Top ten Belfast books

Glenn Patterson is the author of several novels and a memoir, Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times. He has written plays for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and is the co-writer of Good Vibrations (BBC Films), based on the life of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley, which is due for release in 2012. A collection of his journalism, for among others the Guardian, Sunday Times and Irish Times, was published in 2006 as Lapsed Protestant. His latest novel is The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. Patterson lives in Belfast.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of Belfast books. One title on the list:

The Emperor of Ice Cream by Brian Moore

Moore by almost any measure is Belfast's most successful novelist. He spent his entire writing life in Montreal and California, but returned regularly to his native city in his novels, in this particular novel very close to his own experience as a youthful ARP warden in north Belfast. War for Gavin Burke is "freedom from futures" – an opportunity for licence, or as much licence as the local girls ("nuns in mufti") will afford him. And then the Luftwaffe come.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on why cities are good for you

Leo Hollis was born in London in 1972, was educated at Stoneyhurst College and studied history at university. He is the author of number books on London including London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London and the forthcoming Why Cities are Good For You.

With Alec Ash at The Browser, Hollis discussed five top books on why cities are good for you, including:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs

Let’s get into those books, as a way to explore just why cities are good for you. Beginning with The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Jane Jacobs was an architectural writer, not an academic, and she was in many ways an engaged member of the public. She was involved in the 1950s and early 1960s with campaigns to preserve Greenwich Village [in New York], which is where she lived. And out of this came the idea of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she creates the fulcrum on which this new urban thinking is fixed. This book sums up these new ideas of putting people first – that the city is complex but not a place that needs to be rationalised. That you should look at life on the street, rather than the motorways, as a sign of what urban life really is.

She writes very simply about Hudson Street, where she lives, and various other parts of New York, and she gives the city a human face. She looks at people right at the heart of the city, and shows that a neighbourhood can be chaotic and rundown and still have more life in it than a gated community of millionaires.

Presumably, to understand cities today we have to understand their history. When did cities begin?

We’ve been experimenting in urban forms for about 9,000 years. The first cities were created in what one historian, Ian Morris, calls the “happy latitudes”. In other words, the latitudes around the equator which were the first to come back to life after the ice age, and around which the first communities were formed.

We normally assume that the origins of cities began with a farm, then a village, then a town – that they grew incrementally. In fact, archaeologists have shown us that the very first cities were moments of extraordinary revolution. We assume that agriculture came before cities, but what has been shown is that there was a moment – lasting about 300 years – in which everything one thinks the city is was spontaneously created, and agriculture was part of that. The city created the technology to sustain it, rather than the other way around. So cities are completely different to anything that has come before.

Since those 9,000-year-old origins, we’ve been experimenting with different forms of the city depending on climate and population. Technology has always been part of the mix of how a city works. Today, two of the technologies that drive us most – the Internet and the airplane – mean that we don’t need to be physically close to each other, and that we are spending more and more time travelling from city to city, respectively.

Read about the other books Hollis discussed at The Browser.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is among Simon Jenkins's five best books about cities and Tim Harford's top 10 undercover economics books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on Russian short stories

Rosamund Bartlett's books include Wagner and Russia and the acclaimed Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. An authority on Russian cultural history, she has also achieved renown as a translator of Chekhov.

Her latest book is Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

One collection of Russian short fiction she discussed with Daisy Banks at The Browser:

Master and Man and Other Stories
by Leo Tolstoy

What kind of world does your next author, Leo Tolstoy, write about in his short story “What Men Live By”, in the collection Master and Man?

With this story we jump forward to the 1880s, and into the world of the peasantry as imagined by an aristocrat who went rather further than Turgenev in trying to atone for his guilt before Russia’s oppressed underclass. As well as the great novels, Tolstoy also wrote some very fine short stories. Many people would regard The Death of Ivan Ilych or Hadji Murad as his best short prose work, or maybe even Strider, an extraordinary tale narrated by a horse. I am very fond of this story though, because it is charming, the moral is worn lightly and I know what it meant to Tolstoy.

Rather like the Valkyrie Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring [cycle of operas], who is punished by Wotan for refusing to bring Siegmund to Valhalla, the main character in Tolstoy’s story is an angel, Mikhail, punished by God for refusing to take a woman’s life. Mikhail is sent to earth to discover what men live by. A humble peasant shoemaker takes pity on the naked man he stumbles across, slumped up against a chapel wall one cold autumn afternoon, and brings him home. After Mikhail has worked for a while as a cobbler and discovered that men live by love, he springs new wings and is allowed to return to heaven.

This story appeared in a children’s journal in 1881. It was Tolstoy’s first piece of published fiction after Anna Karenina, which he had finished four years earlier. In the years in between, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis which led to him rejecting the Russian Orthodox Church. He ended up producing his own translation of the Gospels which threw out all the miracles and concentrated on Christ’s ethical message. Although there is continuity with everything Tolstoy had written before, “What Men Live By” is his first conscious attempt at expressing his new faith in fictional form. It is prefaced by no fewer than eight epigraphs about love taken from St John in his new translation.

So how does it differ from a work like Anna Karenina?

Anna Karenina is a novel written about upper-class society in which peasants are part of the background. But Tolstoy’s conscience was already troubled, and when he finished it he renounced writing fiction for an educated audience. The main characters in “What Men Live By” are peasants. The story is a model of clarity, but with Tolstoy it is always the art which conceals the art. He had wanted to simplify his literary language ever since working on his ABC [educational] book in the early 1870s, just before he began Anna Karenina, but he was an inveterate craftsman. It is quite moving to discover that he produced 33 drafts of “What Men Live By” before he was happy with it.

It is not actually a story Tolstoy thought up himself. He had been entranced by the rhythms and cadences of the Russian language since putting together medieval epics for his ABC book, and would often go out to the main highway near Yasnaya Polyana [his home in western Russia] to chat to the pilgrims and write down some of their sayings. When he learned that in the remote far north of Russia there were still a few peasants who maintained the oral tradition of reciting epic poems and fables by heart, he invited one of them to stay with him. “What Men Live By” is based on a fable told him by this peasant reciter, originally about fishermen from northern Russia.

Read about the other collections Bartlett discussed at The Browser.

Visit Rosamund Bartlett's website and learn more about Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

Writers Read: Rosamund Bartlett.

My Book, The Movie: Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

The Page 99 Test: Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable books on navigators

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on navigators:

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel

The stars could tell early mariners how far they were from the equator, but longitude--the key second component to mapping one's position on the globe--remained out of reach for thousands of years. Sailors were literally lost at sea, navigating by wit and hard-earned knowledge in what they hoped was their intended direction. In response to a reward offered by Parliament, inventor John Harrison defied the established scientific community and imagined a clock that would withstand pitch and roll, temperature and humidity, and keep precise time at sea. This device, in concert with celestial observation, allowed sailors to accurately pinpoint their location on maps and explore the world with a heretofore unprecedented precision. An enthralling read about the courage to pursue your inspiration and change the world.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Dava Sobel's five best list of books which record extraordinary journeys of discovery.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable books on the gender trap

Peggy Orenstein's books include the New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting for Daisy; Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World; and the best-selling SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. Her latest book is Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

At The Browser, Orenstein and Eve Gerber discuss how, "from an early age, girls learn to be pretty in pink while boys are marketed a prepackaged masculinity." And Orenstein suggests five books that may help parents "give their children a broader, more imaginative outlook," including:

Odd Girl Out
by Rachel Simmons

Let’s get to Odd Girl Out. Rhodes scholar Rachael Simmons’s book about adolescent girls is based on her observations at 30 schools and interviews with more than 300 girls. What is this book about?

Odd Girl Out looks at relational aggression with girls, which is bullying, basically. It breaks down how adolescent girls relate to one another and why it matters – the mean girl stuff that gets dismissed. Simmons takes seriously the issues that girls have with one another. She doesn’t just expose the problem. Simmons helps parents, educators and kids see how to build respective, supportive communities. The new edition includes a whole lot on how to navigate social media. It’s a great resource.

Simmons faults the cultural taboo against girls overtly expressing aggression. How do you see gender norms influencing the emotional lives of adolescents?

There are few cultural outlets for girls to be overtly aggressive so they tend to talk behind backs and that sort of thing instead. Simmons talks about why that happens and what to do about it both in and out of school. There can be difficult dynamics in relationships among girls. If you have a daughter who’s older than three you’ve probably run into these issues. I don’t know a parent who doesn’t need help with how to advise their child.

How can parents help?

What we can do is help girls identify feelings. A lot of times girls don’t identify their feelings. They believe they’re supposed to be nice, polite and pleasant so they end up angry, anxious or unhappy. Just allowing a girl to express the normal range of human emotions helps. Allowing a girl to not be so nice can help release the frustration that leads to relational aggression or depression. Girls need help navigating through anger and disappointment and they need to know that their parents can help.

Read about the other books Orenstein discusses at The Browser.

See--Writers Read: Rachel Simmons (February 2010).

Visit Peggy Orenstein's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Waiting for Daisy.

The Page 99 Test: Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best fraternal hatreds in literature

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

One entry on the list:

Hank and Lee Stamper

Narrated in self-obsessed first-person monologues, Ken Kesey's family saga Sometimes a Great Notion features an Oregon logging clan aptly called the Stampers. Old Henry's two sons loathe each other. Hank is a tough guy; Lee is bookish. Lee leaves for his education, but then returns, bent on revenging himself by seducing his brother's wife.

Read about the other brothers on the list.

Sometimes a Great Notion may be The Great Oregon Novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best novels with complex characters

Jane Harris is the author of the award-winning novel The Observations and, more recently, Gillespie and I.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of "tales that invite the reader to puzzle over complex characters," including:

Notes on a Scandal
by Zoë Heller (2003)

There is something particularly compelling about novels, like this one, that anatomize loneliness and obsession. When beautiful, bohemian Sheba Hart joins the staff of St. George's school, narrator Barbara hopes that they'll become friends. Barbara is in her late 50s: a single history teacher devoted to her cat. Initially, Sheba brings a touch of glamour and excitement into her life. Barbara relishes her role as her new friend's confidante. How disappointing, therefore, for Barbara to learn that Sheba—without telling her—has embarked on an affair with a 15-year-old schoolboy. Recovering swiftly from this shock, Barbara finds herself trying to protect her friend as Sheba's world begins to disintegrate. But things are more complicated than they seem in this disquieting novel, and the narrator is revealed to be a more complex character than we might have imagined. "This isn't a story about me," she insists, prompting us to wonder whether she might protest too much.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Notes on a Scandal appears on Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list on scandals.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten notable lost-then-found novels

At The Daily Beast, Sarah Stodol tagged ten "novels that were lost to the world, along with the fascinating stories behind their journey back into the light," including:

A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole

Perhaps the lost novel with the saddest back story, the manuscript for this one was discovered by the author’s mother after his suicide at age 31, in 1969. Before that, the novel, about a bombastic, unemployed anti-hero living in New Orleans, made it into the hands of Robert Gottlieb, then at Simon & Schuster, who took interest in the manuscript but eventually shelved it. Toole reportedly took these and other rejections hard. After his suicide in Biloxi, Miss., his mother eventually got the manuscript into the hands of Walker Percy, who convinced the Louisiana State University Press to publish it.

Read about the other books on the list.

A Confederacy of Dunces is among Hallie Ephron's top ten books for a good laugh, Stephen Kelman's top 10 outsiders' stories, John Mullan's ten best moustaches in literature, Michael Lewis's five favorite books, and Cracked magazine's classic funny novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on Gilded Age New York

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on Gilded Age New York:

The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton, who once said that "the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing," explores what happens when Newland Archer, a New York gentleman engaged to marry his sweet-but-conventional upper-class fianceé, falls for a scandal-plagued woman he's just met, Countess Ellen Olenska. The first Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by a woman, this novel brilliantly memorializes the social life of Gilded Age Manhattan, as it weaves a timeless tragedy out of the tensions between duty and passion.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Age of Innocence also appears on Frances Kiernan's five best list of books that helped her understand the ways of New York society and David Kamp's list of six books that are notable for their food prose, and is among Elaine Sciolino's six favorite books, Mika Brzezinski's 6 best books and Honor Blackman's 6 best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five YA novels in which environmental catastrophe leads to a dystopia

At Slate, Torie Bosch has an interesting essay about how dystopian young-adult fiction is tackling the social consequences of global warming. Her starting point is The Hunger Games story, and she tags a few other similarly themed novels, including:

Birthmarked by Caragh O’Brien. About the novel:

After climate change, on the north shore of Unlake Superior, a dystopian world is divided between those who live inside the wall, and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, who live outside. It’s Gaia’s job to “advance” a quota of infants from poverty into the walled Enclave, until the night one agonized mother objects, and Gaia’s parents disappear.

As Gaia’s efforts to save her parents take her within the wall, she faces the brutal injustice of the Enclave and discovers she alone holds the key to a secret code, a code of “birthmarked” babies and genetic merit.

Fraught with difficult moral choices and rich with intricate layers of codes, Birthmarked explores a colorful, cruel, eerily familiar world where a criminal is defined by her genes, and one girl can make all the difference.

Read--Caragh O'Brien's Birthmarked, the movie.

Learn about four other novels Bosch mentioned.

Read Bosch's essay.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on hysteria

Asti Hustvedt is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. An independent scholar who has written extensively on hysteria and literature, she has a Ph.D in French literature from New York University, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Phi Betta Kapa Fellowship. Hustvedt is the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France and has published many translations. She lives in New York City.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books on hysteria. One title on the list:

Mad, Bad and Sad
by Lisa Appignanesi (2008)

Lisa Appignanesi's ambitious and fascinating book explores two centuries of "mad, bad and sad" women and the mind doctors who treated them. While the author's scope extends well beyond hysteria proper, the disorder in its myriad forms appears throughout the text. Some of her subjects are women who became famous patients, such as a young woman named Augustine, whose hysteria made her a medical celebrity in 19th-century Paris; and some are famous women who became patients, including Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. Appignanesi reminds us that medical history is made up of human stories and that unhappiness, especially of the female variety, tends to be adapted to fit current diagnostic categories. These days, the tendency is to locate mental illness in biology—in "chemical imbalances" in the brain, for example. Appignanesi counters, with ample evidence, that illness is not stable but shifts according to the needs of the time.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Lisa Appignanesi's Mad, Bad, and Sad.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten canonical, super-weird science fiction novels

At io9, MaryKate Jasper and Charlie Jane Anders came up with a list of ten super-weird science fiction novels that are considered part of the canon.

One entry on the list:

Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

Why It's Weird: The novel follows a healer through a post-apocalyptic, desert-like landscape, as she looks for a replacement "dreamsnake." Dreamsnake bites produce hallucinations similar to acid trips. So in a sense, what we're looking at here is one long roadtrip dedicated to the pursuit of LSD.

Why It's Required: Dreamsnake swept the awards when it was first published, winning the 1979 Hugo Award, the 1978 Nebula Award, and the 1979 Locus Award. It was also nominated for the 1979 Ditmar Award in International Fiction.

Read about the other entries on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Dreamsnake.

--Marshal Zeringue