USETH THE FORCE: A couple of weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Jeffrey Brown's "Star Wars"-based parenting books, which were enjoying a run on the advice, how-to and miscellaneous list. Now another "Star Wars" spinoff is making noise: "William Shakespeare's Star Wars," by Ian Doescher, is new at No. 12 on the hardcover fiction list. The book recasts the story of Luke and Leia and Darth Vader as a five-act play in iambic pentameter - because why not? - and it's more entertaining than you might guess. Here's a sample couplet from the prologue: "In time so long ago begins our play / In star-crossed galaxy far, far away." In a phone interview, Doescher told me he came up with the idea last year, after watching the original "Star Wars" trilogy and attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in quick succession. "People ask me whether I see "Star Wars" as a comedy or a tragedy," he said, "but it's really neither - it's partly a history, like "Henry V," and partly a fantasy, like "The Tempest." " He added that he was gratified, but not entirely surprised, by the book's success: "Shakespeare is a popular market, and "Star Wars" is a popular market," he said. "It's not like I was writing "Geoffrey Chaucer's Ishtar." " NORMAL LIFE: After making its debut at No. 12 on the hardcover fiction list last week, Curtis Sittenfeld's novel "Sisterland" drops to No. 17 on the extended list. The book traces the fraught relationship between psychic twins, one of whom courts celebrity while the other shuns it. But Sittenfeld told The Daily Telegraph recently that the novel's paranormal trappings were really just a way for her to contemplate the routine anxieties she endures as the mother of two young children and a sister herself. "Fiction can be this place where we dramatize more common daily emotions or experiences," she told the newspaper, "because fiction should be a little more interesting than normal life. One hopes. After a pause, she added, "Actually, let me put it this way: Fiction should be more interesting than my normal life." This is Sittenfeld's third book to become a best seller, following "Prep" (which spent a combined 11 weeks on the hardcover and paperback lists) and "American Wife" (which spent a combined 14 weeks on both lists). LEARNING FROM PAPA: "Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations," by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner, is selling well - it's at No. 18 on the extended hardcover nonfiction list. The book is based on notes Evans took in the late 1980s, when Gardner asked him to ghostwrite her autobiography, and among all of its juicy Hollywood gossip there are also a few literary tidbits, including references to Gardner's acquaintance with Ernest Hemingway. (She appeared in three movies based on Hemingway's work, and angered the screenwriter of "The Sun Also Rises" when she sent the script to Hemingway for an opinion. "Fortunately, Papa went easy on me," the screenwriter told Evans.) Gardner wasn't above name-dropping as a kind of bullying, and when she disagreed with Evans about the structure of her proposed autobiography, she told him: "I learned from the best . . . John Huston, Tennessee Williams, Papa Hemingway, John Ford, Joe Mankiewicz, the sonofabitch. I worked with them all. They knew how to tell a story. You want to second-guess Hemingway, Tennessee Williams? You know how to tell a story better than those guys? I'm sorry, I don't think so. Gardner ended up hiring a different ghostwriter, and the autobiography that resulted, "Ava: My Story" (published shortly after her death in 1990), spent three weeks on the hardcover best-seller list.