Stepping into the front room of the flat Rowling said: "This is really the room where I finished Philosopher's Stone, here. This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat." She explained: "I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, Well, I want to write,' and I wrote the book and, What is the worst that can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal. It's really back to the wall time here'."

As she walked around her old home she was amazed to find copies of the Harry Potter books in what had been her bedroom, but is now occupied by new residents. "Oh look, Harry Potter books! Now that is really freaky," she said. Reflecting on her massive fame and fortune Rowling was visibly choked to be back at the place where her journey began, and said she couldn't quite believe how far her life had come in the past 10 years.

"For years now I've felt that if it all disappeared, and some days I do feel like is it real?', then this is where I'd come back to, this would be my baseline, I'd be back in Leith. "And if I'd known that 10 years on I'd come back with a film crew and there'd be my published books on someone else's bookcase in this room it's really incredible to me."

Rowling talked about how she wished she could have known her decision to write the Harry Potter books was going to have such a "fairytale resolution" during the toughest times at the beginning. "Because it's such a well-worn part of my story now, it's a big yawn to hear how I wrote it, as though it was all some kind of publicity stunt for a year, but it was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know that there was going to be this fairytale resolution, and coming back here is just full of ghosts."

Baldacci named his character for film director Oliver Stone, whose controversial movies include JFK. "It was a perfect name for him to take," Baldacci says. "My Oliver Stone is a big-time conspiracy theorist who doesn't trust anybody. So I thought it would be a tip of the hat." Baldacci says he admires Stone's movies because "they take a position, they're courageous and they stir up controversy. And that's never a bad thing." The prosperous-looking Baldacci appears to be the antithesis of the jaded Stone in his novels, whose tattered wardrobe makes people assume he's homeless.

"Someone asked me one time, 'How cynical are you about the U.S. government on a scale of 1 to 10?' I think my answer was 8.5 to 9.3," Baldacci says. "I have given it a lot of thought. I don't have a low opinion of all politics or all politicians, but of the substantial majority of them and how they do their business and go about their work."

*****

"In The Camel Club, I had the audacity to make a complex issue complicated instead of very simple, black and white," he says. "I posed the question, 'Wouldn't it be smart to understand why a normal person in the Middle East might become a terrorist?' I was exploring things some people didn't want explored. They wanted John Wayne." The roots of terrorism he explores in the novel include economic and social pressures faced by young Muslims. Because of early criticism, Baldacci was convinced The Camel Club would not be popular with the reading public, but it turned out to be his biggest seller in hardcover.

"In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there's no gray area at all," Baldacci says. "Good guys kill all the bad guys, and they do it any way they can because that makes the world safer and better. That's total BS, but it plays well to audiences. "For me, the gray is where I live, and that's the only reason I write books like this." Those who fight for justice in his novels don't always survive or win their battles. But critics and fans appear to like Baldacci's less than black-and-white approach to good and evil.

Even by the standards of the book world, 2007 saw more hand-wringing than usual, as well as some unexpected good news. The year was punctuated by anxiety over the decline of many newspaper book review sections and worry that publishing, with its old-fashioned way of printing books on paper and shipping them to stores or to online services, can't keep up with a fragmented, increasingly distracted and digital world.

A flurry of bookstores, especially independents, fell victim to the chains, big-boxes and Amazon.com. In Southern California, that meant the shuttering of Dutton's Beverly Hills, Book Soup's Orange County branch, Anaheim's Book Baron and several beloved used-book stores. Leimert Park's Eso Won Books and Pacific Palisades' Village Books are hanging on by the skin of their teeth: Village owner Katie McLaughlin said she's waiting to see how holiday sales go before deciding whether next year will be her store's last.

And because of price discounts, the final installment of the Harry Potter series didn't give many stores the shot in the arm they were hoping for. Even literacy itself, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts, seems to be on a slow but steady decline. Add to this the destabilizing and ever-increasing pace of change. "It's one of those years -- they come along every once in a while -- where everyone worries and pulls their hair," said Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World.

Dan Fogelberg, the singer and songwriter whose hits "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne" helped define the soft-rock era, died Sunday at his home in Maine after battling prostate cancer. He was 56. His death was announced Sunday in a statement released by his family through the firm Scoop Marketing and also posted on his Web site.

Mr. Fogelberg learned he had advanced prostate cancer in 2004. In a statement then, he thanked fans for their support. "It is truly overwhelming and humbling to realize how many lives my music has touched so deeply all these years," he wrote. "I thank you from the very depths of my heart." Mr. Fogelberg's music was powerful in its simplicity. He did not rely on the volume of his voice to convey his emotions; instead, they came through in his soft, tender delivery and his poignant lyrics. Songs like "Same Old Lang Syne," in which a man reminisces after meeting an old girlfriend by chance during the holidays, became classics not only for his performance, but also for their engaging story lines. Mr. Fogelberg's heyday was in the 1970s and early '80s, when he scored several platinum and multiplatinum records fueled by such hits as "The Power of Gold" and "Leader of the Band," a touching tribute he wrote to his father, a bandleader. Mr. Fogelberg put out his first album in 1972.

Mr. Fogelberg's songs tended to have a weighty tone, reflecting on emotional issues in a serious way. But in an interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1997, he said it did not represent his personality. "That came from my singles in the early '80s," he said. "I think it probably really started on the radio. I'm not a dour person in the least. I'm actually kind of a happy person. Music doesn’t really reflect the whole person.