On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwanRead about all ten marital rows on Mullan's list.
The best thing about this novel is the final bitter argument between husband and wife on the disastrous first night of their honeymoon. McEwan lets you see how each had the chance to relent, but resentment keeps making the cruellest jibe the most tempting thing to say.
Ulysses by James JoyceRead about all ten vegetables on Mullan's list.
The most significant yet mysterious vegetable in literature is surely Leopold Bloom's potato. "Potato I have", he thinks as he checks his pockets on first leaving his house; he carries it everywhere. A prostitute takes it, but he retrieves it, explaining: "It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mama". Later, we hear phantom voices chanting, "Potato Preservative Against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us".
Read the complete interview.The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
The Rebels by Sándor Márai (or Embers by him, if you prefer)
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Not the Hapsburgs, admittedly, but you get the idea.)
One title on his list:The Journals of Lewis and ClarkRead about all five books on Bascomb's list.
1803-05
There are hundreds of books on the Lewis and Clark expedition— scholarly treatises, narratives, biographies, collections of maps. Engrossing reading, sure, but why choose them when the original journals by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exist? Even if the prose is rough, the journals are an American treasure, a first-hand account of the discovery of a nation. There is a hypnotic, galvanizing power in the daily descriptions of rivers forged, buffaloes seen, Indians met, meals eaten, illnesses suffered, plants examined, rainstorms weathered and dangers overcome. No matter the hardship experienced over the more than two years they spent in the wilds, the two explorers always managed to update their journals, as Lewis did one winter day: “The ink f[r]iezes in my pen,” he complained, before continuing with his account. When Clark writes on Nov. 7, 1805, “Ocian in view! O! the joy,” your heart, too, will leap.
Lisa See's most recent book is Shanghai Girls.Women Writing in Modern China: An Anthology of Literature by Chinese Women from the Early 20th Century edited byRead about more books on See's list.Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson: Often in the West, we are told that in the past there were no women writers. But of course there were! Only so much of what they wrote has been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up. China has a different tradition. There were a lot of women writers who have remained in print not only in China but also in this country. There are several anthologies of Chinese women writers. The Red Brush is probably the most comprehensive, and covers over 2,000 years of women writing in China. (Try to beat that, Western canon!) I also like The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, but my favorite is Women Writing in Modern China, which covers the early 20th century. These women write about the same things women write about today — love, children, family, heartbreak, war, the economy, and all the things that bind us together as human beings.
In the 1970s, everything Martian hovered on the brink of major change. The Mariner satellites had photographed the surface, Carl Sagan and others began talking about the possibility of terraforming Mars, and then the Viking missions changed our image of Mars forever. At this moment, Frederik Pohl used the Mariner findings to portray a very realistic Mars and ask the question, How far would we go to adapt ourselves to the place, rather than the place to us? The chilling answers found in Man Plus (1976) make it one of Pohl’s best novels.Read about all ten books on Robinson's list.
For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of literary ménages à trois.A Home at the End of the World by Michael CunninghamRead about all ten ménages à trois on the list.
A touching and honest depiction of an enduring love triangle between a gay man, a self-proclaimed fag-hag and their at times bisexual lover, set in New York during the Aids epidemic. A book filled with love, pain and compassionate humour from the author of The Hours, it was also made into a film starring Colin Farrell and Robin Wright Penn.
Read about all 20 titles. [h/t to escapegrace]Lord of the Flies William Golding
(1954)
Can there really be anyone who hasn’t read this novel? A group of schoolboys are marooned by a plane crash on a desert island and their attempts to remain civilised (and nice toward the fat kid) fail very badly. School teachers love this novel because it poses so many questions about morality, power and what holds together society. Consider checking out The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne from 1857, Lord of the Flies was written as a reposte to this novel.
Anna Karenina by Leo TolstoyRead about all ten births on Mullan's list.
Anna is haunted by a prophecy that she will die in childbirth. We are in the waiting room with the men, as Anna's lover, Vronsky, and her husband are told of the birth of a baby daughter (Vronsky's). The mother, however, has puerperal fever and will certainly die. The men are reconciled – and Anna lives.
Elliott Gorn, who teaches history and American Civilization at Brown University, is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One. For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about criminals.Jesse JamesRead about all five books on Gorn's list.
by T.J. Stiles
Knopf, 2002In “Jesse James,” T.J. Stiles dims the glow of the Old West, avoids the biographers’ fetish of piling fact upon useless fact, and gives us both the life and its rich historical context. Turns out the raging guerrilla warfare of the post-Civil War Missouri borderlands was crucial to understanding Jesse James. Stiles moves us away from thinking of James as a bandit and toward thinking of him as a terrorist—a fitting word to describe Confederate veterans who won by violence and subversion what they had lost on the battlefield. James’s legend became part of the larger Southern myth of the “lost cause,” a myth whose believers helped undermine Reconstruction, justify rigid racial segregation and introduce the rule of lynch law.
Goblin Market and Other Poems - Christina RossettiRead about all ten books on Palmer's list.
"Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices/Squeezed from goblin fruits for you". A new bite-sized selection, focussing on Rossetti's Victorian fairyland fruit fantasy, in all its barmy sensuous excess. Goblins proffering plump unpecked cherries tempt two blushing girls.
One book on the list:William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land: A Love Tale (1912). Hodgson, a British sailor, strongman, and visionary, paints a macabre, fascinating portrait of a frozen future Earth whose few remaining human inhabitants live in a vast underground space created by earthquakes, lit by the glare of lava bubbling up from below, and inhabited by dinosaurs. Worse, at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached "the Barrier of Life" that separated our dimension from one populated by "monstrosities and Forces" - Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, "Ab-humans," Brutes, enormous slugs and spiders - collectively known as the Slayers. (At least one of them, as far as I can tell from the 1972 Ballantine paperback cover shown here, resembles Pac-Man.) The unnamed narrator, along with apparently every other surviving human, lives trapped in the Last Redoubt, a eight-mile-high metal pyramid-city constructed by their ancestors using now-forgotten technologies. The pyramid is protected from the Slayers, who surround and observe it constantly, by mysterious Powers of Goodness, and also by a massive force-field powered by the "Earth Current" - a Tesla-esque force drawn from the planet itself. Our hero is telepathic, and one day he receives a distress signal that appears to issue from a woman living in a long-forgotten community of humans sequestered in a distant Lesser Pyramid whose power supply is running out. Arming himself with a lightsaber-meets-brushcutter gizmo called a Diskos, and eating nothing but protein pills and powdered water, he sets forth on a mission impossible - into the Night Land.Read about all ten books on Glenn's list.
Liz Jensen's latest novel, The Rapture, is an ecological thriller about a psychotic teenage girl who warns of an earth-changing cataclysm. Available now in the U.K., The Rapture arrives in America in August.“A first-class apocalyptic thriller of futuristic science, geophysics, and religion. It's clever, intelligent, and—most terrifying of all—plausible”Jensen named her top 10 environmental disaster stories for the Guardian.
—Kate Mosse, author of Labryinth and Sepulchre
One novel on the list:Oryx and Crake by Margaret AtwoodRead about all ten stories on Jensen's list.
Comedy and horror jostle for supremacy in this masterfully-conjured post-disaster novel. Genetically-modified animal species, defrosted tundras, and a new creation myth to explain it all to a new race of bio-engineered humans: wonderful. But Atwood has a deeper purpose, and while the narrative entertains, the big, dark ideas are whirring as furiously as a wind turbine in a hurricane.
One book on the list:"Satan's Underground," by Lauren StratfordRead about all five titles on Radford's list.
"Satan's Underground" was a 1991 book in which the author described her first-hand experience inside a Satanic cult. Stratford's book included horrific depictions of baby-killing rituals, pornography, torture, rape, and other abuse. Like Anthony Godby Johnson, Stratford claimed to have been continually physically and sexually abused by her parents and forced into prostitution. She also described being locked in a metal drum with the bodies of four babies who had been sacrificed to Satan. The book became a best-seller, helping fuel the "Satanic panic" hysteria that swept across America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet skeptical investigation revealed that the story was a complete hoax. None of Stratford's claims were true; every gruesome, sensational detail was made up. Stratford later changed her name and began claiming to be a Jewish Holocaust survivor, still trying to wring sympathy from the public.
Chowringhee by Sankar (Penguin, $14).Read about all six titles on Ali's list.
A classic of Bengali literature, recently published for the first time in English. Set in a venerable Calcutta establishment, this sprawling saga examines in luminous detail the iniquities of society represented in microcosm at the hotel. Containing the action in a hotel where employees and guests are in physical proximity but a world away from each other heightens Sankar’s every observation.
Read about all eleven Oprah picks.The Grift
by Debra Ginsberg
352 pages, Shaye Areheart
I'm not psychic. There's no such thing; only luck, timing, and observation," Marina Marks, an attractive and highly intuitive "counselor" to the wealthy and influential tells herself. Um, wrong. Marina's second sight—and haunted loneliness—makes Debra Ginsberg's The Grift (Shaye Areheart) an unusually seductive thriller. Read it for the not-so-predictable deceptions and the ghostly elusiveness of love. — Cathleen Medwick
Number One on his list:Our Man in HavanaRead about the other books on Furst's list.
by Graham Greene
Viking, 1958
Graham Greene’s work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and “Our Man in Havana” may be his best. The problem here is Hollywood: Just as you can’t read Greene’s “The Third Man” without thinking of Orson Welles, “Our Man in Havana” instantly brings to mind Alec Guinness, followed closely by the sublime Ernie Kovacs. But the book itself is a marvel, making fun of the espionage business while still remaining a spy novel. It brings ample suspense and expertly wrought ambience to its tale of a British vacuum-cleaner salesman in Cuba who reluctantly agrees to become an MI6 agent. He begins filing fanciful reports—including sketches of a secret military installation based on a vacuum-cleaner design—that the home office takes all too seriously. “Our Man in Havana” is a honey of a beach read, best served with rum and Coke.
Visit Alan Furst's website.
The Grapes of Wrath by John SteinbeckRead about the other nine pieces of fruit on Mullan's list.
No accident that there are fruit in the very title of Steinbeck's chronicle of depression America. The Okies flee the dustbowl for California, where they hope for work picking fruit. There they can only survive by eating the fruit, and make themselves sick. The land of plenty gives you gut rot.
Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas HardyRead about all ten fake deaths on Mullan's list.
Even devotees of Hardy's fiction will find it hard to think of Sergeant Troy's supposed death from drowning without recalling the film version, with Terence Stamp leaving his clothes and his troubles behind him on a Dorset beach. Years later, as Bathsheba teeters on the brink of marriage to Boldwood, Troy, her "dead husband", returns to reclaim her. Boldwood shoots him.
Elise Valmorbida is the author of the critically acclaimed books Matilde Waltzing, The Book of Happy Endings and The TV President."If there's one common element in all my writing, it's an interest in migrants and migration. I guess it's natural given my own multicultural origins, but it's also at the heart of storytelling: the migrant brain is prone to metaphor – the perpetual balancing of here and there, different worlds in simultaneous play. And beingRead about all ten books on Valmorbida's list.translated. Being found in translation. Suitcases. Secrets. Invisible cities."
1. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
This slim book took many years to make. It's compelling, painful and exquisite. Here's the story of the Creole heiress who leaves the Caribbean for a life in England as the first wife of Mr Rochester. (Jane Eyre is the second.) Unpicking her like a hidden jewel from the weave, the author releases a minor character from a major text. She is a migrant bride, a misrepresented outsider, "the other woman", a mad thing in the attic …
One book that made the grade:Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)Read about the other titles on the list.
What would become the staples of the genre were introduced in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto with deliberate fanfare and much hilarity. The setting is medieval and the castle itself is riddled with dungeons, cloisters, secret passages and trapdoors, precisely the sort of architectural features that would later come to symbolise, in the gothic, the human mind in its deviousness and complexity. Incest, murder, ghosts, dreams, madness, supernatural events and other elements suggestive of transgression and decay abound. The story concerns the downfall of Manfred, a tyrannical despot consumed with greed and lust who is unable to control his passions or his servants.
He named his top ten books on globalization for Foreign Policy. A few books on his list:For good overviews of the diverse facets of globalization read David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton's Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture as well as The Great Experiment by Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott who, like Fernandez Armesto, argues that the global integration of humanity has been an inexorable historical trend and explains why improving global governance is an urgent priority. Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington's Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) is also worth a read.Read about all ten books on the list.
One title on the list:Possession by AS ByattRead about the other graveyard scenes on Mullan's list.
Steeped in affairs Victorian, Possession naturally has a stormy climax in a country churchyard. By night, lashed by wind and rain, the novel's modern-day investigators dig in the grave of long-dead poet Randolph Henry Ash to find the final clue to his secret affair with fellow poet Christabel LaMotte. Lightning flashes and the past is exhumed.
One title to make the list:The ScarecrowRead about all five books on Montgomery's list.
by Michael Connelly
One of the most anticipated books of the season is Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow, a followup to 1997’s The Poet, the book that introduced reporter Jack McEvoy. In The Poet, McEvoy teamed up with the FBI to catch a killer preying on cops, making a name for himself as one of the best journalists around.
Now, 12 years later, McEvoy is being forced out of his job at the Los Angeles Times, yet another victim of budget cuts. Hoping to go out on a high note with one last story, he investigates the case of a young drug dealer accused of murder, a crime the teen’s family claims he didn’t commit. What McEvoy uncovers is not just a big story, but a life-or-death situation involving an especially devious serial killer.
There are few authors with both the journalistic background—Connelly was a crime reporter for the Times—and the writing chops to produce such a fascinating thriller. If The Scarecrow isn’t quite as fine as the best of Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, it’s still one of the best books of the summer.
Eugenie Samuel Reich is a former editor at New Scientist. She has written for Nature, New Scientist, and The Boston Globe, and is known for her hard hitting reports on irregular science. Several of her reports have resulted in institutional investigations.Voodoo ScienceRead about all five books on Reich's list.
by Robert L. Park
Oxford, 2000The thesis of “Voodoo Science” is that instances of science fraud arise from ignorance. Whether it’s the dream of free energy or the fear of cancer caused by overhead powerlines, the public’s uninformed obsessions often attract false scientific claims. A physicist at the University of Maryland and former director of the Washington Office of the American Physical Society, Robert L. Park is known for candor in the discussion of bad science. He is devastating, for instance, on the subject of the “cold fusion” debacle in 1989, when chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Utah falsely claimed to have replicated the reactions that power the sun by using a tabletop apparatus that applied electric voltage to heavy water. This eminently readable work leaves the reader with a deep appreciation of how pseudoscientists often tailor their fictions to the public imagination.
David Barnett does not approve of several of the rascals to make the list, but liked some of the choices: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn rightly earns his place – on the run with a slave in 19th-century Mississippi, dressing as a girl, and faking his own death certainly earn him his rascal stripes. And Pippi Longstocking deserves to be included for her baiting and exposing of adult pomposity – oh, and for lifting that horse above her head. Similarly, one can't argue with Bre'r Rabbit's inclusion, thanks to his anti-authoritarian stance.Read more about Barnett's take on the list.
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)Read about all ten titles on the list.
Real-life re-animation experiments were all the rage and gave Shelley the idea for her novel, but as creator of the original "Frankenstein science" she became unwitting godmother of everything from heart transplants to GM foods.
In 2006 Derwent May, a writer and reviewer for the London Times, named a "critic's chart" of top books of exchanges of letters.THE SHOCK OF THE NEWRead about the other books to make the chart.
Robert Hughes
A persuasive critic on a roller-coaster ride through Modernism, linked to a memorable television series.
Ian MacKenzie's debut novel, City of Strangers, is published in paperback this month by Penguin.The Use of Reason by Colm Tóibín (from Mothers and Sons)Read about all ten items on MacKenzie's list.
Another Rembrandt in peril. Tóibín's protagonist, a calm and calculating thief of high-end goods, strays out of his depthwhen he purloins some works of art, including a Portrait of an Old Woman by the Dutch master. He is fluent in the handling of jewels or money, but fumbles a plan to fence the paintings to some enigmatic Dutch customers, and finds himself weighted down with a priceless but unsalable item. The brilliance of the story lies in the reader's agony as he tracks the fate of the painting, which nears an unimaginable point of no return. In the finale, Tóibín makes us shake at the dark future that awaits an irreplaceable artwork, and in the process forces us to consider what we value, and why.
One item on the list:The Big Sleep/The Long GoodbyeRead about the other adaptations to make the grade.
Two examples of how similar source material can be given remarkably different adaptations. The Huston* movie (adapted by Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman) is classic Hollywood; witty, elegant, dark, sexy. Altman's is classic New Hollywood; cynical, rambling, mumbling, sunlit. Interestingly, the great Leigh Brackett worked on both movies.
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