One entry on the list:The Cry of the Owl by Patricia HighsmithRead about the other owls on the list.
Robert Forester is a kind of stalker, surprised to find that Jenny, the object of his attentions, thinks that they are destined to be together. She believes in fate and premonition, fearing that when she hears the cry of an owl it predicts an imminent death. It being Highsmith, she turns out to be right.
"The Detour" (Soho, 307 pages, $25), by the magnificently named Andromeda Romano-Lax, springs from Hitler's real-life purchase of a cast of the ancient sculpture "The Discus Thrower" from the Italian government. In the novel, Ernst Vogler is the man tasked with retrieving the delicate piece, but his return to Germany is sidetracked by the confusing misadventures of his Italian drivers and the appearance of a voluptuous Piedmontese woman.Read about the other books Sacks discussed.
Ernst was born with a minor physical imperfection, which allows Ms. Romano-Lax to muse about the classical beauty embodied by the sculpture and worshiped by Hitler.
Emrys Westacott is a Professor of Philosophy at Alfred University.OblomovRead about the other books on the list.
by Ivan Goncharov (1859)
Goncharov's masterpiece has been translated into English six times yet remains relatively obscure outside Russia. The protagonist, a young nobleman named Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, exemplifies an entire family of bad habits: lethargy, indolence, procrastination, indecisiveness, apathy, escapism, resistance tochange, and a refusal to take responsibility or give life a direction. Oblomovshchina is now a Russian word that means something like Oblomov syndrome—a debilitating lack of get up and go. The strange thing is that, for all his many and obvious failings, Oblomov is rather lovable. Maybe that's because most of us are familiar with the feeling, upon waking, that we'd like to stay in bed and let the busy world leave us alone in our comfortable hobbit holes. Oblomov also represents a leisured way of life that was endangered even in the mid-19th century by looming modernity. The trend was welcome insofar as that way of life was based on parasitism and exploitation, but it also has a sad aspect. As Oblomov might have attested, a lack of ambition allows you to enjoy simple things and savor the passing moment.
Jewish Chronicle. He also presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series, The Long View.The Thirty-Nine StepsRead about the other books Bourne tagged at The Browser.
by John Buchan
Finally, what is it about John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps that makes it such a good thriller?
I haven’t read this for a long, long time. But it has stayed with me since reading it in boyhood. It is extraordinarily fast paced. A huge part of any good thriller is the chase, and this is very good on that. Buchan has a protagonist who is in some ways a precursor to James Bond, in that he is suave, sophisticated and ingenious. It is an espionage story, and the fate of the country is at stake. And it has what every good thriller story should have, which is that no matter how high-concept and overlaid with political intrigue a novel is, it has to be a cracking good yarn. This is one of those classic page-turner, fast, exciting stories.
How do you go about creating suspense and pace yourself?
You know the beginning and you know the end. Your job is a bit like holding a reel of yarn and unspooling it very gradually and steadily. It is very tempting to let the reelstart spinning and have all the yarn out in a matter of seconds. You will get to the end that way, but it is better to unspool it gently and steadily. Each scene should only reveal one more stretch of yarn at a time.
In that sense it is quite different from journalism, where the first line of any news story essentially tells you what the entire story is. Writing a novel is the reverse. You shouldn’t know fully what has happened until you read the last line. A thriller should be slow release, even when it is a very fast-paced story – and that will keep people with you. In each chapter you give them another piece of the puzzle.
It’s quite similar to how people tell a story. If you see people sitting around a table, they all do this. Both my parents, in different ways, are storytellers. When I was a child, they would tell me a little bit at a time and keep my interest alive. So – despite being a journalist – when I came to write novels, I found it less of a departure from everything that I had done before than I was expecting.
Paul Mason is the BBC's Newsnight economics editor. He is the author of Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2008), Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2010) and, this year, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.Read about the other books on the list.Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
This is Mo's masterpiece: China's 20th century told symbolically through the story of one man, from birth to maturity; an adult who cannot wean himself from his mother's milk, assailed by wave upon wave of misfortune, poverty, war, imprisonment and finally release into the grubby capitalism of the 1990s. Mo Yan's China is a world of magic, sexual exploitation, ignorance and senseless violence.
Read about the other entries on the list.My Wicked, Wicked Ways
by Errol Flynn
In iconic film roles such as Robin Hood and Captain Blood, Errol Flynn thwarted the bad guys and made female fans' pulses race with debonair good looks and charm. With the same flair that his filmic counterparts displayed in mock duels, Flynn takes up the pen confronting the popular perception of him as a womanizer head on. He shares details of his days as a soldier of fortune in the South Seas, his three marriages, his countless sexual conquests, and even his trial for statutory rape. More recent editions include passages that were removed when the book was originally published for fear of lawsuits.
Nevada Barr is an award-winning novelist and New York Times best-selling author.The Poacher's Son by Paul DoironRead about the other books on Barr's list.Paul Doiron's sleuth, Mike Bowditch, is a 24-year-old Maine Fisheries and Wildlife man, and most definitely not hard-boiled. Using Bowditch's youth and vulnerability, Doiron gives us a fresh sense of the harsh realities of crime and law enforcement that years of tough guys have allowed us to forget.
Nat Hentoff is an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and writes regularly on jazz and country music for The Wall Street Journal.Thelonious MonkRead about the other books on the list.
by Robin D.G. Kelly (2009)
Jazz musicians who continue to impress their peers and audiences have "signature sounds." After hearing a player for a short time, the listener almost immediately knows who he is. Sometimes it takes only a few bars, as with Thelonious Monk, an always surprising original both as a pianist and a composer. The creative dimensions of thisceaselessly inventive jazz master are artfully brought to life by Robin D.G. Taylor in his engrossing biography. When Monk had a long gig at the Five Spot in New York, the bar was packed with musicians not working that night. I was often among them. Being in the musical presence of Monk, who sometimes got up and danced to his music, was like being part of a beguiling adventure—a sense of possibility that Kelly fully captures. Another magnetic original, John Coltrane, who was a sideman with Monk at the Half Note, tells the author: "You never know exactly what's going to happen. One thing above all that Monk has taught me is not to be afraid to try anything as long as I feel it."
One of his top ten siblings' stories, as told to the Guardian:We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley JacksonRead about the other titles on the list.
Constance and Merricat Blackwood are sisters and neighbourhood pariahs who live in the shadow of scandal: Constance was once arrested for poisoning the rest of the family. She has been acquitted, however, and seems to have settled down to a quiet life when a money-grabbing cousin knocks on the door. Merricat, whose fidelity to the idea of family unity no one is in a position to question, comes to her aid. Scary, mad and gleeful, Jackson's marvellous thriller is also a clever meditation on sibling protectiveness. And insanity.
One entry on the list:Bulstrode NicholasRead about the other bankers on the list.
Bulstrode is the Mr Big of George Eliot's Middlemarch, a wealthy provincial banker on whose good will every local gentleman seems to depend. He wields his influence moralistically, for he is a severe Methodist – but of course he has a shady past. He is being blackmailed by a former associate, and takes desperate measures to get rid of him.
Read about the other thrillers Gerritsen tagged at The Browser.Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
The first thriller you have chosen is Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, which has one of the most evocative opening lines of any novel: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
This a modern – well, 1930s – version of Jane Eyre. In the grand tradition of Gothic novels, it features an innocent young woman and a scary house with secrets. The heroine marries a widowed Englishman and moves into his mansion, where the servants are still mourning his stunning first wife, Rebecca. Throughout the story, she feels the first wife haunt the house, and she can never quite measure up to her. And then the heroine begins to wonder: What if Rebecca was murdered? What if my husband did it?
Rebecca has many different sides to her as a character, depending on who is describing her.
Yes, it is a little bit like [Akira Kurosawa's film] Rashomon in that you look at this dead woman from different points of view. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers sees the late Rebecca as a queen, an object of total worship. The heroine sees her as a flawless and beautiful ideal that she can never match up to. Then you find out that, from the husband’s point of view, Rebecca was in fact a monster.
What makes it such a good thriller?
The exploration of who this dead woman really was, and whether her husband might have killed her. That’s the underlying theme for a lot of good crime novels – the unknowable person. We all walk around with a public face, but we don’t really know what is underneath that mask. Crime fiction is about finding out who the real person is.
And what they are capable of!
Chatsubo from NeuromancerRead about the other bars on the list.
Chatsubo does not sound like a nice place, and it's not in a nice universe. It is, however, in a very good book, and so it's pretty normal to want to explore it. Neuromancer's tale of technological intrigue is heavy with unpleasant consequences for anyone who wasn't hardened enough to deal with it or was hardened enough that they even remotely stepped out of line. Although Chatsubo is an ex-pat bar in Japan and seems more like a pretentious hipster place than a smoldering den of corruption, a place to be annoyed with the clientele rather than terrified by them, it doesn't still doesn't seem like a fun place to go. Instead, you would go to Chatsubo (or the rest of the Neuromancer universe) like you would swim with sharks or run with the bulls - just to say you had done it and not to enjoy it.
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