Words to live by

The ever-swelling flood of entertainment gadgets continues to dazzle us, with new models of iPods, Xboxes, and cellphones that do everything but pull up your socks. They're all around us, yet there's an even bigger flood of a simpler and older device -- the book. About 195,000 new titles were published in 2004, including 25,184 fiction books, and this year will surely prove to be as fecund.

Though most of those books are dreck, there also was and will be this year a deep and wide supply of great or at least worthwhile books, so many that no one could read them all. So herewith a sampler of promising books in 2006, due between now and August, based on a browse through advance copies and publishers' catalogs.

In fiction, a host of famous names have new books in or nearing the press.

A year after his best-selling novel ''The Plot Against America," Philip Roth is back with ''Everyman" (May), a novel recalling Tolstoy's ''Death of Ivan Ilych." A successful commercial artist is stricken with illness in middle age and is forced to confront his mistakes and the fear of death.

Walter Mosley is one of the few novelists to make his name as a mystery specialist -- the Easy Rawlins series -- and move on to success in general fiction. In ''Fortunate Son" (April), a lucky white boy and health-impaired black boy are friends, but amid strange reversals, their natural advantages and disadvantages count for less than the content of their characters.

Jay McInerney, best known for ''Bright Lights, Big City," returrns with ''The Good Life" (February), set in New York just after the Sept. 11 attacks. Two successful New York couples are forced to reassess what really matters to them in the aftermath of catastrophe.

New York is also the scene of Paul Auster's ''The Brooklyn Follies" (January), the story of a disappointed man who comes home to die. His outlook is turned around, though, by new and old faces in the neighborhood.

Northampton's prolific Elinor Lipman offers ''My Latest Grievance" (April), the tale of a quiet college teacher whose family life is stressed by the arrival in town of his spicy former wife.

With fortuitous timing, given all that's happened in South Korea lately, Allegra Goodman of Cambridge offers ''Intuition" (February), set in a Boston science lab. It deals with allegations of phony science in the development of a cancer drug.

A.M. Homes's new novel, ''This Book Will Save Your Life" (April), tells the story of a self-sufficient stock trader struck with a crisis that teaches him how much he needs other people.

Novels with more exotic settings:

Kiran Desai made a splash with her first novel, ''Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," and now is back with ''The Inheritance of Loss" (January), which ranges from the Himalayas to Manhattan in the life of a Nepalese family.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka's ''Behold the Many" (February), is a family ghost story of Hawaii, in which two dead sisters haunt and torment a surviving third for failing to rescue them from an orphanage.

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, best known for ''The Old Gringo," returns with ''The Eagle's Throne" (February), a story of impending disaster set in a Mexico of the future.

American readers this month get to read two finalists for Britain's prestigious 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction: Ali Smith's ''The Accidental" and Julian Barnes's ''Arthur and George." In Smith's novel, a disturbing stranger insinuates herself into the lives of a prosperous English family. Set in Victorian times, Barnes's novel is based on a real-life encounter between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and solicitor George Edalji, defendant in a sensational trial.

Pickings are rich in poetry, with new collections by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (''District and Circle," May), Louise Gluck of Cambridge (''Averno," March), and 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright of Waltham (''God's Silence," March).

Memoirs are plentiful in 2006, as always. The lineup includes ''A Strong West Wind" (February), by the Globe's chief book critic, Gail Caldwell, who writes of growing up in West Texas and moving east with life and literature. Another memoir in letters is ''A Writer's Life" (April), by Gay Talese, and a third is Janna Malamud Smith's story of her novelist dad in ''My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud" (March).

Biographies abound, including yet another of Abraham Lincoln, ''Lincoln," by Richard J. Carwardine (January), and of ''Benjamin Franklin" (also January) by Edwin S. Gaustad.

In the creative world, there's ''Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova" (March), by Elaine Feinstein, and Mark Cotta Vaz's ''Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong" (August).

In ''You Must Set Forth at Dawn" (April), Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka writes of his life as writer and political activist, hated and condemned in absentia by dictator Sani Abacha.

In August comes Tom Sancton's ''Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White." The former Time magazine Paris bureau chief writes of his father, who initiated the author, as a youth, into the world of New Orleans jazz.

Unusual works of history include Catherine Merridale's ''Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945" (February). Few Americans know about these other soldiers, who died by the millions pushing the Wehrmacht back to Berlin.

Historian Alfred W. Crosby, a lively writer and expert in pre-Columbian America and medieval Europe alike, offers ''Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy" (January). It all started with the cookfire, it seems.

''The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution" (February), by Gary B. Nash, reminds us that the Civil War was not the first conflict in which blacks took up arms.

In general nonfiction, Sebastian Junger tells another Bay State story, his first since ''The Perfect Storm," in ''A Death in Belmont" (May). The book concerns a 1963 murder and the stories of two men, a black cleaning man hastily convicted of the killing, and Albert DeSalvo, later imprisoned as the Boston Strangler.

Finally, three books relevant to controversies about religion, ethics, science, and politics.

In ''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" (February), Tufts cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett tackles religious belief as a fit subject for scientific investigation.

''The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" (August), by Francis S. Collins, head of the human genome project, is self-explanatory.

What did Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, et al. really believe about God? From historian David L. Holmes, in ''The Religion of the Founding Fathers" (March), we learn that most of them thought he had some excellent ideas.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.