Been There, Done That : ...

With the exception of “The Road Ahead” (Viking)--a literary trip down the Information Superhighway with super-driver/billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates (due out in April)--most of 1995’s major books ring of nostalgia. The memories are often sweet.

In Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel, “The Autobiography of My Mother” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a 70-year-old West Indian woman looks back on the rich relationships that have given meaning to her life (out in August).

In Isabel Allende’s memoir, “Paula” (HarperCollins), Allende sits at the bedside of her daughter, lying comatose in a Madrid hospital, and recounts the grand saga of her Chilean family (May).

President Clinton’s favorite mystery writer, Walter Mosley, makes his first departure from the genre in “RL’s Dream” (Norton), a novel about an aging blues man who fondly remembers the black poetry he spun on stage with such Mississippi Delta musicians as Robert (RL) Johnson (August).

The new year will also bring memories from a soldier--Colin Powell’s as yet untitled autobiography (Random House) in September--and from a rebel: Susan Eisenhower’s “Breaking Free” (FSG), a memoir of how the former President’s granddaughter began a love affair with Russia’s top rocket scientist in the midst of the Cold War (June).

For darker memories, turn to Carolyn See’s “Dreaming” (Random House), a poignant memoir about her family’s struggle with alcoholism (March), or to William Gass’ massive novel on war and guilt in the 20th Century, “The Tunnel” (Knopf) in February.

Topping the year’s list of likely bestsellers are an as-yet-untitled book on America’s foreign policy by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (Knopf) in October, and novels from James Ellroy, Stephen King, John le Carre, Anne Rice and Larry McMurtry.

The only theme that jumps out from next year’s major nonfiction titles is that most timeless one of all: Sex. And Americans’ approach to it is lambasted in a number of books.

In “Intimate Terrorism” (Norton), Michael Vincent Miller contends that by viewing sex as merely a tool of power, we have stripped it of erotic magic (May). In “With Pleasure” (Oxford), scientists Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton show that we are programmed to have sex for pleasure, not merely to make babies (October). And in “The Apartheid of Sex” (Crown), Martine Rothblatt argues that by categorizing people from birth as either male or female, we’ve come to practice a form of sexual segregation “as pernicious as racial apartheid.” (February).