Five top novels on U.S. frontier social history

Simon Winchester's books include Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, and Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, a history of the world’s second-largest ocean.

With Daisy Banks at The Browser, he discussed five novels about the social history of America's expanding frontiers from the late 19th century to the Great Depression, including:

Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner

Your next choice, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, is about the friendships between two very different couples who met during the Great Depression.

In a way this is an expansion of the theme in [John Williams's] Stoner, once again set in a university. It is a novel mainly about friendship and suffering. It is very sad, beginning with the death of one of the protagonists and how it ends is incredibly touching. Wallace Stegner is known as the great western novelist and is famous for books about Montana and the crossing of the west, most notably a novel called Angle of Repose which is an absolute classic. But in terms of human tenderness I find this particular book remarkable and unforgettable.

The couples are very different characters – one is a very subdued elder couple.

Yes, they are very different indeed. The differences between them are reflected particularly in the Vermont chapter, where all sorts of bizarre things happen during a walk in the woods. What I really love about this novel is the depth of friendship which crossed between these couples from very different classes, who are on the one hand academic failures and on the other academic successes.

Read about the other novels Winchester tagged at The Browser.

Crossing to Safety is on Lan Samantha Chang's five best list of novels on friendship.

Also see Simon Winchester's six favorite books about sailing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on theater

John Heilpern's books include Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa and How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway? Writings on Theater—and Why It Matters. He writes the "Out to Lunch" column for Vanity Fair.

One of his five best books on theater as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Shakespeare's Insults: Educating Your Wit
by Wayne F. Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen (1995)

This collection of some 4,000 of the Bard's insults—4,000 of them!—was gleefully put together by two American students when they were studying at Cambridge University. The Hill & Ottchen team has never let me down. Shakespeare's insults, muscular abuse and common profanities enrich his plays like a lethally merry feast. They are a tonic in these indecorous times: "He is not the flower of courtesy" ("Romeo and Juliet"). They condemn with wit: "The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes" ("Coriolanus"). There's something for everyone. The stinging insult that offers sound advice: "Sell when you can, you are not for all markets" ("As You Like It"). The balefully dismissive: "All that is within him does condemn itself for being there" ("Macbeth"). Even the contemptuously prosaic: "You three-inch fool!" ("The Taming of the Shrew"). There are also abundant examples of insults that are so rude, and lewd, that they cannot be done justice to here. That is what the theater is for.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best nightmares in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best nightmares in literature.

One novel on the list:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

"Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire." Captain Ahab lies in his bunk, screaming in his sleep at the terrors that possess him. "A chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them." And all because he wants to kill a whale.

Read about the other bad dreams on the list.

Moby-Dick also appears among Katharine Quarmby's top ten disability stories, Jonathan Evison's six favorite books, Bella Bathurst's top 10 books on the sea, John Mullan's list of ten of the best tattoos in literature, Susan Cheever's five best books about obsession, Christopher Buckley's best books, Jane Yolen's five most important books, Chris Dodd's best books, Augusten Burroughs' five most important books, Norman Mailer's top ten works of literature, David Wroblewski's five most important books, Russell Banks' five most important books, and Philip Hoare's top ten books about whales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on dissent in Eastern Europe

Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale University. His books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

One book tagged in his dialogue with Alec Ash at The Browser about books on the experience of dissent in Central and Eastern Europe:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
by Milan Kundera

Why did you choose Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?

Milan Kundera was of course not really a dissident, but this book gets across the heartfelt reality of Stalinist faith. Kundera was a young Stalinist, as were his friends. So he knows what it was like to be on the inside, to have certainty about the rest of the world and to believe that everyone who didn’t share that certainty was a fool. To know where things were going and what you wanted from society – that glowing, overwhelming sense that one is young and the world belongs to you. Kundera really gets that sense across, and I think that’s incredibly important.

When one thinks about the reality of dissidence, we in the West tend to look back and think there was bad communism and a bunch of nice liberals. But in fact most dissidents went through a pretty intense intellectual revolution themselves to get to where they were. The most important dissidents in Czechoslovakia were themselves Stalinists at one point. The point is not just that we all have original sin, but that if we don’t grasp the positive forces that attracted other people at one point then we grasp neither the human evolution of dissidence nor what they were really up against, which was a quite powerful ideology.

So was the history of Soviet dissidence written by the victors?

I think the history of dissidence has been written not so much by the victors as by observers of the victors. They played a supporting role in a larger drama about the neoliberal triumph. It’s only part of a larger story, whereas there’s a much more interesting smaller story about people's capacity to change themselves.

Interestingly, in 2008, documents were found that seemed to suggest that Kundera had turned in a spy to the communist authorities. Everyone was shocked. The Americans, the Czechs, everyone – including Kundera himself, who denies it. But we shouldn’t have been shocked. We have this delusion that everyone who we think of as resisting communism must have been a nice liberal their whole life. But of course when this allegedly happened, in 1952, Kundera was a Stalinist. So behaving irregularly was completely consistent with his worldview at the time. Everyone has together been wishfully dismissing that from history.

Read about the other books Snyder discussed at The Browser.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is on Colum McCann's top ten list of novels featuring poets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books by the homesick

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 and Homesickness: An American History.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books by the homesick.

One title on the list:

Desert Exile
by Yoshiko Uchida (1982)

In 1942, Yoshiko Uchida's family left their home in Berkeley, Calif., where she was attending college, and took up residence in horse stall No. 40 at the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, on the other side of San Francisco Bay. They had been sent to the track along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the Uchidas arrived at the racetrack, the young woman felt "degraded, humiliated, and overwhelmed with a longing for home," she wrote in this memoir. "And I saw the unutterable sadness on my mother's face." Yet the family tried so hard to make the rough surroundings comfortable that when they were again uprooted and sent to an internment camp in Utah, they found themselves missing Tanforan—at least it was familiar. In addition to recording her family's internment experience, Uchida recounts her parents' emigration to the U.S. a few decades earlier, their gradual assimilation during the 1920s and 1930s, and their postwar efforts to put down roots. "Desert Exile" is a portrait of a family for which a lasting sense of home proved elusive.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Susan J. Matt's Homesickness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best seductions in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best seductions in literature.

One novel on the list:

Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe

Moll looks back on her first steps in a career of sexual opportunism. It begins with the son of the woman for whom she works as a maidservant. He starts with mere flattery, throws in a few "earnest" kisses and then thrusts five guineas into her hand. "I was more confounded with the Money than I was before with the Love" – and so "I gave my self up to Ruin."

Read about the other entries on the list.

Moll Flanders appears on Freya North's top ten list of romantic fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books of the night

Ian Marchant's books include two acclaimed memoir/travel books, Parallel Lines and The Longest Crawl, and the recently released night-owl's guide to Britain, Something of the Night.

One of his top ten books of the night, as told to the Guardian:

Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

This is an account of Scott's expedition of 1912, brilliantly written by one who was there. The title might lead you to suspect that the doomed attempt on the South Pole would be the eponymous journey. Not a bit of it. Compared to the so-called Winter Journey, going to the Pole was a bit of a spree. Apsley-Garrard, Edward Wilson and Birdie Bowers travelled 130 miles in temperatures as low as -60C to collect emperor penguin eggs. It was so cold that the pus in their frostbitten fingers froze. And all under cover of the Antarctic winter night. Astonishing, and never out of print since publication in 1922.

Read about the other books on the list.

Worst Journey in the World is one of the Barnes & Noble Review's five books on winter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Henry Alford's six favorite books

Henry Alford has written for the New York Times and Vanity Fair for over a decade. He has also written for the New Yorker. It is entirely possible that you have heard him on National Public Radio.

He is the author of a humor collection, Municipal Bondage, and of an account of his attempts to become a working actor, Big Kiss, which won a Thurber Prize. His book How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They are Still on This Earth), which was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

Alford's new book about manners, Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, was published earlier this month.

One of the author's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

You don't need to know this parody novel's antecedents — D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy's rural melodramas­ — to weep with laughter at it: Backwoods yokelism is universal. Read it and "I saw something nasty in the woodshed" may become your new "grunions at their best," if not your new "Danskin crotch panel."

Read about the other books on Alford's list.

Cold Comfort Farm is among Belinda McKeon top ten farming novels, John Mullan's ten best parodies in literature, and Lisa Armstrong's top books on shoes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about mountaineering

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books about mountaineering:

Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer

Krakauer's unforgettable and unflinching page-turner set the standard for modern accounts of hubris colliding with the elements. It tells the story of the May 1996 disaster on Mount Everest that left eight people dead. Krakauer was on the mountain that fateful morning, and he shares every last detail of one of Everest's darkest days, including doubts about his own behavior that may have cost a life. This edition is updated with a new postscript that addresses conflicting accounts of the tragedy, especially the bitter debate that arose between Krakauer and Everest guide Anatoli Boukree.

Read about the other books on the list.

Into Thin Air is one of Ed Douglas's ten best survival stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top science fiction classics

Adam Roberts received his MA (English and Classics Jt-Hons) from Aberdeen University and his PhD (Robert Browning and the Classics) from Cambridge University. He has worked in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, since 1991, and he is currently Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature.

His books include The History of Science Fiction as well as numerous science fiction novels, eight parodies, two novellas, a collection of short stories and various other things.

One of five top science fiction classics he discussed with Alec Ash at The Browser:

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

Let’s begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818.

Frankenstein is called by some (but not by me) the first science fiction novel. In it, that futurity is materialised as Frankenstein’s monster, a weird symbolisation of “the child” filtered through the imaginarium of horror and terror. Shelley had miscarried her first pregnancy a year before writing the novel – the year after it was published, both her babies died of malaria – and her novel understands the relationship between creativity and morbidity, between birth and death.

I’m sure I don’t need to summarise the story for you [spoiler alert!]. A scientist called Victor Frankenstein constructs and animates an eight-foot-tall artificial man, but obscurely horrified by what he has done, abandons his creation and temporarily loses his memory. The creature – never named – comes into the world a mental tabula rasa to be written upon by experience – as it transpires, mostly the experience of others’ hostility towards its hideous appearance. It learns not only to speak but, improbably enough, to read and write by eavesdropping unnoticed on a peasant family. Thereafter it becomes murderous, a consequence not only of others’ hostility but also of reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and identifying with the outcast Satan. Lonely, it seeks out its maker demanding that he create a monstrous bride. Frankenstein agrees and builds a second, female creature, but belatedly alarmed at the implication of his two creations breeding and populating the world with monsters, he tears it to pieces. In revenge the monster kills Frankenstein’s own wife. Frankenstein pursues his creation to the arctic wastes, where he dies. The novel ends with the creature still alive, but promising to kill itself.

Summarised so baldly, this perhaps seems a little clumsily plotted – Shelley was 19 when she wrote it – and the novel does sometimes lapse into a rather melodramatic crudeness. But it also possesses remarkable imaginative power, not least in the embodiment, in both heart-wracked scientist and sublime monster, of two enduringly iconic archetypes of the genre.

Do we trace the beginnings of sci-fi back to Frankenstein, or earlier still?

Brian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him. For Aldiss, writing in Billion Year Spree, Frankenstein encapsulates “the modern theme, touching not only on science but man’s dual nature, whose inherited ape curiosity has brought him both success and misery”. Indeed, in 1974 Aldiss wrote his own oblique fictional treatment of the same story, Frankenstein Unbound, in which a modern man, propelled by “timeslips” back to the Romantic era, meets not only Mary Shelley but Frankenstein and his monster too – the latter proving an eloquent commentator on man’s capacity for dialectically interconnected creation and destruction. As a description of the novel and an implicit characterisation of SF as a whole, this has persuaded many.

I once wrote a History of Science Fiction in which I argued that SF begins much earlier than Frankenstein. I’m not alone in thinking so. Some people suggest that it goes all the way back to Homer’s fantastical voyage or the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fantasy in the broadest sense is of great antiquity in human culture, I agree. But there seems some point to me in separating out science fiction from the broader category of fantasy, and I’d say we can’t really do that until we have “science” as a meaningful category. For me that means the Renaissance.

I argue that the first proper SF story is a book by Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer, called Somnium – written in 1600, though not published until the 1630s – in which he imagines what actual lunar life forms might look like. There are a great many voyages to planets in the 17th and 18th centuries. But that said, I’d agree that Frankenstein occupies a special place in the genre. Though a little clumsily put together, it is astonishingly powerful and dream-haunting. One reason for that is the way it realises, in dramatic form, the terror of generation – of what inherits us, what comes after.

Read about the other entries at The Browser.

Frankenstein is one of Andrew Crumey's top ten novels that predicted the future.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on the gods of Olympus

One novel on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on the Olympians:

The Infinities
by John Banville

The Greek pantheon has been the inspiration for a wide variety of recent works of fiction. In The Messenger of Athens, Ann Zouroudi introduced readers to Hermes Diaktoros, a detective of possibly divine origin. Dan Simmons imagined a race of "Post-Humans" taking on the personae of Zeus & Co. in Ilium. And, of course, in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, a boy finds himself part of a hidden world of modern Olympians. In The Infinities, Man Booker Prize-winner John Banville surrounds a dying writer and his fractured family with the scheming of Greek divinities -- who display distinctly earthly appetites.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about secret agents featured in series

Jeffrey T. Richelson is the author of several books on intelligence, including Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America's Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad and Spying on the Bomb. He is currently a Senior Fellow with the National Security Archive.

In 2008 he named a five best list of books on secret agents featured in series for the Wall Street Journal, including:

Berlin Game
by Len Deighton

Intelligence officer Bernard Samson is languishing behind a desk in London when word arrives that one of Britain's most important sources behind the Iron Curtain wants out. Samson is sent into the field to bring "Brahms Four" home -- a mission he undertakes despite troubling evidence of an enemy mole in his department. Though Len Deighton is better known for "The Ipcress File" (1962), "Berlin Game" -- the first book in what would become a series of three Samson trilogies -- is his most absorbing work. It captures two preoccupations of Cold War intelligence battles: recruiting agents in the adversary's intelligence services and unmasking enemy penetrations. Deighton skillfully weaves suspense, but he also writes with an appealingly jaundiced view of the spy game, particularly of its top officials. Samson's boss, we're told, "the most stuffed shirt in the whole Department," locks up his elegant coffee cup and sugar bowl in a secure filing cabinet each night.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue