Top ten novels of solitude

Teju Cole was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992. He is a writer, photographer, and professional historian of early Netherlandish art. Open City is his first novel. He lives in New York City.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten novels of solitude, including:

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

This slim volume is the daddy of English spy novels. A big-game hunter decides, on a lark, to get the president of a central European country in his gun sights. He does, but he's caught, stripped, tortured, and left for dead, and he must slip out of the country unnoticed. We are with him all the hair-raising way. It is genre, certainly, but it is far better-written than most "literary" fictions.

Read about the other books on the list.

Rogue Male is on John Mullan's list of ten of the best chases in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five standout new 9/11 books

At Salon, Emma Mustich tagged five of the best new books about 9/11 and its aftermath.

One book on her list:

Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses, by Charles B. Strozier

"The tenth anniversary moves personal loss into historical memory," wrote psychotherapist and professor Charles B. Strozier (who directs the Center of Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice) on his blog earlier this summer, in a general discussion of the process of dealing with the loss of a loved one. Strozier then compared this personal process to the wider, "collective experience" of remembering 9/11: "After the tenth anniversary, the sense is that we will think differently about 9/11, reflect on it as part of ongoing history, study it more than relive it, a process, needless to say, that is not always welcome by survivors." Strozier's own upcoming work, "Until the Fires Stopped Burning," examines New Yorkers' diverse experiences of 9/11, exploring the geography of the city's grief through interviews and original analysis.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on Islamic militancy

Jason Burke is a British journalist and the author of several non-fiction books. Lee Konstantinou called Burke’s Al-Qaeda" a really eye-opening look at how the terrorist organization was born and how it really operates."

At The Browser, he discussed five books on Islamic militancy with Daisy Banks, including:

The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad

I’m intrigued by your next choice, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, which is actually set in London and is about a spy.

Basically, anything you want to know about how terrorism works you can find in this book. It is not necessarily about who is behind terrorism because in this book it is a shadowy foreign state that wants an agent provocateur in London to explode Greenwich Observatory to make a point.

But the broad picture that Conrad paints of how ideologies work, of how people get drawn into violence and how amateurish it can so often be, is true of much of terrorism worldwide. It goes wrong in The Secret Agent, by the way, and the wrong person ends up getting killed.

And thankfully, militants are often very amateurish as well. So this book strikes me as a deeply useful reminder of what this kind of religious or political activism is about. I would just like to mention a brilliant line in the book when Conrad is talking about violence and he says, “the way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds”.

Read about Burke's other picks at The Browser.

The Secret Agent also appears among Iain Sinclair's five novels on the spirit and history of London, Dan Vyleta's top ten books in second languages, Jessica Stern's five best books on who terrorists are, Adam Thorpe's top ten satires, and on John Mullan's list of ten of the best professors in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine literary works on earthquakes

David L. Ulin is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith.

Earlier this year he came up with a list of "ways of looking at earthquakes through literature." One title to make his list:

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami.

This 2000 collection of stories was written in reaction to the Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,000 people on Jan. 17, 1995. Although in many of the pieces here the disaster plays only a peripheral part, it reverberates throughout the book like an aftershock. "Five straight days she spent in front of the television," Murakami writes in "UFO in Kushiro," "staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways. She never said a word. Sunk deep in the cushions of the sofa, her mouth clamped shut, she wouldn’t answer when Komura spoke to her. She wouldn’t shake her head or nod. Komuracould not be sure the sound of his voice was even getting through to her."

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten great books about hurricanes

The writers at The Daily Beast came up with a list of "good book[s] about people enduring hurricanes and other aquatic misadventures," including:

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe

Crusoe’s adventures kick off with a hurricane that shipwrecks him somewhere off the coast of South America. It’s a memorable storm, created by an author who probably never saw one (he never saw the plague attack London either but that didn’t slow him down a whit when it came to writing about it). But as storm aftermaths go, this one pretty well retires the prize.

Read about the other entries on the list.

See: The Page 99 Test: Robinson Crusoe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about aliens

For the Independent, Alice-Azania Jarvis came up with a reading list on aliens.

Her selection under the "classic" category:

War of the Worlds by H G Wells

Variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British imperialism and Victorian fears and prejudices, War of the Worlds tells the nail-biting tale of one man's struggle to track down his wife during an alien invasion. Included are some of the most vivid scenes of London in literature.

Read about the other books on the reading list.

The War of the Worlds also appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best aliens in science fiction; the movie version starring Tom Cruise is one of the Independent's five turkey adaptations.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best fictional holidays

At the Guardian, Kate Kellaway named the ten best fictional holidays.

One book on the list:

The Beach
Alex Garland

“Beaucoup bad shit” is the catchphrase in this 1996 novel – and it’s something of an understatement. Richard hears of “the beach” when he’s given a map by a Scot on Khaosan Road, Bangkok. What follows is a grown-up, backpacking, Thai version of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a story about what happens when people make their own rules on a “paradise” island. Their diet includes poisonous squid, fermented coconut juice, a rice supply infected by fungus – and that’s just the food. Ironically, Garland’s novel (also a 2000 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio) is a popular holiday read

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Beach also appears on the Guardian editors' list of the 50 best summer reads ever, John Mullan's list of ten of the best swimming scenes in literature, and Sloane Crosley's list of five depressing beach reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top five teen fantasy series

At the Christian Science Monitor, Megan Wasson compiles a list of "five fantasy series geared towards teens that adults will love too."

One title on the list:

The "Hunger Games" trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

In this wildly successful fantasy trilogy, an organization called "The Capitol" controls a post-apocalyptic North America, now called Panem. As punishment for a past rebellion, each year two teens from each of the 12 districts ruled by The Capitol must compete in a televised contest. The 24 "tributes" are released in a large arena and forced to kill each other until one is left standing. Katniss, a girl from District 12, steps in to compete in place of her younger sister, sparking a chain of events that will shape the future of Panem.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best books set in Berlin

Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' City-Lit series, featuring writing on cities including Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Venice and Dublin.

For the Guardian, he named ten of the best books set in Berlin, including:

Philip Kerr, March Violets, 1989

Freelance detective Bernie Gunther works on the mean streets of 1930s Berlin, where Nazi excesses are never far from the surface.

"This morning at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Jägerstrasse, I saw two men, SA men, unscrewing a red Der Stürmer showcase from the wall of a building. Der Stürmer is the anti-Semitic journal that's run by the Reich's leading Jew-hater, Julius Streicher."

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best nature books

Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is a poet and novelist. Among his many awards and honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2005, the induction by the president of Iceland into the Order of the Falcon for his writings about Nordic literature. He is a professor in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of dispatches from the natural world, including:

Walden
by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

Henry David Thoreau was a mere 27 when, in 1845, he undertook to build a cabin near Concord, Mass., and reside in semi-seclusion on Walden Pond. His account of the experience, first published as "Walden; or, Life in the Woods," may be the world's best-loved nature book. Its success is all the more noteworthy given that "Walden" is in effect a sermon, delivered in the church of the great outdoors. Thoreau delivers his text standing not behind a pulpit but a fallen log, gesticulating at his animated surroundings: the wandering clouds, the drilling insects, the probing streams. Although he can be as stern as any stony-faced Puritan preacher, especially on the topic of greed, he regards our planet—the site of all our mortal trials and travails—as an irrepressibly joyous place, everywhere open to human betterment. His elation and enthusiasm are infectious. "All change is a miracle to contemplate," he tells us. And adds: "But it is a miracle which is taking place every instant."

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Will Howarth's list of books for lovers of Thoreau's Walden.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on exploration

Laurence Bergreen's books include Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu and Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. In 2007 he named a five best list of books on exploration for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

White Gold
by Giles Milton

Every so often, it is tonic to read an honest-to-Pete, can-you-believe-this historical account of nightmarish events. "White Gold" is such a book. The prolific English travel writer and historian Giles Milton describes with riveting immediacy the ordeal of Thomas Pellow, who, along with his English shipmates, was taken prisoner by Barbary Coast slave traders at war with Christendom in the early years of the 18th century. Pellow wound up in the service of Moulay Ismail, the sadistic sultan of Morocco, for 23 years -- making for more than two decades of grisly adventures and near-death experiences. "White Gold" offers a topsy-turvy view of a decadent Islamic empire in which orthodoxy fights a losing battle with the temptations of the flesh.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tony Hadley's six best books

Tony Hadley is best known as the lead vocalist with the Eighties New Romantic band Spandau Ballet.

One of his six favorite books, as told to the Scottish Sunday Express:

THE RATS
by James Herbert

I didn't go for horror books until I discovered James Herbert. He wrote some very scary stuff. The Rats was the first one I read and I was hooked. I read it in bed and would just go cold it was so scary. Until that point I hadn't realised you could be frightened by a book.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Rats also appears on Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list on rats.

--Marshal Zeringue