Ten of the best riddles in literature

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

One entry on the list:

The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

Bilbo has to defeat Gollum in a riddle competition if he is to escape from the tunnel under the Misty Mountains. Here is his first one. "Thirty white horses on a red hill, / First they champ, / Then they stamp, / Then they stand still." Answer: teeth. Gollum's reply? "Voiceless it cries, / Wingless flutters, / Toothless bites, / Mouthless mutters." Easy.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Hobbit is a book Niall Ferguson hopes parents will read to their kids.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Coe's six favorite books

Jonathan Coe’s awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Prix Médicis Étranger, and, for The Rotters’ Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

His latest novel is The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

Along with Tristram Shandy, this cerebral Irish comedy ties for best postmodern novel ever written. Enclosing stories within stories, O’Brien makes us reflect on the fraught, often absurd, relationship between writers, their characters, and their readers. The jokes are frequent and exquisitely precise.

Read about the other books on the list.

Flann O’Brien is, according to Max McGuinness, one of four unjustly overlooked Irish writers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Reading list: five family memoirs

At the Independent Alice-Azania Jarvis compiled a brief reading list of family memoirs.

The title on the list under "music:"

I Slept with Joey Ramone by Legs McNeil and Mickey Leigh

Joey Ramone co-founded The Ramones, offering one of the defining sounds of 1970s New York. Here, his brother, Mickey Leigh, documents the rock star's evolution: from the suburban child with low self-esteem and possible obsessive compulsive disorder, to the Greenwich Village hipster and musical pioneer. A vibrant musical memoir.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten journalist's tales

Tom Rachman was born in 1974 in London, but grew up in Vancouver. He studied cinema at the University of Toronto and completed a Master's degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York. From 1998, he worked as an editor at the foreign desk of The Associated Press in New York, then did a stint as a reporter in India and Sri Lanka, before returning to New York. In 2002, he was sent to Rome as an AP correspondent, with assignments taking him to Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Egypt. Beginning in 2006, he worked part-time as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris to support himself while writing fiction. His debut novel is The Imperfectionists.

One of Rachman's top ten journalist's tales, as told to the Guardian:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Fowler is a middle-aged British correspondent in the professional habit of watching others' suffering from a distance. When he encounters an idealistic young American with plans to fix Vietnam, Fowler must decide whether to act. As relevant today as when published in 1955.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Quiet American is among John Mullan's ten best journalists in literature, Charles Glass's five best books on Americans abroad, Robert McCrum's books to inspire busy public figures, Malcolm Pryce's top ten expatriate tales, Catherine Sampson's top ten Asian crime fiction, and Pauline Melville's top 10 revolutionary tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best historical crime novelists

J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of the award-winning crime-fiction blog The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January Magazine.

For his column as Kirkus Reviews’ lead blogger in the Mysteries and Thrillers category, he came up with five of the best and most interesting historical crime novelists, including:

Michael Gregorio.

Behind that byline hide husband-and-wife authors Daniela De Gregorio and Michael G. Jacob, residents ofcritique Italy who have now penned four historical mysteries featuring early 1800s Prussian magistrate-cum-detective Hanno Stiffeniis. It’s best to begin reading at the start of this series, with Critique of Criminal Reason (2006), in which Stiffeniis must determine who’s responsible for doing in four people, none of whom shows obvious signs of violence. Fortunately, Stiffeniis has help from his aging mentor, German philosopher Emmanuel Kant, who uses these slayings to test his hypotheses about criminal-probing methodologies.

Read about the other novelists on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Michael Gregorio's Hanno Stiffeniis novels.

Also see: David B. Rivkin, Jr's five best historical mystery novels and Randy Dotinga's top five historical true-crime books of the last decade.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best works of fiction on baseball

Allen Barra's books include Rickwood Field: A Century in America's Oldest Ballpark and Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of baseball fiction, including:

Ring Around the Bases
by Ring Lardner (1992)

To paraphrase Hemingway on "Huckleberry Finn," all baseball literature comes from one book by Ring Lardner, "You Know Me Al" (1916), the first-person account of the trials and tribulations of a shallow young bush-league braggart. Lardner's appeal extended far beyond readers of the sports pages: His fans even included Virginia Woolf, who said that Lardner "writes the best prose that has come our way, often in a language which is not English." She was right; it is pure American. In "Ring Around the Bases," the stories of "You Know Me Al" are reprinted along with some of Lardner's other great baseball writing, including such tales as "Alibi Ike," "My Roomy" and "Hurry Kane." Some of it deals with a motor-mouthed young outfielder named Casey Stengel—who, before he re-emerged in 1949 as the manager of the Yankees, many thought Lardner had invented. As Matthew Bruccoli makes clear in his introduction, Lardner's brilliance as a fiction writer was due in large part to his keen journalist's ear: He did not so much create a new language as reveal one.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Marjorie Kehe's ten best list of baseball books, Doug Glanville's best books on baseball, Richard J. Tofel's list of the five best books on baseball as a business, Tom Werner's six favorite baseball books, Fay Vincent's five best list of baseball books, Tim McCarver's five best list of baseball books, and Nicholas Dawidoff's five best list of baseball novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten animal adventures

Lauren St. John is the author of the White Giraffe series and the Laura Marlin mysteries.

For the Guardian she named her top ten animal adventures.

One title on the list:

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

I don't believe anyone who reads Black Beauty is left unchanged by it. Anna Sewell's deeply sympathetic and empathetic story of the horse's troubles as he passes from owner to cruel owner before finally finding peace in retirement on a farm broke literary ground on its publication in 1878 and was enormously influential in changing public opinion about the treatment of working horses. It is the sixth biggest selling book in the English language and remains one of the best animal books of all time.

Read about the other stories on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on family dynasties

At the Independent Will Dean compiled a brief reading list on family dynasties, including one novel:

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Forget the John and Bobby K, America's most famous dynasty is the Corleones. Puzo's first bestseller covers the story from father Vito's decline to son Michael's rise. Extra family history comes from literary sequels such as The Sicilian, and the original screenplays of the Godfather movie sequels. Puzo co-wrote those with Francis Ford Coppola – whose own dynasty now reaches across Hollywood.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Godfather is one of Jackie Collins' six best books and five best literary guilty pleasures. It appears on Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list on the Mafia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carmela Ciuraru's six favorite pseudonymous books

Carmela Ciuraru is the author of Nom de Plume: A Secret History of Pseudonyms.

Carmela Ciuraru is not a pseudonym. Her anthologies include First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them (Scribner) and Solitude Poems (Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library). A graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN American Center. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other publications.

She is a 2011 Fellow in Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

For The Week magazine, Ciuraru named her favorite pseudonymous books, including:

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Orwell’s literary debut, chronicling the lives of the working poor, is considered a masterpiece of reportage. But it was initially rejected by two publishers, and the author (whose real name was Eric Blair) admitted that he was not proud of it. Thus the persona "George Orwell" was born.

Read about the other books on the list.

See Carmela Ciuraru's list of ten great books by pseudonymous authors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten best spy novels

At the Independent, Samuel Muston complied a list of the ten best spy novels.

One title on the list:

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE BY IAN FLEMING

The finest book in the Bond franchise. Russian counter-intelligence agency Smersh, with its comically foul boss Rosa Klebb, is out to kill James. No prizes for guessing who comes out on top.

Read about the other novels on the list.

From Russia with Love also made John Mullan's lists of ten of the best chess games in fiction, ten of the best punch-ups in fiction, and ten of the best breakfasts in literature, and a list of eleven presidents' favorite books. It is one of Keith Jeffery's five best books on Britain's Secret Service.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten Iranian books

Kamin Mohammadi is a writer, journalist and broadcaster specializing in Iran. She also writes travel books and is a magazine editor and lifestyle journalist with specialties in Italy, health, beauty, yoga and fashion. Her book, The Cypress Tree, is out this month in the UK from Bloomsbury.

At the Guardian she named her top ten Iranian books, including:

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński

Legendary Polish foreign correspondent Kapuściński was in Iran throughout the revolution and his pared-down account of the events of those days is gripping and insightful. He has enormous understanding and the ability to tell a harrowing story in the most graceful way, while also preserving a delightful sense of the absurd. He is unusual in that he does not subscribe to an Orientalist point of view – and so is able to comment on the events of the day and the peculiarities of the Iranian character and system with objectivity – even affection – but without the usual implicit sense of superiority that western writers tend to slip into when writing about Iran.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on scandals, real or made-up

H. W. Brands's latest book is The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield.

At the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books on scandals...in truth or just in print.

One title on the list:

All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

Inspired by the rise and fall of Huey Long, the populist demagogue from Louisiana, Robert Penn Warren's roman à clef is arguably the greatest of American political novels. Willie Stark begins his career honestly but is corrupted by ambition and power. He sells offices, shakes down government contractors and sleeps with women not his wife—including the sister of one of Stark's appointees, who discovers the affair and kills him. Jack Burden, Stark's political fixer, retrospectively narrates the story, which reveals his own disillusionment. The novel was a brilliant popular success and won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; the 1949 film version received the Academy Award for best picture. "All the King's Men" remained a powerful literary influence a half-century later: Joe Klein modeled "Primary Colors" (1996) on the novel to explain the scandalous and self-destructive charm of Bill Clinton.

Read about the other entries on the list.

One critic argues that while it's not the best Louisiana novel, All the King's Men is The Great Louisiana Novel. The book appears on Melanie Kirkpatrick's list of her five favorite novels of political intrigue; Robert McCrum called it a book to inspire busy public figures.

--Marshal Zeringue