Top ten classical books

Madeline Miller was born in Boston and grew up in New York City and Philadelphia. She attended Brown University, where she earned her BA and MA in Classics. For the last ten years she has been teaching and tutoring Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she teaches and writes. The Song of Achilles is her first novel.

From her list of ten favorite classical works, as told to the Guardian:

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

Is it cheating to include them both? The first is Homer's action-packed and psychologically acute paean to a single man's rage. The second is the tumultuous journey of a war veteran struggling to get home to his family. Both are bursting with incident, poetry and amazing characters that grab the attention. When I began writing my own novel, I found myself constantly having to rein in digressions trying to include them all.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Iliad also appears on Bettany Hughes's six best books list, James Anderson Winn's five best list of works of war poetry, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best funerals in literature and ten of the best examples of ekphrasis. It is one of Karl Marlantes's top ten war stories.

The Odyssey also made John Mullan's lists ten of the best shipwrecks in literature, ten of the best monsters in literature, ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, and ten of the best caves in literature, as well as Justin Somper's top ten list of pirate books and Carsten Jensen's list of the top ten seafaring tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten fantasy books for children

Charlie Higson is a comedian as well as the bestselling author of the Young Bond series of novels and adult crime novels including King of the Ants. His new novel is The Fear.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of fantasy books for children.

One title on the list:

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The feeling I got reading this book was similar to the one I got when I first read Darren Shan – we're not in Oz any more. The Hunger Games doesn't pull any punches. There are echoes of Greek mythology – the innocent young being sent off to ritually die in order to atone for the sins of the fathers. In a distant future (I know, I know…) the poorer provinces of North America are punished for daring to rise up (vainly) against the ruling elite by having to send children to compete in the annual hunger games. You keep thinking, oh well, I'm sure no one will actually get hurt, but the games are a fully armed fight to the death – and deaths there are a-plenty. A strong heroine, a well-realised society (with parallels to our own reality TV and celebrity-obsessed culture) unflinching violence… Fantastic.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Hunger Games also appears on Megan Wasson's list of five fantasy series geared towards teens that adults will love too.

Also see Charlie Higson's top ten horror books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten best songs based on books

At The Observer, Mark O'Connell came up with ten of the best songs based on books.

One entry on the list:

Jefferson Airplane

White Rabbit

Drawing heavily on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this 1967 psychedelic anthem fairly reeks of acid. Just as listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son makes the most mundane tasks – cleaning the oven, filing tax returns – feel like you’re being choppered in for a tour of duty in ’Nam, hearing Grace Slick sing White Rabbit makes you feel as though you’ve taken some psychotropic substance and are about to follow Alice down the rabbit hole. It’s difficult to think of a song more representative of late 1960s freak culture

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best books about Germany & Germans

Steve Kettmann, an American living in Berlin since 1999, is the author, co-author or editor of eight books, including four New York Times best-sellers. He has written a weekly column for East Berlin's Berliner Zeitung and is now at work on a memoir about German-American and German identity.

One of his recommended books about Germany and Germans--"in which neither the word 'Third' nor 'Reich' figures prominently and one finds nary a reference to that failed artist from Linz, Austria"--as told to The Daily Beast:

King, Queen, Knave, by Vladimir Nabokov

It’s often said that Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in his second language, an astonishing fact given the dexterous word play and masterful command of English on display in that most writerly of novels, and this is true enough. Less widely known, though, is that after leaving Russia, Nabokov lived in Berlin for some 15 years starting in 1922 and was quite obstinate, even proud, about not bothering to learn more than fledgling German. The result is a period in his work, the Berlin novels, that provide a fascinating snapshot both of the man and the city. King, Queen, Knave, somewhat mawkish in plot with its classic love triangle of woman, husband, and woman’s lover/husband’s protégé, opens with a dazzling set piece and evokes the Berlin of its day with nonpareil vividness. Sample: “Berlin! In that very name of the still unfamiliar metropolis, in the lumber and rumble of the first syllable and in the light ring of the second there was something that excited him like the romantic names of good wines and bad women.”

Read about the other books on Kettmann's list.

Also see, Steve Ozment's five best books about Germany & Germans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on religious cults in antiquity

Mary Beard is a classics professor at the University of Cambridge and author of The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found and The Roman Triumph.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books on religious cults in antiquity.

One title on the list:

A World Full of Gods
by Keith Hopkins (1999)

The religious world of the Roman Empire, with its melting pot of cults, from Cybele (an import from the East that came complete with a retinue of self-castrated priests) to Christianity, is very distant. What did it feel like to offer sacrifice, to watch the wild dances or to join in religious ecstasy? After a lifetime of work on the politics and economy of the Roman world, Keith Hopkins in "A World Full of Gods" shares his puzzlement at the sheer strangeness of ancient religions. The book is written in an intentionally subversive style, with the first chapter following a pair of modern time-travelers to ancient Pompeii as they try (not very successfully) to make some sense of the religious world they find there. The next chapter features a group of filmmakers trying to recapture religious debates between pagans, Jews and early Christians. The whole book is interspersed with spoof letters from imaginary colleagues objecting to Hopkins's approach. Not a book for those who like their history "straight"; but a brilliant postmodern experiment.

Read about the other books on Beard's list.

The Page 99 Test: The Roman Triumph.

The Page 99 Test: The Fires of Vesuvius.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best thin men in literature

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

One entry on the list:

Clyde Wynant

Who he? Wynant is, or was, an inventor and is the eponymous thin man of Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled murder mystery The Thin Man. A skeleton is assumed to have belonged to a portly man because of the size of the clothes, but boozy investigators Nick and Nora Charles work out that the togs have been swapped. He was thin all along!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gal Beckerman's six favorite books about political movements

Gal Beckerman is the opinion editor at The Forward. He was a longtime editor and staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review and has also written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He was a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin and the recipient of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His first book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, a history of the Soviet Jewry movement, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September 2010. It was named was one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post, as well as winning the 2010 National Jewish Book Award.

One of Beckerman's six favorite books about political movements, as told to The Week magazine:

The Last Utopia by Samuel Moyn

Moyn's revisionist history is an argument for looking at the concept of human rights as a fairly new phenomenon, dating to the 1970s. While discounting the idea's role in shaping society in earlier centuries, he provides a great primer on the evolution of a revolutionary idea.

Read about the other books on Beckerman's list.

The Page 99 Test: Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best film directors in fictional form

Award winning film historian Patrick McGilligan's new book is Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director.

One of McGilligan's five best film directors in fictional form, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

The New Confessions
by William Boyd (1988)

In William Boyd's grand pastiche of a novel, a Scotsman named John James Todd learns to handle a camera while making battlefield propaganda films during World War I. He moves in the Berlin of the 1920s, where F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang are turning silent-filmmaking into an art form. Todd has his own movie-making dream: a three-part epic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Confessions." He makes fitful efforts to film the story over the coming years, but romantic and professional complications intervene. Todd ends up in Hollywood making inferior westerns and honing his tennis game while still dreaming of his Rousseau project. During the postwar Hollywood blacklisting period, Todd's movie work dries up—his fellow-traveling during the 1920s is his undoing—and retreats to a Mediterranean villa to write his memoirs. "The New Confessions" may be the best of all novels involving a movie director, because it perfectly captures the monomaniacal quality common to filmmakers. I wonder why this darkly comic tour de force isn't more widely known; perhaps because, fortunately or not, nobody has made it into a movie.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on the art of observation

Alexandra Horowitz holds degrees in philosophy and cognitive science, and teaches in the Department of Psychology at Barnard.

She is the author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know.

With Daisy Banks at The Browser, she discussed five books on the art of observation, including:

Manhole Covers
by Mimi Melnick (photos by Robert A Melnick)

I am intrigued to find out more about how Manhole Covers by Mimi Melnick fits in with your theme of looking at the world.

This covers the part of the world which is underfoot, and might be the way that a lot of people find most immediately rewarding – to start to look at an ordinary block in a way they haven’t before. For the most part, even in New York where a lot of old manholes have been replaced and covered with resin, there are still many, many beautiful examples of 19th century ironwork that we drive or walk over. And this book is a picture history of a number of these covers. The Melnicks were some of the first to publish images of metal covers as though they were art. I think the covers really are beautiful and it is surprising that there will still be millions of people walking around in cities who haven’t bothered to look at these covers, which have things on them like a radiating sun pattern, or to wonder about the initials that represent the iron forger or the company which commissioned the making of the manhole. And so from this book you can remember to walk down your block, gaze at what’s underfoot and enjoy that.

And it talks about all the different types as well, including coalholes, grates, lamp-holes, storm drains, steam covers and meter lids.

Yes, which are easily identifiable as soon as you have an eye for it. The phone lines and the electrical lines are all going to be represented by different covers.

It sounds a little bit like trainspotting.

There probably are collectors of these covers, too. And there was a point at which, unlike trainspotting, people were often stealing these manholes and taking them away to have at home or be sold as scrap.

Read about the other books Horowitz tagged.

The Page 99 Test: Inside of a Dog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on inamoratas and other women

Elizabeth Abbott is a writer and historian with a special interest in women's issues, social justice for all and sugarcane-cutters in particular, the treatment and lives of animals, and the environment. She has a doctorate from McGill University in 19th century history. She is the author of several books, including A History of Marriage, which completes her trilogy about human relationships with A History of Celibacy and A History of Mistresses.

One of Abbott's five best books about inamoratas and other women, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Greek Fire
by Nicholas Gage (2000)

Greek-born American journalist Nicholas Gage gives us a splendid portrait of opera star Maria Callas's life as the mistress of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Their love ignited in the summer of 1959, on Onassis's yacht. Though unlikely lovers—Onassis derided opera as "Italian chefs shouting risotto recipes at each other"—Maria "flooded [him] with her love, surrendered totally." He divorced his first wife, Athina, a year after the affair began but then didn't marry Callas—and did embark, eight years later, on an unhappy marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas might have been a tempestuous diva, but she remained his closest friend and confidante. "Greek Fire" confirms, as many suspected, that in her heart-rending interpretation of "Tosca," Callas was also singing about her own life: "Vissi d'arte, Vissi d'amore." I lived for art, I lived for love.

Read about the other entries on Abbott's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on torture

Juan E. Méndez is a visiting professor of law at the American University, Washington College of Law, and the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. A native of Argentina, Mr Méndez has dedicated his legal career to the defence of human rights and has a long and distinguished record of advocacy throughout the Americas. As a result of his involvement in representing political prisoners, the Argentinean military dictatorship arrested him and subjected him to torture and administrative detention for more than a year.

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

1984
by George Orwell

Finally you have chosen a classic, 1984 by George Orwell.

I think torture is not just the physical torture that we all associate with the word. It is also several forms of psychological and mental torture that can happen even on a massive scale.

Of course 1984 came and went and we didn’t have the kind of dramatic tyranny George Orwell predicted. But, perhaps we didn’t have it in 1984 because of his book 35 years earlier. I think it does alert us to the danger of unfettered state power, which under any circumstance always ends up committing violations against individuals and particularly the kind of violation that we associate with the word torture.

Read about the other books on the list.

Nineteen Eighty-four is #7 on a list of the 100 best last lines from novels. The book made P. J. O’Rourke's list of the five best political satires, Daniel Johnson's five best list of books about Cold War culture, Robert Collins' top ten list of dystopian novels, Gemma Malley's top 10 list of dystopian novels for teenagers, is one of Norman Tebbit's six best books and one of the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King. It made a difference to Isla Fisher, and appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best rats in literature and ten of the best horrid children in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best birthday parties in literature

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

One entry on the list:

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

In the surprising coda to this novel, most of which is set in the 1930s and 1940s, some of the characters meet again in 1999 to celebrate Briony Tallis's 77th birthday. The play she wrote as a child in the first chapter will at last be performed. But Briony knows that she is dying, and has to tell us the truth about those events long ago.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Atonement also appears on Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpieces of fiction that also worked as films, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best misdirected messages in literature, ten of the best scenes on London Underground, ten of the best breakages in literature, ten of the best weddings in literature, and ten of the best identical twins in fiction. It is one of Stephanie Beacham's six best books.

Also see: Ten of the best birthday poems.

--Marshal Zeringue