John Inverdale's six best books

John Inverdale, a BBC TV and radio presenter, named his six best books for the Daily Express.

One title on his list:

WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte

Another classic which is a wonderfully passionate book and is set in one of my favourite parts of the country.

I read it at school and have revisited it on several occasions since and every time I read it I get something new from a novel rightly held in such high regard.

Read about the other books on Inverdale's list.

Wuthering Heights appears on Valerie Martin's list of novels about doomed marriages, Susan Cheever's list of the five best books about obsession, and Melissa Katsoulis' top 25 list of book to film adaptations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philip Pullman's 6 best books

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, named his six best books for the Daily Express.

One title on the list:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The opening of this thrilling book never fails. Neither does the middle or the end. A perfect piece of clear, taut, vivid storytelling and one I re-read often to remind myself of what I’m trying to do.

Read about the other books on Pullman's list.

Treasure Island also appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best pirates in fiction.

Also see: Philip Pullman's forty favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 transformation stories

Ali Shaw graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in English literature and has since worked as a bookseller and at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

The Girl with Glass Feet, his highly acclaimed first novel, won The Desmond Elliott Prize for 2010. The judges said: “After some soul searching and much debate, we decided on The Girl with Glass Feet as our winner. This is an extraordinary first novel - bold, original, tragic and endlessly surprising. In its exploration of frozen landscapes, both interior and exterior, and in its precisely detailed and articulated fantasy, it is possible to see a substantial author of the future.”

Shaw has described The Girl With Glass Feet as "a love story about a woman who is turning into glass."

For the Guardian, he named his top ten stories of transformation. One title on the list:

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The classic story of a man continuously transforming between good and evil incarnations of himself. It finds time to consider the psychological burden of Jekyll's condition without slowing down the rip-roaring adventure story at the heart of the book.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best butlers in literature and among Yann Martel's six favorite books.

Read an excerpt from Shaw's The Girl with Glass Feet, and learn more about the book and author at Ali Shaw's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Girl with Glass Feet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six great books about natural disasters

M. L. Malcolm is a Harvard Law graduate, journalist, recovering attorney, and public speaker who has won several awards for short fiction, including recognition in the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Competition, and a silver medal from ForeWord magazine for Historical Fiction Book of the Year.

Her new novel is Heart of Lies.

For Flashlight Worthy, she named six great books on natural disasters. One title on the list:

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
by John M. Barry

Like most Americans I watched in horror during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as floodwaters destroyed huge sections of New Orleans, creating a scene of disaster and deprivation that we just didn't want to believe could happen in America. But then I read this book, and discovered that Katrina was yet another case of "déjà-vû all over again."

The Great Depression brought on the New Deal, but the flood of 1927 first, quite literally, cleared the way; the lasting impact of this calamity was its effect on the American political landscape. In the same way that the government's response to Hurricane Katrina aroused intense anger that, coupled with a major economic downturn, triggered an enormous change of Who's In Charge and What We Will Allow Them To Do About This Mess We're In, this earlier disaster and the government's inept reaction to it engendered a complete transformation of American society.

Barry does a great job of describing the terrifying events of the flood itself and the mismanagement that exacerbated it, but it's his follow-up of the sociological and political aftermath that sets this work apart from a typical disaster book.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allen Barra's six favorite books

Critic, biographer, and sports columnist Allen Barra's latest book is Rickwood Field, A Century in America’s Oldest Ballpark.

He named his six favorite books for The Week magazine. One title on the list:

Pronto by Elmore Leonard

U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, a modern-day Wyatt Earp, inspired the main character­ in FX’s terrific series Justified. Typical dialogue: Raylan to hit man Tommy Bucks, “If you don’t choose to leave, then we have to play by your rules.” “I don’t have rules.” “That’s what I mean.”

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best nameless protagonists

For the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best nameless protagonists in literature.

One novel on the list:

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

Greene liked to find unusual names – Bendrix, Querry – for his protagonists, so his refusal to name the alcoholic Mexican priest on the run from the anti-clerical authorities is significant. The protagonist's discovery of a religious mission through danger and suffering is made a Greenian parable about the need for religious belief.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Power and the Glory also appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best episodes of drunkenness in literature. It is one of seven books that made a difference to Colin Firth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best novels on success

Tad Friend is the author of Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of novels on success.

One title on the list:

True Grit
by Charles Portis

"True Grit" calls to mind Cormac McCarthy's sanguinary meditations on the border, but Charles Portis details the savagery of the 1870s frontier through an astonishing narrative voice: that of the 14-year-old Mattie Ross, a flinty, skeptical, Bible-thumping scourge. Mattie hires a federal marshal and rides into the Oklahoma territory to find the coward who shot her father, and her outrage brings order to the wilderness—an order predicated on the deaths of half a dozen outlaws, some of them guilty of rather little. The book is dryly hilarious yet gradually mournful, for Mattie is recalling these events years later, as a well-to-do but cranky spinster. Her readers know how much she had to offer, but no suitor ever saw it. For Mattie—and, Portis suggests, for the country—once the West was won, the rest was afterglow.

Read about the other books on the list.

True Grit also appears on Willy Vlautin's list of five great books set in the West and Jonathan Lethem's list of five terrific novels overshadowed by their film versions.

Also see Tad Friend's list of the seven best fiction books about WASPs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books that made a difference to Isla Fisher

Last summer Isla Fisher (Confessions of a Shopaholic) named a list of books that made a difference in her life for O, The Oprah Magazine.

One novel on the list:

Lord of the Flies
by William Golding

This is a great story about a group of boys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war. They descend into madness and end up killing two of their companions, Piggy and Simon. I reread this book recently and found it interesting that Golding seems to imply that savagery is more primal and fundamental to the human psyche than civilization. That idea is fascinating—and so are the questions it raises: If people were left to their own devices, would savagery ensue or would people live by the rules and be nice? Which is the most powerful impulse within us?

Read about the other books on Fisher's list.

Lord of the Flies is on AbeBooks' list of 20 books of shattered childhoods and is one of the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King. It appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best pairs of glasses in literature and ten of the best horrid children in literature, and William Skidelsky's list of ten of the best accounts of being marooned in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about appeasement

Bruce Bawer is the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books on appeasement.

One title on the list:

Guilty Men
by "Cato"

This brief, impassioned j'accuse, written under the pseudonym Cato by British journalists Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen, was churned out and published at lightning speed in July 1940, a month after the British escape at Dunkirk from the German army advancing through France. It was a fateful moment, as Foot recalled in a 1988 preface, when the "shameful" era of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's feckless leadership had ended and "English people could look into each other's eyes with recovered pride and courage." To read "Guilty Men" now is to feel Englishmen's shock at the might of the Nazi war machine and to share the authors' rage at the obtuseness of the appeasers (Chamberlain and 14 others are listed) who sweet-talked Hitler in Munich, agreeing in 1938 to let him annex part of Czechoslovakia, and mocked Winston Churchill for assailing conciliation and urging rearmament. This urgent piece of journalism made appeasement and Chamberlain's infamous claim, upon returning from Munich, of having secured "peace in our time" synonymous with naïveté and cowardice.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Lohan's jailhouse reading list

Avi Steinberg, a former prison librarian, is the author of the forthcoming book, Running the Books, due out in November.

For The Daily Beast, he named a brief list of books Lindsay Lohan should read while serving her jail sentence. One book on the list:

Lit
by Mary Karr

On her Twitter page, Lohan refers to herself as “a writer.” She has been working on a memoir for over a year now. What type of writer is she? It’s unlikely that she herself has the answer to this question. She will discover some hints in the writings of others. If she wishes to do something more than a celebrity memoir and not fall into the traps of the hard-luck memoir, she should acquaint herself with some of the best writers working today. Mary Karr’s subjects—addiction, a circus-like upbringing, hard-partying friends—will undoubtedly echo with Lohan. But it’s her style that is unique, her blend of humor and bracing honesty, the refusal to lay the blame on others, the attempt to use stories to empathize with her foes and not to settle scores or to merely absolve herself—these are the authorial attributes that Karr can teach Lohan, the writer. Perhaps reading Karr will make Lohan understand that a person is rarely either a victim or a perpetrator, but very often both. I’ve seen prison inmates gain this precise insight from reading Karr. In fact, I’ve gained it from them speaking about Karr.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten memento mori

Greg Baxter is a fiction writer and essayist who lives in Dublin. He is the author of A Preparation for Death (Penguin Ireland, 2010). He worked as a Creative Writing tutor in the Irish Writers’ Centre from 2006 to 2009, before launching the Workshops at Some Blind Alleys. He has published essays and short stories in journals such as the Dublin Review, Cincinnati Review, and Southwest Review. He regularly reviews for the Irish Times.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten books that remind us of our own mortality. One classic on the list:

Death of Embarrassment: Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche

When your books are misunderstood and dismissed as the desperate and nonsensical ramblings of a lunatic, you can attempt to change your ways, become more acceptable, and please the greatest number of people. Or you can plunge yourself deeper into lunacy, write for the future, and call yourself a destiny. Who but a lunatic allows himself to say: "I am not a man. I am dynamite"?

Read about the other entries on Baxter's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

12 uniquely American sci-fi & fantasy novels and stories

John T. Ottinger of Grasping For The Wind came up with a list of 12 science fiction and fantasy novels and stories that are uniquely American.

One title on the list:

Topping the list is, ironically, a book by a Brit. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, celebrates America's love of the sometimes weird and wacky with a multiple award winning novel. Its one of my personal favorites, not least of which is because the final battle between the Gods, the Ragnarok, takes place not 3 miles from where I earned my bachelor's degree, at the iconic Rock City. (Tangentially, another book in this vein, if you are interested, is Norse Code by Greg Van Eekhout.)

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue