Essential reading for modern humans

Powells.com asked Richard K. Morgan to "Recommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise."

Here's what he came up with:

Essential Reading for Modern Humans: Six Books That Will Change the Way You View the World (Though You May Not Thank Them for It):

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human by Matt Ridley

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism by Robin Morgan (no relation!)

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Culture and Prosperity: Why Some Nations Are Rich But Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Read the entire Powells.com Ink Q & A with Richard Morgan.

The Page 69 Test: Thirteen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Perry's list

Thomas Perry, author of Nightlife -- and over a dozen other excellent thrillers, including the soon-to-be-released Silence -- contributed "The List" to The Week magazine this week.

One of his titles:

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

It’s Faulkner’s dramatization of storytelling — how human beings piece together the past based on what is known, what can be surmised, and what is always true of human beings. Miss Rosa Coldfield tells the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen and his family, and then Quentin Compson and his friend Shreve retell the old story until they know they’ve got it right.

Read about Perry's other picks.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia O'Toole's 5 most important books

Pulitzer Prize-nominated biographer Patricia O'Toole has chronicled the lives of powerful figures such as Henry Adams (The Five of Hearts) and Teddy Roosevelt (When Trumpets Call).

She told Newsweek about her five most important books.

The only one on her list that I haven't read:

The Journal of John Winthrop

Now there was a leader. Humane, visionary and just.

Read about the other four titles on Patricia O'Toole's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gordon Brown's favorite books

Gordon Brown, the incoming Prime Minister of Great Britain, talked to Mariella Frostrup of the BBC's Radio 4 about his five all-time favorite books.

One title mentioned:

Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 by Linda Colley.

Read about the rest of Brown's list.

What does the list reveal about Brown? Something impressive, according to Ben Macintyre of the London Times; not so much, says Richard Lea at the Guardian books blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Scott: 5 books that "cast a spell"

Joanna Scott is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at The University of Rochester and author of numerous books, including Everybody Loves Somebody, a collection of stories and Liberation, a novel.

In an interview with Powells.com Ink Q & A, she was asked to "Recommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise."

Her response:

I'm always looking for books that cast a spell, whatever that means. It should be a simple quality to describe, yet it's infinitely mysterious. I can't give any recipe for this or even offer a list of ingredients. But I can offer examples of the spellbinding books I've read or reread recently:

1. The Silver Screen by Maureen Howard
2. King by John Berger
3. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
4. Two Women by Alberto Moravia
5. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about Germany & Germans

Steven Ozment is a professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard University. His most recent book is A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People.

He selected five books that "excel in their portraits of Germany and the German people" for Opinion Journal.

Number One on the list:

The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples by Herwig Wolfram (University of California, 1997).

Why do thousands of Germans annually visit the 19th-century monument near Detmold honoring the first-century barbarian prince Arminius? Herwig Wolfram explains all. Arminius was the first barbarian to defeat Roman legions, and in his life and deeds one finds the first stirrings of the "German people" among polyglot tribes migrating to the borders of the Roman Empire. At this time, barbarians served Rome as the members of federated armies and as agricultural workers, the talented becoming Roman citizens. By the fourth century, crack Germanic warriors occupied virtually every senior military post in the Roman army. As the Romans were "barbarized," the barbarians were "Romanized." The resulting mix of Roman, Christian and Germanic cultures lay at the heart of what became the German nation.

Read about all five titles on Ozment's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Richtel's list

Matt Richtel, author of the new Silicon Valley thriller Hooked, contributed "The List" to The Week magazine this week.

One of his titles:

Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp by C.D. Payne

I nearly injured myself laughing. The story is about a geeky 14-year-old desperate to lose his virginity while bearing a larger-than-life vocabulary and worldview.

Read about the other books to make Richtel's list.

Matt Richtel is an author, journalist, and cartoonist. Hooked is his first novel, and he is currently writing a second, tentatively titled Idle's Mind. He makes most of his living as a New York Times reporter, covering technology and telecommunications from the San Francisco bureau.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paulette Jiles's 12 favorite books

In a spring 2007 interview with Barnes & Noble, Paulette Jiles named her twelve favorite books:

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye

Grimms' Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Peru by Gordon Lish

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The above are my favorites because they are so beautifully written, because of the intelligence that shines from the stories, because of the urgency behind their presentation, and because of the authors' conviction that the story being told matters deeply. Grimms' Fairy Tales, of course, are not by any one author. They are like an open window into an ancient and probably ageless part of our minds that lusts for stories.

Read the complete interview.

Stormy Weather is Paulette Jiles's second novel. Her first novel, Enemy Women, was published in 2002. A national bestseller, it was hailed as "a delight from start to finish" by author Tracy Chevalier, and praised as a "book with backbone, written with a tough, haunting eloquence" by Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

--Marshal Zeringue

Willy Vlautin: 5 great books set in the West

Willy Vlautin, author of The Motel Life, named these "five great books set in the West" for a Q & A with Powell's.

Winter in The Blood by James Welch
Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
True Grit by Charles Portis

Read more of the Q & A at Powell's.

Here's how Vlautin described his novel:

The Motel Life is a novel set in Reno, Nevada. It's about two brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan, who end up living on their own in a motel at an early age, 14 and 16. These are decent kids who end up bouncing around for the next nine years living from place to place and going from job to job. Then one night Jerry Lee, while driving home, accidentally hits a boy on a bike and kills him. This changes the brothers' lives forever, because instead of reporting it, Jerry Lee goes to his brother for help and the two decide to run.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil deGrasse Tyson's 5 most important books

American Museum of Natural History astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told Newsweek about his five most important books.

The only novel on his list:

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

He says Mars has two moons a century before that's discovered. Lucky guess.

Read about the other four titles on Neil deGrasse Tyson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: American literature of the 1920s

Jeffrey Hart, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College and author of Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe (2001) and The Making of the American Conservative Mind (2005), selected five books "essential to appreciating American literature of the 1920s" for Opinion Journal.

One title to make the grade:

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1929)

In my opinion, this is Hemingway's best novel, written with a style and lyrical force that is apparent from the famous opening: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.... Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees." Catherine Barkley, Hemingway's greatest heroine, is an English nurse's aid in Italy during World War I. Her fiancé, a British officer, has been killed on the Somme, blown to bits. Then a wounded man, an American ambulance driver named Frederic Henry, is brought into the hospital where Catherine works, and they find a certain solace in each other. As she later lies dying in childbirth and Frederic tries to comfort her with empty words, she passes the British officer's discipline on to him. " 'I'm going to die,' she said; then waited and said, 'I hate it.' " Her resolution in the face of death -- she "holds her line under the maximum exposure," as Hemingway put it elsewhere -- reflected the writer's own stylistic and moral imperative.

Read about all five titles on Hart's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tina Brown's list

Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and the author of a new biography of Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles, contributed "The List" -- of "some of her favorite recent reads" -- to the The Week magazine.

One of her titles:

The Tyrannicide Brief by Geoffrey Robertson

An absorbing portrait of a hitherto forgotten figure in British history, John Cooke, the heroic lawyer who was selected by Parliament in 1649 to prosecute the trial of Charles I. Cooke righted British democracy, then paid for his courage with his life.

Read about the other books to make Brown's list.

--Marshal Zeringue