Top ten Halloween books

In 2006 Book Sense came up with a top ten list of Halloween books. One title on the list:

THE MERCY OF THIN AIR: A Novel, by Ronlyn Domingue

"With a ghost who hangs around from 1920s New Orleans until today, Domingue's novel would make a great Halloween read for the gentler spirits whose interests run toward human inter-relationships."

Read about the other books on the list.

Visit Ronlyn Domingue's website; see The Mercy of Thin Air Page 69 Test.

Also see The Rap Sheet's suggested Halloween reading. "If any holiday seems perfectly paired to crime fiction, it’s Halloween," wrote editor J. Kingston Pierce in 2006.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on glamour

Helena Frith Powell is the author of All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation Into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women, Be Incredibly Sexy: A Crash Course in Getting Your Groove On--and Keeping It There, and other books. Her new novel, which is about first love and set in London, will be out in the spring of 2013.

With Sophie Roell at The Browser, she tagged five notable books on glamour, including:

Out of Africa
by Isak Dinesen

So onto your next book, “Out of Africa.” How does it relate to glamour?

I chose “Out of Africa” because I find Karen Blixen one of the most inspirational women that I’ve ever come across. And this again goes back to my theory that being glamorous is not just out about being beautiful. Karen Blixen wasn’t very beautiful, she was very striking, and the thing about her that made her so appealing was her imagination, and her brain, and her curiosity about life and other cultures, and her capacity for love and her very sympathetic character. I found the book itself inspirational, and I found the fact that a woman had written it doubly inspirational. It’s quite a manly topic, trying to make a living out of a coffee farm. In some senses she is very masculine, and she even wrote the book under a male pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. But she is also clearly very sexually appealing and lands the best boy on the block, Denys Finch Hatton. Who sadly then dies in an airplane crash.

The book doesn’t seem to bear much relation to the movie. It’s certainly not about her love affair with Denys Finch Hatton — the Robert Redford character. He barely gets a mention.

No, the book is much more about her love for Africa. I think it’s really one of the most lovely declarations of love for Africa ever written. I think if you go to Africa, there is something about it that really captures you, there is something very addictive about it, there is something so romantic about it. And for the English, that’s true of Kenya in particular — we have a romantic image of it because of our combined history and the White Mischief era.

And then the coffee plantation fails and she has to leave and go back to Denmark. And she writes that beautiful, nostalgic, line:

“If I know a song of Africa, of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?”

It is a beautifully written book — particularly amazing if you think that English was her second language, that she was not writing in her native tongue. Or maybe that’s exactly why it is so beautiful. Even just the opening line: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…”

When I was in Kenya I visited her house. You can see the Ngong Hills in the distance. It’s still beautiful there even though the suburbs of Nairobi have slightly started to surround it. But yes, she twice nearly won the Nobel prize, but lost out to Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus.

Read about the other books Helena Frith Powell tagged at The Browser.

Visit Helena Frith Powell's website, and read about her top ten list of "sexy French books."

Writers Read: Helena Frith Powell (February 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue

Ty Burr's six favorite movie-star biographies

Ty Burr has been a film critic at The Boston Globe since 2002. Prior to that he wrote about movies for Entertainment Weekly, and he began his career as an in-house movie analyst for HBO. His books include The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together and the newly released Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame.

One of his six favorite movie-star biographies, as told to The Week magazine:

All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader edited by Yona Zeldis McDonough

With contributions from Gloria Steinem, Joyce Carol Oates, Molly Haskell, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Clare Boothe Luce, this book comes at Marilyn from all sides — and still never gets to the bottom of her mystique.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see: Five of the best Hollywood tell-alls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top novels not about humans

Carol Birch is the author of Jamrach’s Menagerie and ten other novels. She has won the David Higham Prize for Life in the Palace, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Fog Line, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 for Turn Again Home.

For the Wall Street Journal she named five top novels not about humans, including:

The Labrador Pact
by Matt Haig (2004)

Narrated by Prince the Labrador, Matt Haig's reworking of "Henry IV, Part 1" is a heartbreaker with a minimum of sentiment and a huge dose of humor. Haig has said that he began this as a book about a family in crisis. The dog perspective imposed itself because the family pet was the ideal mute observer, listening in on all secrets. Haig's great imaginative stroke here is his portrait of Prince as a real dog, not just a human with fur—an ordinary dog in an ordinary family. No hero, no wolf under the skin, he's cozy and staid. His responsibilities lie heavy on him: It's his duty to protect the family and keep it together at all costs, even as it seems determined to pull itself apart. Equally complex is the power play working itself out in the parallel world of the local dogs, one of whom explains the Labrador code ("Duty Over All") and the history of the "Springer Uprising." Both a comedy about family life and a tragedy about the eternal conflict between duty and pleasure, "The Labrador Pact" is a moving tale—also a beautiful one in all its dark perceptions.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Matt Haig's The Labrador Pact.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten horror novels that are scarier than most movies

At io9 Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders came up with ten horror novels that are scarier than almost any movie.

One title on the list:

The Shining by Stephen King

The movie version of The Shining is a pop culture touchstone — but as usual, the book is even better than the movie. There's a reason King is considered a horror master: The tense atmosphere and freaky supernatural occurrences get into the reader's head and make you begin to doubt your own grip on sanity, along with that of the characters. Most people are probably familiar with the premise of the book: An alcoholic father takes a job as the off-season caretaker of an isolated mountain resort, in order to work on his writing and become closer to his family. The son is a psychic, a "shiner", who can see the hauntings in the hotel. Sure the book is chock full of supernatural visions — but equally disturbing is the human-on-human violence. The child's-eye view of his parents' deteriorating relationship — and sanity — is meant to dredge up uncomfortable memories of childhood's confusion and powerlessness.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Shining is among Charlie Higson's top ten horror books and Monica Ali's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books of ghost stories

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

The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story
by Susan Hill

Set on an English moor in the not-too-distant yet suitably murky past, this chilling tale -- complete with fog, a long-buried secret, and, of course, a haunted house -- follows a young solicitor who comes from London to attend the funeral and settle the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow. What he doesn't know...well, you get the picture.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Woman in Black is one of Kate Mosse's top 10 ghost stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books with maps

Simon Garfield's acclaimed books of nonfiction include last year's Just My Type: A Book about Fonts.

His new book, On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, is available now in the UK and hits the US in December 2012.

One of Garfield's top ten books with maps, as told to the Guardian:

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

Disturbing and truly memorable, Sebald's ramble through the Suffolk ghostlands shows us how much we normally miss. The author weaves history, memory and erudite imaginings as he strolls, with a visit to McDonalds an eerie break in an otherworldly journey. In so doing he worms a map in your psyche, and I felt I was trespassing on secret and pagan land. It's not the cheeriest of reads or landscapes, but it's an utterly compelling one.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Rings of Saturn is on John Mullan's list of ten of the best long walks in literature.

The Page 99 Test: Simon Garfield's Just My Type.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best brief biographies

Paul Johnson's latest book is Darwin.

One of his five favorite brief biographies, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Lincoln at Gettysburg
by Garry Wills (2006)

Of Grant's contemporary, Lincoln, there are over 1,000 biographies, many multivolume, with more appearing every year. There are few short ones, and none outstanding, but there is one that contrives to take a particular episode and use it to epitomize and illuminate the whole life. This is Garry Wills's "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America." The main text is only 175 pages, but it shows how Lincoln in this short speech was able to ennoble the war, to explain why it was necessary, to show why it succeeded in its objects and to give Americans a key text about themselves. The book sums up Lincoln's qualities and makes good his claim to be the exemplar of the American virtues and the central figure in American history. This is a two-day read—with the appendices three—but time profitably spent.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Lincoln at Gettysburg is one of James Ledbetter's six notable books about speeches that changed U.S. politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six notable books with overweight protagonists

Jami Attenberg's new novel is The Middlesteins.

Jonathan Franzen (author of Freedom) says: “The Middlesteins had me from its very first pages, but it wasn’t until its final pages that I fully appreciated the range of Attenberg’s sympathy and the artistry of her storytelling.”

At The Week magazine Attenberg named her six favorite books with overweight protagonists.  One title on the list:

Heft by Liz Moore

There is so much humanity and honesty in this novel about a 550-pound man, housebound for a decade, now reconnecting with a woman from his past. I also love a character with an appreciation for food: It's fun to walk away from a book a little hungry.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Liz Moore's Heft.

Visit Jami Attenberg's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten "library" books

Adam Lancaster is the UK's SLA School Librarian of the Year 2012.

At the Guardian he named a top ten list of "books that are set in libraries or have set his library alight," including:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

One book that is a must in any library. The style and the humour of the books is the key to turning some non-readers into avid readers. I also love using these books to show those very same people that were originally turned off to reading that Greg loves to write and draw. That's why he keeps journal, and that's why they are able to read about what he gets up to.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best narrators in literature

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels The Interloper and Panorama City.

One book (and an alternate, "a sort of spiritual cousin") on his ten best list of narrators in literature, as told to Publishers Weekly:

Ditie, I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

Hrabal is a modern master of the literature of the Fool. But unlike his forebears (cf Jasek's novel The Good Soldier Svejk), Hrabal lets his fools speak for themselves, giving them the microphone to narrate their own stories in all of their venal, occasionally insightful, narrow-minded glory. Ditie, a hotel waiter, likes to brag that he once served the Emperor of Ethiopia. A poor judge of seemingly everything, he marries a stern German athlete just as the Nazis are taking power. James Wood's review of Hrabal's work is a must-read. (Alternate: Stevens, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro)

Read about the other narrators on Wilson's list.

I Served the King of England is one of Jonathan Coe's 6 favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten literary parodies

D.J. Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. His novels include Derby Day (2011), At the Chime of a City Clock (2010), Ask Alice (2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006).

His new book is What You Didn't Miss, "a hilarious collection of literary lampoons and an alternative history of modern English literature" culled from the popular Private Eye column of the same name.

One of Taylor's top ten literary parodies, as told to the Guardian:

David Lodge on Salman Rushdie

Ralph Messenger, the hero of Lodge's 2001 novel Thinks, is an expert in artificial intelligence and human consciousness whose students are encouraged to produce parodies of modern novelists. Hence What is it like to a be a Bat? by S*lm*n R*shd** ("What kind of question is that, sir? With all due respect, what you say if I asked you, 'What is it like to be a man?'") The bat in question turns out to be hanging from the coat hook of a toilet in the first-class cabin of an Air India jet. Read by Lodge with great attack at literary festivals.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue