What is the deal with these authors fabricating their memoirs? You’d think that after James Frey’s reputation broke into a million little pieces on Oprah, that’d be the end of it. But now we hear two other authors have come out of the closet.

Last week Misha Defonseca, author of “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” admitted she spent the war in Brussels, safe and sound. And she’s not even Jewish. Isn’t that somewhat like stealing from Santa Claus?

This week author Margaret B. Jones confessed that her memoir about growing up in South Central L.A. and running drugs for the Bloods is not true. ”Love and Consequences” was critically acclaimed. Now the author’s toast.

Was Ms. Jones/Seltzer/whatever-her-real-name-is watching Oprah that day she eviscerated Frey for lying about his book and thinking to herself, “Hey, I could do that.”

I just don’t understand. Why didn’t they peddle their books as what they are — fiction. And don’t editors at publishing houses check these things?

Maybe the reality-TV generation is to blame. Maybe we’re so hungry as a people to experience others’ misfortune that the tragic memoir is a better selling point than a well-written, riveting work of fiction about a made-up person’s tragic misfortune. I don’t know about you, but I prefer my schadenfreude served up with a side order of truth.

Please, Jeanette Walls, don’t be next…

OK, I was going to write about how book sales were up 1 percent last year (thanks to a bump from the last book in the Harry Potter series), and how Steve Jobs, even though he’s a techno god and makes these impossibly cool iThings and looks good in a black mock turtleneck, was just plain WRONG when he said people don’t read anymore.

I was going to write that, and it was going to be a good, insightful, witty, fact-based, take-that! kind of thing.

I was going to write that … but I went online to check a fact, and I came across this piece on nytimes.com by the great Timothy Egan, who says it way better than I ever could. So, take that! Mr. Apple man, um, what he said…

The folks who award The Man Booker Prize for Fiction are letting the readers have a say in who wins The Best of the Booker to celebrate the prize’s 40th anniversary.

But because the Booker folks don’t completely trust the general public, they’ll whittle the list of 41 down to six for you to choose from come May.

Among the titles and authors are some of my favorites — “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy being at the top of the list. But any of the contenders will likely be going up against “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie, which won the 25th anniversary celebratory award, the Booker of Bookers.

Read on for a list of the yearly winners, and punctuation be damned, I’m not sticking in all those quotation marks… or all the hyperlinks… (I’m feeling lazy today. Sorry.)

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NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” recently featured a really cool book filled with six-word accounts of people’s lives.

“Not Quite What I Was Planning” was conceived by Smith, an online magazine, and contains the ever-so-brief memoirs of writers, musicians, artists and some everyday folks. Some names you’ll recognize, some you won’t, but the entries are fascinating.

This from a 27-year-old who just got dumped: I still make coffee for two. And from Joyce Carol Oates: Revenge is living well, without you. Stephen Colbert chimes in: Well, I thought it was funny.

What would your six words be?  How about six words for our local celebs or public officials?