Editor’s note: The following is the first installment of a new Flagpole column devoted to books and book-related news and observations from local lit junkie John Nettles.

(If) He Did It: Nobody ever said that life was fair. It’s not fair, for example, that Robert Plant can write a song about hobbits and get laid like a monster, while if you did it, you’d get pantsed and stuffed into a locker. It’s not fair that Dick Cheney can shoot a guy in the face and get a public apology for the inconvenience from the guy he shot. It’s not fair that 90 percent of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of dull white guys who wear madras shorts in public.

Life isn’t fair, and so all of us have a certain obligation to make it as just as possible. Which is a roundabout, hedging way of getting to a task I’m not sure I want, but which is nevertheless called for: defending O.J. Simpson.

Most people, myself included, are certain that O.J. committed the murders of his wife Nicole and innocent bystander Ron Goldman, and 13 years after the fact, we are still beside ourselves with incredulity that the Juice skated on the charges. The fact that last year, HarperCollins Books, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, announced plans to publish Simpson’s “speculative” take on the case, coyly titled If I Did It, along with a Fox network special, only fueled the popular conviction that Simpson’s enormous ego wouldn’t let him stay quiet about having gotten away with a double homicide. The announcement was monstrous, and the ensuing public outcry was predictably horrific. Murdoch’s people yanked the book and the special, and it seemed that the issue was dead.

The problem, however, was that while Simpson walked on criminal charges, he lost a civil wrongful-death suit to Ron Goldman’s family, to the tune of more than $30 million. Having blown all his capital on a pair of heavyweight legal teams, and having no job prospects lined up (would you hire him?), Simpson has been defaulting on the settlement for years. With no unprotected assets to seize, the Goldman family took O.J. back to court this summer and secured possession of his book.

This is where things get dicey. Rather than simply putting a lien on all profits derived from the sale of Simpson’s book, the judge awarded the Goldmans the manuscript, which they have amended and annotated extensively to counter all of Simpson’s “speculative” observations and released the book as If I Did It: Confessions of The Killer (Beaufort Books, 2007), with the word “If” printed in tiny letters inside the “I,” making the title appear at first glance to read “I Did It.” The book has been in stores for several weeks now and is doing brisk sales.

Did O.J. do the murders? Yes. Does he deserve to profit from a ham-handed publicity stunt related to the murders? Certainly not. But do the Goldmans have the right to change Simpson’s book however they wish? The answer is an emphatic no, and the judge who awarded them this license was wrong to do so. Even with as feeble and out-of-control an intellect as O.J. Simpson’s, intellectual property is intellectual property and should be inviolate, always. We are free not to believe a word of it, and we are definitely free not to pay for it, but none of us, no matter how deeply wronged, has the right to simply change someone else’s words just because we don’t like what they say.

The First Amendment can’t only apply to people we like, and O.J. Simpson - that old double-murdering, gun-waving, hotel-room-heisting exhibitionist fool - is and must be the proof of that. It may not be fair, but it is only just.

In the Same Department: While we’re on the subject of fairness, poor Missy Chase Lapine, huh? According to the New York Times, Lapine, a mother of two and a former publisher of Eating Well magazine, approached HarperCollins (them again) twice with The Sneaky Chef, her cookbook of recipes for substituting healthy ingredients into kid-friendly foods, like pureed spinach into brownies, for instance. HarperCollins rejected her book twice (Running Press bought it and put it out last April), citing too much similarity to another cookbook in their catalogue.

This did not, however, stop the publishing house from putting out Deceptively Delicious, a cookbook about sneaking healthy ingredients into kid-friendly foods - like pureed spinach into brownies, for instance - written by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry Seinfeld. According to the Times, a large number of people have reported on suspicious similarities between the two books to Amazon.com, and, after Seinfeld plugged her book on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” to the show’s website as well. The Seinfelds have denied any wrongdoing, and Lapine is loath to accuse them.

It would be tacky to suggest, as many people have, that anything scurrilous is going on, although rumor has it that the publisher is currently making changes to Seinfeld’s book, thus further delaying shipments in the face of the burgeoning demand. Let’s face it, if you’ve ever had kids, you’ve camouflaged a few nutritious foods in your time to get them past the little ones’ crap-centric palates. The idea is hardly new, and there’s bound to be some overlapping recipes, as whatever works, works. What is unfortunate about this situation, however, is that while Lapine's credentials as an authority on nutrition are more substantial than Seinfeld’s, Seinfeld has the name recognition to get on “Oprah,” and despite the fact that Oprah has never personally had to figure out how to feed children herself, that appearance was sufficient to send her zombie legions lumbering into bookstores to pick up the Seinfeld book.

Hey, Some Good News: The best part of having a book column is being able to pass along news of good books, not only of the recent variety, but occasionally of an older vintage as well. I’m asked all the time what my favorite books are, and it’s impossible to answer that without a fistful of qualifications, but I can name the best book I read last year, and it was Marisha Pessl’s debut novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Penguin Putnam Trade, 2006, now out in paperback).

A moving, smart, funny and heartbreaking coming-of-age novel, it is the story of Blue van Meer, the precocious daughter of a widowed journeyman poli-sci professor. After years of moving from place to place, Blue’s father relentlessly overeducating her in the car, Blue settles in at an exclusive prep school and falls in with the school’s elite crowd and their flamboyant mentor. But after the mentor commits suicide while taking her students camping, Blue’s crowd begins to turn on each other. Forced to play Nancy Drew, Blue begins to unravel the perverse secrets of her teacher, her friends, and, ultimately, herself.

The book is loaded to bursting with literary and film references from the store of encyclopedic knowledge that shapes Blue’s way of looking at the world, but the device never gets old or too clever for its own good. As Blue moves from an itinerant loner toward her grown-up destiny, her journey is all peaks and valleys, teenage insecurities and tragedy beyond anyone’s control, sometimes horrible but always engaging. Pessl manages to take a character who could easily be little more than a gimmick and imbue her with such humanity that the reader will feel what she feels, for good or ill, with absolute certainty. That’s what happened to me, and with as much reading as I do, for a novel to affect me like this one did means that it’s one damn good novel indeed.

John G. Nettles