Five best books with spinster protagonists

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. She is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and, most recently, Mr Fox.

One of her five best books with a spinster protagonist, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Nemesis
by Agatha Christie (1971)

The murder that Miss Marple investigates in Agatha Christie's "Nemesis" is a so-called crime of passion: A young woman was killed on the day she was due to elope with her lover. As Marple looks into the case, she becomes aware of a certain desolation—"sorrow, misery, fear . . . frustrated love"—that is both cause and consequence of the murder. But we also sense that the emotion forms part of Marple's psychological response to the spinster life. After she has confronted the murderer in the name of justice—doing so while wearing a pink woolly scarf—one character who has seen her in action calls her "the most frightening woman I have ever met." He may be referring to the elderly super-sleuth's eerie understanding that "Love is a terrible thing. It is alive to evil," and her translation of that intuition into deductive logic.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best women dressed as men

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best women dressed as men in literature.

One book on his list:

Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

Éowyn desperately wants to avenge her father, killed by orcs. She disguises herself as the male warrior Dernhelm and fights alongside the Riders of Rohan in battle, even managing to kill the Lord of the Nazgûl – who has boasted that no man can ever defeat him and is nonplussed to discover that his opponent is, in fact, a woman.

Read about the other crossdressers on the list.

The Lord of the Rings also made Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs' list of ten classic SF books that were originally considered failures, Lev Grossman's list of the six greatest fantasy books of all time, and appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best bows and arrows in literature, ten of the best beards in literature, ten of the best towers in literature, ten of the best volcanoes in literature, ten of the best chases in literature, and ten of the best monsters in literature. It is one of Salman Rushdie's five best fantasy novels for all ages. It is a book that made a difference to Pat Conroy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books by 2012 presidential hopefuls

At the Christian Science Monitor, Husna Haq tagged five books by the 2012 presidential hopefuls, including--under the category "best written"--Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope:

When his books hit coffee table and bookshelves across America – and long after – reviewers couldn’t stop cooing about Barack Obama's gift for writing and the success of his books "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." The president is a natural storyteller and his days as editor of the Harvard Law Review honed his eloquent style.

“Dreams from my Father,” which was published before Obama began his political career, tells his life story up to his entry in Harvard Law School. One Monitor reader said of the book, "He tells his story so earnestly and movingly that a person learns about himself/herself through this book and about the society she/he lives in."

“The Audacity of Hope,” which introduced Obama as a politician, was an instant bestseller, described, like his campaign, as a shot of inspiration. Monitor reviewer Ari Pinkus wrote of this book in 2007, "The openness and eloquence with which Obama shares his personal story interwoven with his broad vision for America is compelling. For those who have been disillusioned by the divisiveness of politics, Obama inspires."

Read about the other books on the list.

Dreams from My Father also appears on Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list of family memoirs, Gillian Orr's reading list on fatherhood, Sammy Perlmutter's list of the five best books from Nobel winners who didn't win their medal for literature, and Iain Finlayson's critic's chart of six books on young leaders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten short stories

In 2007 novelist and short story writer Alison MacLeod named her top ten short stories for the Guardian.

Her criteria and one title on her list:

Writing a short story is a high-wire act, sentence by sentence, foot by foot. Very few story writers work with the safety net of a plot conceived in advance. They trust in the humming tension of a single opening line or in an image that rises in their mind, or in a fragment of a character's voice. They might have a sense of where they want their characters to go; they rarely know how they'll get them there. At times it's unnerving work. Lose your concentration or the line of tension in the story and both you and it fall. The best short stories have a breathless, in-motion quality to them, a quality that makes them ideal for adaptation into film, as directors are increasingly realising. A great story ending resonates far beyond its final word. It's a hit to the brain. I read stories and love them for that hit. As the writer Elizabeth Taylor commented, the short story gives the reader the feeling of "being lifted into another world, instead of sinking into it, as one does with longer fiction". The best stories leave you exhilarated.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver

Story writers are naturally drawn to life's undersides - to the bits we perhaps shouldn't see. They're often private worlds, stolen glimpses, and we, the readers, are licensed voyeurs. Here, two couples, Mel, a cardiologist, his second wife Terri, and young Nick and Laura in their first flush of love, sit around a kitchen table sharing a drink. They talk, the sun goes down, the gin bottle drains. That's it. Or it would be, except inhibitions slip. An argument starts, emotions burst like blisters; they're covered over and burst again. As Nick and Laura struggle to hold onto their clichés of romantic love, Terri claims that the ex-husband who used to drag her around the living room by her ankles really did love her. Carver had to have been influenced by Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Things get that ugly. But it's also profoundly moving as Mel struggles through the blur of the gin and the shadows of the setting sun to believe in the strength of the human heart.

Read the entire top ten.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appears on Ward Just's list of six books with an “autumnal” quality and among Dennis Lehane's five favorite short story collections.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten African memoirs

Alexandra Fuller has written four books of non-fiction.

Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense best non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage.

The Legend of Colton H Bryant was a Toronto Globe and Mail Best Non-Fiction Book of 2008.

Her latest book is Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

One of Fuller's top ten African memoirs, as told to the Guardian:

Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela

This is a book you will find yourself going back to and thumbing through, not just for the historical perspective that this collection of essays, speeches and conversations that this memoir provides, but for the shot-to-the-heart wisdom of one of the greatest and most inspiring leaders of our time.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Conversations with Myself made Martin E. Marty's five best list of books on the theme of prison writing.

See Alexandra Fuller's five best list of books that "brilliantly evoke the modern American West."

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten English translations

Adam Thorpe is a poet, playwright and novelist...and a translator of Madame Bovary.

One of his top ten English translations, as told to the Guardian:

Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

Heaney's magnificent rendering of the earliest English epic has its roots, ironically, in his Northern Irish background: its local voices enabled him to "find the tuning fork … the note and pitch for the overall music of the work". The result is pitch-perfect. My grisly memories of university days ploughing over Old English assignments have been banished.

Read about the other translations on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about renewable energy

Juliet Davenport is chief executive of Good Energy, the UK's only 100% renewable electricity supplier.

With Daisy Banks at The Browser, Davenport discussed five books about "good energy"--having a practical interaction with climate change--including:

Too Big to Fail
by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Your next book, Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, has got you thinking about how the bankers could fit in with all this.

I wanted to read this book because I didn’t really understand how the global economy managed to get into the current mess. Suddenly the banking system was collapsing and everyone was talking about sub-prime mortgages. And it was fascinating to read this story of greed, egos and disregard for process. There were all these stops and checks to stop things like this happening but the key players had dismissed them all, which was amazing. It was so arrogant.

So where do Wall Street bankers fit in with clean energy and climate change?

One of the things that is really important to any business is that you need to get money from somewhere to do it. The insight I got was that the money markets seem to be happy to implement some very high-risk strategies if they think they can make huge amounts of money – and they did on paper for many years. And actually we need huge amounts of money to be able to deliver the renewable targets that we are talking about. So it got me thinking, what are the issues within banking, who do they talk about, what do they think and might they be interested in us as a market?

Were you trying to get into their minds to persuade them to invest in you?

It was partly that, but it is also about how we frame renewable energy in a way that can be an alternative to the sub-prime market. I am not suggesting that anybody would want to repeat the risks that were taken there, but obviously people were happy to take a certain amount of risk. What we need to do is to persuade bankers that renewables isn’t a high-risk strategy, and it was interesting reading the book to see what the methods for doing that were.

Do you think renewables could be lucrative for bankers as a market?

Definitely. Renewable energy is fascinating because it is a very long-term asset. At the moment pension funds can either buy property, which isn’t doing very well right now, or invest in equities, which isn’t a very good bet either. So I think that maybe they should be investing in renewable energy projects, which will happen in the future out of necessity.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about the beginnings of the Second World War

Richard Overy's books include 1939: Countdown to War.

One of his five best books on the beginnings of World War II, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

The Triumph of the Dark
by Zara Steiner (2010)

Every now and again, a book comes along that merits being called "definitive." Zara Steiner's "The Triumph of the Dark" is the most thorough, wide-ranging and carefully argued narrative available on the tumultuous decade that ended in world war. Every historian of the period will stand in Steiner's debt. Not everyone will agree with some of her arguments. Steiner is particularly tough on Neville Chamberlain, taking him to task for being so blinded by anticommunism that he failed to appreciate how a British-French-Soviet alliance in the 1930s might have stopped Hitler's military expansion. That was Churchill's view too, so she is in good company. Whether Stalin would have signed up, of course, remains open to question. But reading Steiner on the subject at least provides the comforts of contemplating an alternative storyline, one in which the dark does not triumph.

Read about the other other books on Overy's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best cliffs in literature

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

One book on his list:

The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean

Led by Captain Keith Mallory, a New Zealand mountaineer, a British team attempts to knock out the German guns on the Aegean island of Navarone. The only way to get to them is via the island's "unclimbable" south cliff. Do they manage it? Well, who won the war?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Bohjalian's six favorite books about plane crashes

Chris Bohjalian latest novel, The Night Strangers, is a ghost story that begins with a plane crash.

At The Week magazine he came up with a list of six favorite books about plane crashes, including:

Outliers by Malcom Gladwell

Most of Outliers is about why some people are preternaturally successful. My favorite chapter, however, is "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes." The black box transcripts are riveting, as are Gladwell's insights into how the catastrophes that he details could have been avoided.

Read about the other books on the list.

Check out Malcolm Gladwell's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

A.E. Hotchner's five favorite coming-of-age tales

A.E. Hotchner is best known for Papa Hemingway, his 1966 biography of Ernest Hemingway, whose work he had adapted for plays and television. His other books include King of the Hill, a memoir about growing up in St. Louis during the Great Depression. It was made into a film in 1993, the screenplay written and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

In 2007 he named a five best list of coming-of-age tales for the Wall Street Journal.

One book on the list:

The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
Little, Brown, 1951

Holden Caulfield thoroughly deserves his status as the quintessential teenager of American literature. J.D. Salinger found a note-perfect teenage voice, with Holden's venomous contempt for everything "phony," a voice that the author expertly deploys in capturing all the prejudices and emotions of a troubled prep-school boy from New York. Holden's escapades are both hilarious and painful, as when he decides to lose his virginity with a prostitute that he has procured with the help of a hotel bellhop. When she arrives, Holden has second thoughts about this misguided attempt to grow up and finds himself bargaining with the indignant woman to let him out of the deal. Holden zig-zags through an amusing, pathetic, confusing year, battling inner turmoil every step of the way. But in the end he does grow up -- somewhat.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Catcher In The Rye appears on Jay McInerney's list of five essential New York novels, Woody Allen's top five books list, Patrick Ness's top 10 list of "unsuitable" books for teenagers, David Ulin's six favorite books list, Nicholas Royle's list of the top ten writers on the telephone, TIME magazine's list of the top ten books you were forced to read in school, Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, Dan Rhodes' top ten list of short books, and Sarah Ebner's top 25 list of boarding school books; it is one of Sophie Thompson's six best books. Upon rereading, the novel disappointed Khaled Hosseini, Mary Gordon, and Laura Lippman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten memoirs by children of famous parents

At the Christian Science Monitor, Molly Driscoll came up with ten memoirs by children of famous parents, including:

Reading My Father, by Alexandra Styron

Alexandra Styron, daughter of "Sophie's Choice" author William Styron wrote in her memoir Reading My Father that her father would have rages at the tiniest provocation and told her stories intended to scare her when she was young. Alexandra also recalls, however, moments of warmth that they shared, and remembers that her father – who suffered from depression – would sometimes take calls from people feeling suicidal to try to convince them to abandon their plans.

Read about the other books on the list.

See Alexandra Styron's five best books about fathers and daughters.

--Marshal Zeringue