Origami: it used to be such an innocent craft, such a sweet way of creating flowers and boats and critters. Well, don't look now, but there's a new wrinkle to the old Japanese art of folding paper. Rizzoli will soon publish "Very Naughty Origami," with step-by-step instructions on how to shock your friends and neighbors with lascivious handiwork. The book's pièce de résistance is an illustration of little paper people having group sex.

Can there be any doubt that the middle of the road isn't where it used to be? The formerly outré, freaky and unthinkable now constitute business as usual in popular culture. And these have become outright selling points for books that eagerly capitalize on their kinks. Although the celebrity autobiography is a genre that might be deemed obscene by definition, it takes on a whole new meaning with Jenna Jameson perched high on the best-seller list.

Ms. Jameson, the self-promoting porn star ("How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," written with Neil Strauss, a former music writer for The New York Times), is no stranger to tricky positions. After all, she does some of her best work gyrating against a stripper's pole. "How about the time," she is asked, "when you were on top of the pole and you turned upside down, but you had too much oil on your legs, so you slipped off and fell right on your head?" This appears in one of the various interviews, dialogues, monologues, diary entries and comics patched together to form this G-stringed Horatio Alger story.

When it comes to displaying herself, Ms. Jameson had previously tried everything except her current maneuver: being planted right in the middle of the bookstore. Amazingly, a memoir that once would have won itself a plain brown wrapper can now be found beside books about Henry James.

It's a sign of the times that Ms. Jameson's on-the-job reminiscences don't stand out from the crowd. It's another sign of the times that some of the book's photographs of the author and her pals are confusingly captioned. It's not always clear which long-haired blonde with heavy makeup and breast implants is Ms. Jameson, unless the reader happens to be looking at the tattoo on her rear.

It's another sign of the times that Christopher Buckley has written "Florence of Arabia," a novel dotted with Lawrence of Arabia references and billed as "his first and probably last Middle East comedy." Much of what Mr. Buckley satirizes was not deemed funny until — well, until Mr. Buckley decided to make it funny. Take the idea of women being stoned to death in Middle Eastern countries with religious fundamentalist regimes: no laughs linked to that. But in this book, Mr. Buckley actually gets comic mileage out of discussing the best rocks to use for this purpose:

" `The smallest. Like this. These are the best. Like the ones we throw at Satan in Mecca during the hajj.'

" `Those are small,' replies one resident of Wasabia, where the wife of King Tallulah has been sentenced to death for advocating women's rights. `Wouldn't it take a very long time to kill a woman with stones that small?'

" `Yes,' replies Grand Mufti Ifkir." (Mr. Buckley has great fun scrambling names.) " `That is the point. It's a mercy. It gives her time to repent of her crime.' "

"Florence of Arabia" concerns a beautiful blonde from the State Department who is looking for a way to help Arab women. ("I'm just trying to think outside the box," says Florence. "Which box? Pandora's?" asks another State Department functionary.) It is made as defiant as it is witty by the example of Fern Holland, the beautiful 33-year-old "real-life Florence of Arabia," in Mr. Buckley's words, a Washington lawyer who went to Iraq as an advocate for women's rights and was murdered there six months ago. Beyond raising the question of just how quickly Mr. Buckley writes, this improbably lighthearted book creates as much mischief as it possibly can.

So it cites the discovery in the Middle East of "a first-century scroll underneath the Old City that purported to be a certificate of marriage between a Nazarene carpenter named Yeshua and a former prostitute named Mariah, from the town of Magdala." This artifact "caused a great sensation for months, until carbon dating and an investigation traced the document to the publicity department of a New York City publishing house."

For those who need any more evidence that "The Da Vinci Code" still casts a long shadow, consider Steve Berry's second thriller. Now that Dan Brown's colossal hit has made the Holy Grail a hard act to follow, where can an author unearth secret history? And how can the secret be fused with globe-trotting action? Mr. Berry, a trial lawyer, decides that the time is ripe for reinstating Russian royalty. Once it would have been outlandish; now it's perfectly reasonable to cook up a book about reinstating the czar.

"The Romanov Prophecy" begins, of course, with a prophecy about the Romanovs. The year is 1916, the listener is Empress Alexandra and the speaker is Rasputin, whose "blue silk blouse and velvet trousers reeked of alcohol, which tempered his usual stench, one her court ladies had said reminded them of a goat." As that may indicate, Mr. Berry does not trade in delicate nuances. No, he sends a lawyer named Miles Lord racing around the planet, chased by gunmen and checking out one of the latter-day Romanovs who has a claim to the Russian throne.

Very soon, in a book full of breathless contrivances, Miles has been thrown into the company of a beautiful young woman, "a Russian circus performer sympathetic to his struggle." Meanwhile, flashbacks offer an account of what befell Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918. ("Why was his cousin the kaiser doing this to him? Did he hate him that much?" ) And Mr. Berry has a theory about what became of all the lost Romanovs, including the two children left unaccounted for, Alexie and Anastasia.

The truth remains shrouded in mystery. But we know this much: descendants of the czar turn up in Nancy Lieberman's present-day novel, "Admissions." What are the Romanovs doing nowadays? Sending a gift of caviar to ease their way into a New York City private school.

Ever since "The Nanny Diaries" opened the floodgates, the Upper East Side tell-all genre has known no bounds. And it has presumed no limit to readers' interest in how Park Avenue parents behave. Ms. Lieberman tests that notion with a book full of stock characters and one that is entirely devoted to school-related wangling, unmitigated by any broader world view. For instance, a mom named Helen bristles: "How dare she imply that Zoe's test skills are substandard?"

Once it would have been risky to suppose that Zoe's test skills could dominate a novel — or that anyone would be interested in the malfeasance of a private school headmistress, which is as close as "Admissions" comes to a plot device. Actually, there's one more: will the above-mentioned Helen return the interest of the very rich, handsome and single father of another high school applicant? This is about as suspenseful as the question of whether the Romanov family has a way with a bribe.

Chick-lit hasn't always been as specialized as "Admissions." Anyone could read "Bridget Jones's Diary," for instance; interest was not confined to overweight young women with dead-end jobs and dastardly employers. But "Admissions," which is enough of a roman-à-clef to use names like "The Fancy Girls' School," "The Very Brainy Girls' School" and so on, isn't likely to captivate any part of the population that is not application-obsessed.

Jennifer Weiner's "Little Earthquakes" is also geared to a precise demographic group: brand-new mothers. "Babies make strange bedfellows" is its ultimate wisdom.

Ms. Weiner made a splash on the beach-book scene with her first novel, "Good in Bed." It was candy-colored and charming; "Little Earthquakes" strives for the same effect. But this new book is more formulaic, thanks to three characters who are drawn together by the prospect of new motherhood and fascinated by every last aspect of childbirth.

Reader interest in anesthesia, diapers and breast-feeding is presumed. Husband- and mother-in-law-related grievances also shape the story, as do baby-related emergencies. Jenna Jameson footnote: one of the book's young mothers brings home a porn DVD from a series in which Ms. Jameson figures. This is mistaken for a kiddie video by the character's mother-in-law. Additional Jenna Jameson footnote: Ms. Jameson says she would like nothing more than to be a mom.

The screen is a lot tamer when Jane Pauley's on it. And Ms. Pauley has been on television for nearly 30 years. That would seem to be sufficient justification for "Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue," her new memoir. After all, Ms. Pauley has her share of stories to tell, even if many of them are anything but underexposed. ("My father's entire early life was punctuated with loss and trauma, as I said in the `Dateline' story that aired in March 1999.")

But the happy-face memoir model that used to work is no longer applicable. Today, the genre feeds on terrible secrets, and woe to the star who happens not to have any. So Ms. Pauley, called "Dawn's Early Sprite" when she first hit "The Today Show" in 1976, makes the most of her stay in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

So what if the initial diagnosis was a case of hives? It blossomed into something bipolar, which she acknowledges, and into other symptoms that go unmentioned. Ms. Pauley has an odd way of referring to herself in the third person and a longtime luminary's way of dealing with a staff. Even in letting this book leap out of the blue (hence the title), she "imagined the `boys in the back room' toiling while I slept, because often I knew things in the morning that I hadn't known the night before."

If there's anything less promising than a nice star's life story, it's the self-serving autobiography of a politician. Since when are these things interesting? They're an election season specialty, and normally they are deadly dull. This makes an anomaly out of "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" by Barack Obama. Mr. Obama, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate in Illinois, has somehow managed to live an uncommonly interesting life, and writes about it frankly and well.

Of course, this book has an unfair advantage: it was first published in 1995, long before the author was well known. The sales were "underwhelming," by Mr. Obama's own assessment, and only his entry into the Senate race prompted a new paperback edition. He acknowledges that this book should be 50 pages shorter. But it doesn't seem long. And he hasn't fixed it, "even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research."

His account moves from Kansas to Hawaii to Kenya, with an emphasis on the father who died when Mr. Obama was very young. If he could rewrite it now, he says, the mother who raised him (and died after the book was published) would play a bigger role. But Mr. Obama would still break the mold of most memoir writers, if only because "an autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events." With this thought comes a truly unusual acknowledgment: "There is none of that here."