodsuckers.

NEW YORK - The story line on "Valkyrie" has focused on the "Tom Cruise-as-Nazi" angle, but it's also a notable regrouping of the two minds behind one of the most beloved movies of the last 15 years.

NEW YORK - The economy hung like a cloud over the 59th annual National Book Awards. Barack Obama was the silver lining.

Truth hasn’t just been stranger than fiction this year; it’s been better, with documentaries emerging as some of the strongest — and best-reviewed — films so far. Granted, we’re not even halfway through 2006 yet.

Practically a childhood right of passage, “A Wrinkle in Time” is a book a lot of adults can credit with sparking a love for science fiction and fantasy — or at least introducing words like “mitochondria” and “tesseract” to their vocabulary. Whether you want to acquaint your own kids with the beloved story or just take a trip down memory lane, you can see the stage adaptation of Madeline L’Engle’s 1963 Newbery Medal-winning book in Tempe.

Pen at the ready!

Last month I highlighted Jacqueline Winspear’s “Maise Dobbs” series and this month is dedicated to Canadian author Louise Penny and the wonderful world she has created in the fictional setting of Three Pines, a rural Canadian village south of Montreal, just kilometers from the Vermont border.

At Gilbert's Campo Verde High School, biomedical sciences students are trying to discover the factors that led to the ‘death' of a fictional person.

Plenty of subgenres fall under the "mystery" umbrella, including cozies written by Agatha Christie, humorous crime capers by Donald Westlake and Carl Hiaasen, and political thrillers by Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn.

Wireless spy cameras. Eavesdropping bugs. GPS tracking gadgets. All of these things may seem far-fetched, the stuff of movies. But these gadgets do exist. And they are becoming more sophisticated.