Top 10 graphic novels

One title from Lev Grossman's top ten graphic novels list at Time magazine:

It's way beyond cliché at this point to call Watchmen the greatest superhero comic ever written-slash-drawn. But it's true. In the world Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created, it's 1985, Nixon is still president, the Cold War is at absolute zero, and the nation's superheroes consist of a bunch of neurotic, washed-up has-beens, mostly without actual superpowers, mostly retired.

As the novel begins one of them, the Comedian, is murdered. What follows is an astoundingly dense, beautiful, sad story that begins as a noir mystery and ends with the destruction, or possibly the redemption, of the entire world as we know it. To tell this story Gibbons and Moore deployed about a dozen fugually interwoven plots and an intricate system of echoing visual motifs. The result is a masterpiece so powerful it caused the entire genre of superhero comics to immediately rethink its most sacred conventions.

Read about all ten titles on the list.

V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd appears on Malorie Blackman's list of the top ten of graphic novels for teenagers.

--Marshal Zeringue

The top 20 books of fiction of the '00s

The Millions assembled a panel to determine the best books of fiction of the last ten years. "It’s a bit early, of course, to pass definitive judgment on the literary legacy of the ’00s, or how it stacks up against that of the 1930s, or 1850s," goes the introduction. "Who knows what will be read 50 years from now? But, with the end of the decade just a few months away, it seemed to us [to be] a good time to pause and take stock...."

One book to make the Top 20:

#19: American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman

Read about all twenty books on the list.

Also see: The Page 69 Test: American Genius, A Comedy.

Lynne Tillman: Writers Read.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best: green stories in literature

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

One novel on his list:

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper's characters are wooden, but his most famous novel made readers all over Europe thrill to the sublime wilderness of America. Endlessly escaping over vividly described mountains and lakes, braving the white water of unbridged torrents, Hawkeye and the Brits whom he helps are the ancestors of today's trekkers.

Read about all ten stories on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best novels that focus on mental disorders

Douwe Draaisma, the author of Disturbances of the Mind, teaches the theory and history of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of novels that focus on mental disorders. One novel on the list:

Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday, 1999

Now that neurologists and psychiatrists tend to describe diseases rather than the case histories of individual patients, novelists have stepped in to fill the void. Many fictional characters these days suffer from syndromes and disorders, giving voice to the patient's perspective, often convincingly. In "Motherless Brooklyn," Jonathan Lethem introduces us to Lionel Essrog, also known as Freakshow, who is afflicted with a fierce case of Tourette syndrome. The thing is, he's a private eye, a challenging profession even without the twitching, barking and verbal tics that threaten to give him away. Lethem draws you inside a hectic Tourette mind, where the same compulsive urge to restore order also helps the detective to get to the bottom of a murder case.

Read about the other four novels on the list.

Motherless Brooklyn also figures in Phillip Lopate's literary guide to Brooklyn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best tattoos in literature

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

One novel on his list:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Ishmael, the narrator, finds himself sharing a bed at the whalers' inn with a Polynesian harpooneer whose face and body are covered with tattoos. These are the work of a "seer of his island" who has "written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth". Unfortunately, it is illegible to everyone, including Queequeg himself.

Read about the other nine tattoos on Mullan's list.

Moby-Dick also appears among 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

Jim James' best books

Jim James, the frontman of the Grammy-nominated American rock band My Morning Jacket, recently released a George Harrison tribute album.

And he told The Week magazine about his six best books.

One book to make the grade:

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey (Harper Perennial, $15).

Monkey wrenchin’. Stickin’ it to the man. For his 1975 comic novel about a band of eco-saboteurs, Abbey invented some of the most memorable characters ever set into motion. High adventure in the great American West. Pure mental cinema. Great escape with a great message to boot.

Read about the other books on James' list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about the Cannes film festival

Earlier this year Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic, came up with a top 10 list of books "to help you imagine yourself" at the Cannes film festival.

One book on the list:

JG Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000)

This has to be Ballard's late masterpiece and is sometimes regarded as a companion piece to his (slightly inferior) novel Cocaine Nights. Ballard proposes a futuristic business park built in the hills above Cannes, a rational technopolis which, far from having "designed out" crime, has secretly designed in rage, anarchy and despair. There are some tart remarks about the festival, and the new Palais building – opened in 1983, in fact – and their faintly sinister aspect, gesturing at the unexamined neurotic dimension of cinema. Ballard's book offered cinephiles and francophiles a new, uncliched way of looking at the rackety side of Cannes, the endlessly rehearsed serious/trashy paradox and the seamy side of the business.

Read about the other books on Bradshaw's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Martin's five favorite novels

Judith Martin is a syndicated columnist and the author of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated.

In 2005 she named her five favorite novels for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

"Emma" by Jane Austen (1816).

Before the injunctions "Be yourself" and "Express yourself" inspired so much bad behavior and art, sophisticated novelists were examining the social selves we invent, as indeed we must to face the world. Little Miss Do-Gooder, the unlikely heroine of this novel, exhibits the philanthropist's fatal flaw of acting on theory rather than on observation. Most impressively, that sly Miss Austen manages to engage our sympathies for a Georgian version of Paris Hilton whose motto is Everyone Wants to Be Me. The faults of Elizabeth Bennet of "Pride and Prejudice" and Marianne Dashwood of "Sense and Sensibility" are merely taking laudable traits--self-respect and romantic passion, respectively--to excess. But Emma Woodhouse is a rich, spoiled young busybody who imagines that everyone aspires to her lifestyle and that she is conferring the greatest of favors by bossing others around. So why do we ache to see her happily married to that nice, innocent gentleman?

Read about the other four novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best books about Poland during World War II

Ruth Franklin, a senior editor at The New Republic, is writing a book about Holocaust literature. For Newsweek, she named a ten best list of books about Poland during World War II.

One title on the list:

No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939–1945, by Norman Davies

Davies, the author of the two-volume definitive history of Poland, God’s Playground, turns his attention here to the war's Eastern front, which he argues is underplayed by most histories of the war. Seeking to give the Soviets as well as the Nazis their fair share of blame, he argues that the common term "Hitler's war" for the invasion is misleading, letting Stalin—whose war crimes are perhaps still underestimated—off the hook. Davies's Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw is also indispensable.

Read about the other nine books on Franklin's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best books written in prison

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best books written in prison.

One book on his list:

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes was jailed two or three times, and he claims in his prologue to Don Quixote that his great mock-romance was "begotten in a prison". Confined to a cell, the author's imagination wanders with his crack-brained knight over the dusty roads of Spain.

Read about the other nine works on Mullan's list.

Don Quixote is the second most popular book among prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay.

Paul Auster always returns to Don Quixote; Claire Messud hasn't read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 25 book to film adaptations

Melissa Katsoulis named "twenty-five films that made it from the book shelf to the box office with credibility intact" for the Daily Telegraph.

One title on the list:

WUTHERING HEIGHTS by EMILY BRONTË

Published: 1847

Film adaptation: 1939

Director: WILLIAM WYLER

Brontë’s gothic tale of moors madness gets the William Wyler treatment in this classic movie version starring Merle Oberon as Cathy and Laurence Olivier as Heathcliffe. None of the subsequent adaptations has matched the dark power of the brilliant Wyler’s. Not even the one with Cliff Richard.

Read about the other 24 adaptations on the list.

Wuthering Heights appears on Valerie Martin's list of novels about doomed marriages and Susan Cheever's list of the five best books about obsession.

The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about obsession

Susan Cheever's books include five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She applied the "page 69 test" to her 2006 book, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.

In 2008's Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, she "explores the shifting boundaries between the feelings of passion and addiction, desire and need, and she raises provocative and important questions about who we love and why."

One of her five best books about obsession:

Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
1847

Obsession is a mischief maker, and its most common disguise is what romantics call true love. Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" is probably the bleakest, most intense novel about obsessive love ever written—Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, thrown into relief by the tale's setting on the desolate Yorkshire moors, have practically become synonymous with tempestuous passion. The two had seemed destined to be together since childhood, but then Catherine, despite her obsession, marries someone else, and Heathcliff's fury is unleashed. The mutual fixation ruins their own lives and the lives of those around them. "If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be," Catherine says, "and if all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."

Read about the other four titles on Cheever's list.

Wuthering Heights appears on Valerie Martin's list of novels about doomed marriages.

The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.

Visit Susan Cheever's official website and read the Page 69 Test results for American Bloomsbury.

--Marshal Zeringue