Ten best books of social concern by journalists

From Judith Paterson's list of the 10 best books of social concern by journalists, in the American Journalism Review (September 1994):

The Broken Cord
by Michael Dorris (1989)

This bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award introduced the public to the damaging set of birth defects caused by alcohol consumption by pregnant women. Though the effects of maternal drinking constitute the largest preventable cause of birth defects and mental retardation in the United States, at the time the book was written few people had heard of either fetal alcohol syndrome or the less severe fetal alcohol effect. Dorris wraps the facts about the affliction around the tragic story of its impact on his adopted American Indian son.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best historical mysteries

David B. Rivkin, Jr., a Washington-based lawyer who has served in the Justice Department, named a five best list of historical mystery novels for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

Alexandria
by Lindsey Davis
St. Martin's/Minotaur, 2009

Set during the first-century reign of the Roman emperor Vespasian, Lindsey Davis's "Alexandria" is an especially captivating entry in the historical-mystery series featuring Vespasian's "informer," sleuth extraordinaire Marcus Didius Falco. This time around, trouble finds Falco even when he is on a family vacation in Alexandria. Shortly after he dines with the head of Alexandria's renowned library, the librarian is found dead. Other mysterious deaths among the city's intelligentsia follow. As he begins digging into the case, the practical-minded Falco casts a sardonic eye on decadent Egyptian life in a city where people "picked pockets, exchanged goods, held assignations, complained about Roman taxes, insulted other sects, insulted their in-laws, cheated and fornicated." The novel offers many memorable elements, including a fine corpse-dissection scene and a monstrous man-eating Nile crocodile that terrorizes the city. One of Davis's virtues is the way she roots her tales in ancient times even as she adds sly modern touches; in "Alexandria" she lampoons today's universities with a hilarious portrayal of academia circa A.D. 75, replete with rancorous board meetings, pretentious intellectual wrangling and petty professional jealousies.

Read about the other books on the list.

Alexandria is Davis' 19th novel featuring Marcus Didius Falco (born AD41). Read the Page 99 Test for the 18th Falco novel, Saturnalia.

See Davis' top 10 list of Roman books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five favorite books of New York stories

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize, a selection of Barnes and Noble's First Look Book Club, an IndieNext pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she's written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals.

She named her five favorite books of New York stories for C.M. Mayo's "Madam Mayo" blog. One title on the list:

The White Rose, Jean Hanff Korelitz.

I’ve written elsewhere about Korelitz’s latest novel, Admission, which is perhaps my favorite novel of 2009. Like Admission, The White Rose is a novel of manners, set primarily on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—and its eastern and northern colonies, the Hamptons and the Berkshires—among the wealthy German Jews and the nouveau riche who aspire to their social status. Though it’s based on the Strauss opera, Der Rosenkavalier, it reads more like a contemporary gloss on Wharton: A childless Columbia professor, Marian Kahn, at 48 has fallen crashingly—- and, she fears, absurdly—- in love with her best friend’s son, 26-year-old Oliver, who has also becomes—- through a series of absurdities—- the object of her closeted cousin Barton’s affections. Complications ensue. Korelitz perfectly captures the fabric of a particular segment of the city and a very specific sort of class yearning.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 69 Test: A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 portrayals of working life in fiction

Aifric Campbell is the author of The Semantics of Murder and The Loss Adjustor.

For the Guardian, she named a top ten list of favorite jobs in fiction. One item on her list:

Estate agent
The Sportswriter / Independence Day / The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

You will see your estate agent, or "realtor", in completely different light when you get to know Frank Bascombe who has "lived to face down regret". His young son dies, his early literary success evaporates, he gets divorced and observes New Jersey and the human condition with grace and humour, often from behind the wheel of his car. Viciously funny and incredibly moving, I have re-read my copy of The Sportswriter so many times that the pages are falling apart.

Read about the other books/jobs on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 20 best science fiction books of the noughties

Annalee Newitz and io9 came up with a list of the 20 best science fiction books of the last decade.

One book on the list:

Acacia: The War with the Mein, by David Anthony Durham (Doubleday)

According to the Washington Post:

From the first pages of Acacia, Durham, a respected historical novelist, demonstrates that he is a master of the fantasy epic. He quickly sets out in broad strokes the corrupt world that these unwitting children have been raised to rule. For 22 generations, the Akarans have presided over the empire of Acacia. And for 22 generations, they've sent a yearly shipment of child slaves to mysterious traders beyond their borders, "with no questions asked, no conditions imposed on what they did with them, and no possibility that the children would ever see Acacia again." In exchange, the Akarans get "mist," a drug that guarantees their subjects' "labor and submission." ... Durham sacrifices nothing — not psychological acuity, not political complexity, not lyrical phrases — as he drives the plot of this gripping book forward. The names of people and places sound as if they've been recalled from a dusty past, not cobbled from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, a far too common practice among fantasy writers. Tropes that sound outlandish — "dream-travel," for one — are credible in Durham's telling. And the story always surprises. Characters that seem poised to take center stage are killed abruptly. Evil often triumphs.

This is the first novel in Durham's planned Acacian Trilogy. The second novel, The Other Lands, has recently been published and the third is on the way.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Acacia (Acacia, Book 1).

The Other Lands is one of Amazon's top 10 Science Fiction & Fantasy books for 2009.

The Page 69 Test: Acacia: The Other Lands.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six best books on rethinking of the rules of artistic appropriation

David Shields’s new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is:

an ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of “reality” into their work. The questions Shields explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a rigorous, radical reframing of how we might think about this “truthiness”: about literary license, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels.

For The Week magazine, he named six books that inspired the project. One title on the list:

Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy

Rather like Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man in that the art consists of taking someone else’s material and reframing it. Lesy juxtaposes photographs and historical documents from turn-of-the-20th-century Jackson County, Wisc., to create what he calls “an experiment in both history and alchemy”—the alchemy being Lesy’s transformation of American pastoral into a nightmare out of Munch.

Read about the other books on Shields's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best monsters in literature

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

One monster on the list:

Cyclops

The best monsters want to eat you. In The Odyssey, the Cyclops is a one-eyed giant with a taste for human flesh. Polyphemus, a monstrous son of Poseidon, is the scariest of all. He imprisons Odysseus and several of his men in his cave, killing and eating a couple of them each day. Odysseus manages to get him drunk and blind him with a red-hot stake.

The Odyssey also made Mullan's list ten of the best shipwrecks in literature.

Read about the other monsters on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Zephaniah's six best books

Benjamin Zephaniah is a well-known British poet.

He named his six best books for the Daily Express.

One book on his list:

Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore

This is special because while everyone knows about Darwin very few people know about the anti-slavery stance he took in his life. He was years ahead of his time in this respect.

Read about the other titles on Zephaniah's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about British military deception

Nicholas Rankin is the author of A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars (2009).

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about British military deception.

One title on the list:

'Blinker' Hall
by David Ramsay
Spellmount, 2008

As David Ramsay recounts in this fascinating biography, Britain's Machiavellian director of naval intelligence in World War I, Reginald "Blinker" Hall, was a man whose talent for tricks and bribes made the U.S. ambassador consider him "the one genius that the war has developed." Hall's organization, working out of Room 40 in the Admiralty offices, "tapped the air" for German wireless messages and scanned diplomatic cables. The codebreakers' greatest coup came in 1917 with the interception and deciphering of "the Zimmermann telegram," a secret message from Germany to the Mexican government offering money and the return of the American Southwest if the Mexicans would help wage war on the U.S. The furor that ensued after the message's contents were revealed helped impel the U.S. into the war, thus clinching final victory for the British and their allies.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Donohoe's 6 best books

Amanda Donohoe played LA Law’s bisexual lawyer CJ Lamb on TV and has appeared in such movies as The Madness of King George and Liar Liar.

She told Britain's Daily Express about her six best books. One title on the list:

The White Queen
by Philippa Gregory

Gregory is particularly palatable as a writer of historical fiction because she is also a historian. The facts are there but they are embellished in a fabulous way. This is about the War of the Roses and she makes all those complex characters understandable. I wish she’d been around when I was studying for my history O level.

Read about the other books on Donohoe's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 14 best books you missed in the last decade

One title from The Daily Beast's list of the 14 best books you missed in the last decade:

Tokyo Year Zero
by David Peace

David Peace is fast becoming a British Institution. His books are more or less routinely hailed by the London critics. They go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. And then they're made into acclaimed films and television dramas. But, even over here, his Tokyo Year Zero seems to get treated like a footnote, a minor work. For my money, though, it's his best novel yet: a crime thriller whose beat is the fear and anguish of post-war, post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki Japan. The question it asks: Can anything rise from the rubble?

Read about the other books on the list.

See David Peace's Literary Top 10.

Read Ali Karim's interview with David Peace at The Rap Sheet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten unreliable narrators

Henry Sutton's novels include the critically acclaimed Gorleston and The Housesitter, and the newly released Get Me Out of Here. For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of novels with unreliable narrators.

One book on the list:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Never straight with himself, let alone the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to whom he is ultimately addressing his words, Humbert Humbert arrived halfway through the 20th century, intent on justifying his appalling crime. Nabokov's syntactical genius is the one true triumph.

Read about the other novels on Sutton's list.

Lolita also appears among Adam Leith Gollner's top ten fruit scenes in literature, Laura Hird's literary top 10 list, Monica Ali's ten favorite books, Laura Lippman's 5 most important books, Mohsin Hamid's 10 favorite books, and Dani Shapiro's 10 favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue