One of his ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:The Man Who Loved Children by Christina SteadRead about the other entries on the list.
Great Australian author Stead wrote this brilliant novel about the Pollits family, and set it in the USA at the behest of her agent. Jonathan Franzen said it best when he said that it “makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. She has been named BBC Radio's food writer of the year and is a three-time Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year. She writes a monthly column on food in the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Cambridge, England.Vegetarianism had a surprising flowering in late 19th-century Britain, as Colin Spencer describes in his comprehensive Vegetarianism: A History. As he recounts, there were multiple groups of campaigners in the 1880s who saw a non-animal diet asRead about the other books Wilson tagged.part of wider social radicalism. Many Victorian vegetarians were also pacifists or Fabians. Some of them were what Gandhi called “vegetarian extremists”, abstaining from milk and butter and well as meat.
Clearly, there have been de facto vegans for a long time, but the word itself was only invented in 1944. That year, the Vegan Society broke away from the Vegetarian Society on the grounds that, as Spencer explains: “The dairy herd is inextricably mixed up with the meat industry; three-quarters of beef production stems from it, and milk production entails the removal of the calves from their mothers when they are a few days old.”
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).Read about the other entries on the list.
Anna and Vronsky run away together to Italy and he resigns his commission in the Russian army. How to fill his days: Why not take up painting? Tolstoy enjoys some painful comedy at the expense of the dilettante aristocrat as he tries to learn from a real artist.
A.F. Brady is a writer, psychotherapist and mental health counsellor. Her latest novel is Once a Liar.American Psycho, by Brett Easton Ellis (1991)Read about the other entries on the list.
Patrick Bateman, Vice President at Pierce & Pierce, living in a gorgeous apartment with a coveted address, invited to all the important parties, and able to secure almost every exclusive restaurant reservation.His days are spent daydreaming about the brutal murders he’s just committed or those he is about to commit. He manipulates and uses people, only for his own benefit, never willing or able to connect on any deeper level. Set in the restaurants, offices and homes of New York’s wealthy elite, Bateman slowly loses his mind. Seemingly in possession of exactly what the world tells us we want out of life—good looks, charm, elite education and employment—in the end, it’s loneliness and fear that define Patrick Bateman’s life.
Precisely what happened to the climate in Poul Anderson’s The Winter of the World is unclear; it’s set far enough in the future that Mars is green (presumably a hat tip to now outmoded models of Martian climate), so it’s possible that Earth is simply the victim of natural processes. Still, references in the novel suggest that the first phase of the cooling that ended our civilization involved a large number of extreme heating events provided courtesy of our pal, the nuclear bomb. (Presumably using them made sense at the time?) Millennia later, humanity is well on its way towards recovering what was lost under the ice—not least of all, epic imperialism. While the political machinations are familiar from history, time and isolation have given rise to something entirely novel in the far north.Read about the other entries on the list.
One of his ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul MonetteRead about the other entries on the list.
Paul Monette’s memoir is a devastating account of his encounter with a disease that would kill him. It is so intimate and personal that I often felt I was reading someone’s diary and was ashamed to be committing such a gross invasion of another person’s privacy. Paul Monette was not a careless man. He wanted us to know and remember what AIDS did to him. He succeeded more than he could ever have realized. Books about what it means to be human have no expiration date.
The Binti Trilogy, by Nnedi OkoraforRead about the other entries on the list.
Okorafor’s recent, Hugo-winning Binti Trilogy fits nicely here; the protagonist is a woman from a marginalized human tribe who is the first of her people to be offered a chance to study at a the galaxy’s most elite university, but doing so will require her to give up her identity—but it is ultimately that uniqueness that will help her to save her own life and form new bonds of understanding across a vast cultural divide. But if you can stomach something unremittingly darker, the World Fantasy Award-winner Who Fears Death also applies. Set in a post-apocalyptic future Sudan where a light-skinned race oppresses a darker-skinned one, a girl of both societies, born out of violence and gifted with magical abilities, sets off to murder her father. Incorporating scenes of barbaric female genital mutilation and the use of rape as a weapon of control, it is a harrowing, angry novel about a woman who refuses to be a victim.
Cane Toad Wars by Rick ShineRead about the other books on the list.
In 1935, white Australians (an alien invasive species) imported 101 cane toads (also an alien invasive species, as it turned out) from South America to eat beetles that were devastating the sugar cane crop (another alien species) in Queensland. What happened next is chilling because cane toads did not eat the insects they were supposed to eat, but they did quickly invade all of northern Australia, becoming fabulously, wildly successful. But more than just re-telling the history of this most fearsome of all man-made ecological disasters, Rick Shine, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney, explores the complex and often nuanced story: the adaptation of the toads to their new environment and of their new environment to them, writing that these events have much to teach us about evolution and ecological resilience. This engaging firsthand account tells the personal story of Professor Shine’s lifetime of research into cane toads and how rigorous natural history studies can effectively inform conservation policies and practices. Professor Shine also makes a strong argument in support of that (apparently) most quaint of scientific practices: field work.
Kristyn Kusek Lewis is the author of the novels Save Me (2014) and How Lucky You Are (2012), both from Grand Central. Her new novel is Half of What You Hear. The Perfect Mother by Aimee MolloyRead about the other entries on the list.
When The May Mothers, a Brooklyn mother’s group that typically meets at a local park, decide one summer night to blow off steamand go out drinking, the unthinkable happens: One of the mother’s babies goes missing. The scandal rocks the community, most of all the mothers in the group, who begin pointing fingers—and drawing suspicion—as the story deepens and more questions arise about what actually happened to the baby and who is to blame.
Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts.Six of Crows, Leigh BardugoRead about the other entries on the list.
I was a big fan of Leigh Bardugo’s original Grisha trilogy, with its Russian aesthetic and fascinating magic, but Six of Crows and The Crooked Kingdom really raised the bar. Six of Crows manages to pack in a fascinating cast, an amazing city that feels real, and a lot of wonderful character moments and still have room for a pulse-pounding magical heist. I loved every minute of both of these.
School of Music, and several years later, she received her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University. She currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She is the author of Another Place You’ve Never Been, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the acclaimed The Gunners.Station Eleven by Emily St John MandelRead about the other entries on the list.
“‘The thing with the new world,’ the tuba had said once, ‘is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.’” Members of the Traveling Symphony roam a post-apocalyptic world performing Shakespeare and musical numbers for the remaining humans. The book opens with a scene from King Lear and uses classic motifs throughout. It is a wonderfully bizarre and haunting tribute to the endurance of art in the face of an unrecognisable world.
Wil Medearis is the author of Restoration Heights. At CrimeReads he tagged seven favorite novels that explore real estate swindles, including:Attica Locke, The Cutting SeasonRead about the other entries on the list.
Belle Vie, once a sprawling Louisiana plantation, is now a tourist attraction managed by Caren Gray, a black woman whose mother was a cook for the family who owns the estate. The staff—most of them also black—perform pageants that perpetuate the standard myths of the Old South, full of happy slaves and genteel, good-hearted masters. Yet Caren maintains a deep affection for the place—a conflict that anyonewho grew up in the South will recognize as requiring the kind of mental and moral gymnastics that are routinely expected of black Americans—and it is this affection that drives her suspicion of the sugar-cane company that has been buying up land around the plantation. The narrative is set in motion when the body of a migrant worker is found in the cane fields just across the fence from Belle Vie, but it is the tension of the descendants of slaves trying to make a good life for themselves while the crimes of their history go unacknowledged that drives the novel.
Steph Post is the author of A Tree Born Crooked, Lightwood, and Walk in the Fire, as well as a short story writer, reader, teacher and dog lover (among many other things...).Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. ByattRead about the other entries on the list.
While Gaiman['s Norse Mythology] works a bit of humor into his retelling of the Norse gods’ antics, A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok ispiercingly somber and yet captures the epic showdown of the Twilight of the Gods in all its spectacular, Wagnerian glory. Ragnarok: The End of the Gods juxtaposes the experiences of a young British girl evacuated to the countryside during World War Two with the Norse end-of-the-world myth in a startling, yet gorgeously wrought way that brings power and humanity to both sides of the coin.
Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent novel is Barkskins.Read about the other entries on the list.The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell is especially good at showing the daunting complexity of solutions to on-the-ground problems in places such as Miami Beach, Alaska, New York, Venice and remote islands whose residents have nowhere to go. Here are real-world headaches of flood insurance, transportation, nuclear reactors on eroding shorelines, the tendency to rebuild rather than rethink following disasters.
how his legacy has shaped the past half-century:There Will Be No Miracles HereLearn about the other entries on the list.
When Casey Gerald is recruited to play football at Yale, he enters a world he’s never dreamed of, the anteroom to secret societies and success on Wall Street, in Washington, and beyond. But even as he attains the inner sanctums of power, Casey sees how the world crushes those who live at its margins.
finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996).Read about the other entries on the list.
I first read Infinite Jest when I was nine months sober, and found an unexpectedly poignant account of recovery where I'd been expecting mere intellectual virtuosity. Don Gately is easily the most compelling fictional rehab house counselor you'll ever meet.
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Bryn GreenwoodRead about the other entries on the list.
Set against the backdrop of meth dealers and their thugs, poverty, alcoholism, broken families, and abuse, Greenwood’s novel is ultimately about how people care for each other in such a harsh and corrosive environment. In this slowly unfolding love story, we gasp at the developing relationship between a girl and a (much older) young man, but at the same time recognize its inevitability. The book is provocative, unsettling, and honest, and much of its success lies in Greenwood’s ability to make us feel the genuine love between these two so powerfully that we suspend judgment.
The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine ArdenRead about the other entries on the list.
Set in medieval Russia, in an era when Christianity is replacing folk magic, the Winternight Trilogy revolves around Vasilisa, a young woman with one of the last connections to the magical world, and her extended family. So many of the relationships are incredibly well drawn, but I was particularly captivated by the one between Vasilisa and her brother Sasha, a devout warrior monk. Though they’re set on VERY different sides of a theological war, with Sasha’s faith a direct threat to Vasilisa’s beloved magical world and Sasha truly fearing for his sister’s soul, they never stop fighting for (and with) each other.
The Lost Ones, by Sheena KamalRead about the other entries on the list.
The first book in Canadian Kamal’s Nora Watts series is a twisted story of—what else?—a missing girl. Watts, a recovering addict and underemployed depressive, gets a call that Bonnie, the daughter she put up for adoption years before, has run away from her adoptive family. Thinking Bonnie might go looking for her birth mother, Bonnie’s adoptive father contacts Nora and asks for her help in the search for Bonnie. Watts is still dealing with her own demons after a childhood spent in foster care and her fall into addiction, but she cares enough about her daughter to try and find her, revealing parts of the past she’d rather not reckon with.
One of her top ten books about Trinidad and Tobago, as shared at the Guardian:Measures of Expatriation by Vahni CapildeoRead about the other entries on the list.
The 2016 winner of the Forward prize for best poetry collection. Some of the locations and experiences are recognisably Trinidadian, and yet the poems, and the larger work, transcend particularity. In one poem, “The mouth is planetary, circled by systematic tides”; it is also “geographical to the extent that the body is terrain”.
David Mack is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure, including the newly released The Iron Codex.Child of Fire by Harry ConnollyRead about the other entries on the list.
Being a tough-guy mage isn’t always about being the best or the strongest. This is doubly true for down-on-his luck car thief turned driver Ray Lilly. He’s got a bit of magical talent, but he makes his living as a driver for Annalise Powliss, a member of the Twenty Palaces Society,which hunts down rogue mages. She has it in for Ray because he betrayed her once before, and she’s looking for an excuse to kill him—or to turn a blind eye while someone else does. But when her latest mission goes wrong, it falls to Ray to finish it for her—meaning he will have to take down a sorcerer with powers far beyond his own. This is a classic David-vs.-Goliath tale with a high rate of collateral damage, one in which raw power must be overcome through cunning, courage, and sheer guts. Urban fantasy adventure doesn’t get much better than this.
Daniel Palmer is a critically acclaimed suspense novelist.
One of his seven favorite conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, as shared at CrimeReads:Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal Frederick Forsyth’s depiction of a professional assassin, contracted by a French dissident paramilitary organization to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, renders such an accurate portrayal of a global manhunt that it was no surprise when the author later revealed his past role as a British M16 agent. Perhaps that’s why he was able to write theLearn about the other books on the list.book in 35 days, which is utterly discouraging for us mere mortal writers. When it comes to grand conspiracies, nothing satisfies quite like a high-level assassination. The Jackal’s cunning makes him compellingly enigmatic and oddly sympathetic. The Day Of the Jackal is arguably the best conspiracy thriller ever written, and inarguably had a profound impact on the genre of political/conspiracy thrillers.
Hannah Tennant-Moore is the author of Wreck and Order.In The Good Mother by Sue Miller, a recently divorced woman meets a man who awakens her sexual longing for the first time. This would seem to be a familiar storyline: frigid female set free by confident, sexy hunk. But the form Anna’s new passion takes is far from cliché or fantastic. Rather than swooning or feeling helpless and breathless inRead about the other entries on the list.Leo’s presence, Anna feels that her “pelvic bones got heavier, shifted somehow.” And the first time they have sex, Anna does not experience multi-orgasmic fireworks, but a more realistic longing for the sex to last longer, to “feel more.” With her ex-husband Brian and her prior lovers—starting with groping adolescent boys—Anna has always been passive, accepting male advances as “intrusions” to be endured, wanting the man to finish so the sex would end. But with Leo, Anna feels “left behind” when Leo comes, longing to experience the same pleasure he does. This is a far more interesting—and believable—depiction of the awakening of heterosexual female lust than, say, having your first orgasm when a man plays with your nipples (as happens to Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Grey).
For Anna, having pleasurable sex is not the magical result of good chemistry, but the logical result of...[read on]
One of her six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel (2018).Read about the other entries on the list.
All of this book's short stories are great, but "Arms Overhead," about two teenage girls who bond over their shared desire to cannibalize men, has earned a special place in my heart. One review called the book "bloodless," but I couldn't disagree more — I could practically feel the blood dripping down my chin as I read.
Jean McNeil is the author of thirteen books, including six novels and a collection of short fiction, a collection of poetry, a travel guide and literary essays. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award for fiction and the Journey Prize for short fiction (Canada). Her 2016 book Ice Diaries: an Antarctic Memoir, which The New York Times has called 'stunningly written', won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival Book Competition.“It appears out of the fog and low clouds, like a white comet in the twilight.” [Environmental historian Stephen J] Pyne opens hisRead about the other entries on the list.thrilling survey The Ice on this looming note. He obeys his own dictum to find a language worthy of the place in this narrative steeped in science and history and so commandingly written it is best read a few paragraphs at a time, to savour the cold voltage of his prose. Structured by the stratigraphy of the continent, with sections titled The Berg, The Sheet, The Glacier, The Ice’s vertiginous language voices the Antarctic’s Wagnerian grandeur and unpacks its image as a blank space to reveal its true character: a metaphor, an enigma.
Emma Rous grew up in England, Indonesia, Kuwait, Portugal and Fiji, and from a young age she had two ambitions: to write stories, and to look after animals. She studied veterinary medicine and zoology at the University of Cambridge, then worked as a small animal veterinary surgeon for eighteen years before switching to full time writing in 2016.The Thirteenth Tale, Diane SetterfieldRead about the other entries on the list.
Adeline and Emmeline are out-of-control twins growing up in a wealthy but unstable family. The bond between them is powerfuland, at times, destructive. The book opens with a reclusive author, approaching the end of her life, deciding to tell the truth—or at least, part of the truth—about her disturbing childhood. She convinces her reluctant biographer to listen to her tale, and her memories take her back to Angelfield, her family’s estate, long since burnt to the ground under mysterious circumstances. The identity of Adeline and Emmeline, and the exact relationship between them, is more complicated than the biographer at first understands, and gradually the elderly author reveals the dark secrets that have haunted her all her life.
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’ His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books.Read about the other entries on the list.Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway: Which will help you understand the mushrooming #ExxonKnew scandal.
“Doubt-mongering also works because we think science is about facts—cold, hard, definite facts. If someone tells us that things are uncertain, we think that means that the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a precess of discovery.”
Steph Post is the author of A Tree Born Crooked, Lightwood, and Walk in the Fire, as well as a short story writer, reader, teacher and dog lover (among many other things...).The Goshawk by T.H. WhiteRead about the other entries on the list.
T.H. White is known for The Once and Future King and his Arthurian scholarship and fantasies, but it is The Goshawk, a slim, humble volume I found referenced inHelen Macdonald’s brilliant H is for Hawk that has haunted my dreams for years. White, frustrated with teaching and yearning to embrace a more wild existence, moves to a country house with a goshawk, determined to tame the bird using archaic methods that prove brutal to both parties. It’s the true portrait of a twisted, complex relationship between a single man and a single bird, pushing and pulling against one each other in a heartbreaking tug-of-war.
Laura Sims's new novel is Looker.The White City by Karolina RamqvistRead about the other entries on the list.
Ramqvist’s novel is quietly arresting from the start: “It was the end of winter. Under the sky that had always been there, now dark, the house still looked almost new. It had a sort of shine to it and was surrounded by nothing but silence and snow.” Inside this starkly beautiful, isolated landscape, in a once-grand, now-neglected and deeply mortgaged house, a woman isstruggling to survive with her infant child after her partner, a high-rolling criminal, has died. I love everything about this book: the spare, finely honed language and atmospheric setting; the atypical focus on the criminal’s female partner, rather than the criminal himself; the realistic portrayal of motherhood’s comforts and demands; the protagonist’s piercing observations; and the escalating, realistic tension that drives the character to act as she never would have dreamed she could.
Bridget Collins, an amateur bookbinder, actor and Quaker, is the author of The Binding and seven books for teenagers.Captain Bildad in Moby-Dick by Herman MelvilleRead about the other entries on the list.
A refreshing counter-example to the upstanding, idealistic Friends that feature elsewhere in this list, Captain Bildad is bitter, hard, avaricious and sanguinary, one of the “fighting Quakers … Quakers with a vengeance”. Opposed to bloodshed in principle, he has nonetheless spent his youth on the spillage of “tuns and tuns of leviathan gore” and retires to enjoy his substantial income.
Martin Seay's ten best long books, Ian McGuire's ten best adventure novels, Jeff Somers's five top books that will expand your vocabulary and entertain, Four books that changed Mary Norris, Tim Dee's ten best nature books, the Telegraph's fifteen best North American novels of all time, Nicole Hill's top ten best names in literature to give your dog, Horatio Clare's five favorite maritime novels, the Telegraph's ten great meals in literature, Brenda Wineapple's six favorite books, Scott Greenstone's top seven allegorical novels, Paul Wilson's top ten books about disability, Lynn Shepherd's ten top fictional drownings, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, Penn Jillette's six favorite books, Peter F. Stevens's top ten nautical books, 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 lists of ten of the best nightmares in literature and 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.
Our Gang, by Philip RothRead about the other Nixons on the list.
One day in 1971 Philip Roth saw side-by-side stories on the front page of his morning newspaper: one, Nixon declaring his belief in the sanctity of human life where abortion is concerned, and two, Nixon ordering the release of a man recently convicted for his participation in the My Lai massacre. Roth figured there was no small irony in this juxtaposition and he went to town on it. The resulting satire is savage and Swiftian, if a little unrelenting. Reading it today, the funniest and most resonant joke is the notion of President Trick E. Dixon picking on a country like Denmark to declare war on and invade.
One of the author's six favorite literary grudges, as shared at The Week magazine:The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side by Agatha ChristieRead about the other entries on the list.
A party hosted by a famous actress is interrupted by a suspicious death in one of Christie's finest Miss Marple novels. I don't want to give away any surprises, but it's safe to say that the grudge central to the plot stands out because of its unusual position in the narrative.
and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.“Enemies: A Love Story,” by Isaac Bashevis SingerRead about the other entries on the list.
Perhaps my favorite contemporary novel by someone I’m not married to. It’s about a Holocaust survivor who ends up with three wives. Every scene is a gold mine of insight about human nature.
Posts
All Comments
