Top ten writer/illustrators

Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in North Walsham, Norfolk, England, during an April snowstorm. He currently lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva: the Twins Who Saved a City, which have been translated into thirteen different languages, and both of which he illustrated. His latest book is Heap House, book one of The Iremonger Trilogy.

One of Carey's top ten writer/illustrators, as told to the Guardian:

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

I remember as a child being very disturbed by the Wild Things when I first saw them, but I kept returning. Sendak's refugee relatives were the inspiration behind the book, he said of them, "these people didn't speak English. And they were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying…And they'd pick you up and hug you and kiss you, 'Oh we could eat you up.' And we know they would eat anything, anything. And so they're the wild things." There's always a sense of danger in his books, and also a sense of the past, of melancholy. His posthumous work My Brother's Book is a tribute to his brother filled with haunting paintings inspired by William Blake.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Where the Wild Things Are is among Sara Maitland's top ten books of the forest and Anthony Browne's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books with "white" in the title

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Amy Wilkinson tagged seven top books with "white" in the title, including:

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga

Adiga depicts India’s class struggles and corruption in this intriguing debut, centering around a young entrepreneur—the titular White Tiger Balram Halwai—who feels so tread upon that he commits an unspeakable act against his seemingly decent employer.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The White Tiger is on Julia Stuart's list of five of the best stories about domestic servants, Stephen Kelman's top ten list of outsiders' stories, and is one of The Freakonomics guys' six best books.

The Page 69 Test: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten stories about infidelity

Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton. She is the author of three novels: The Changeling; The Wave Theory of Angels; and Unexploded, which is longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. MacLeod has also written a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction.

She named her top ten stories about infidelity for the Guardian. One novel on the list:

Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Who can forget Emma and Léon's furious cab ride through the streets of Rouen, their illicit passion concealed from view? In 1857, following publication, the Second Empire tried Flaubert for offences to morality and religion. He was acquitted, and the novel became an immediate bestseller. From the distance of the 21st century, it is easy to lose sight of just how radical Madame Bovary was when it first appeared, not only in its new "objective" style of prose, but also in its refusal to either romanticise or sermonise. Flaubert confessed to weeping at times as he wrote; he sympathised so much with Emma in her final days that he felt physically ill.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Madame Bovary is on Álvaro Enrigue's list of ten notable books based on other books, Jennifer Gilmore's list of the ten worst mothers in books, Amy Sohn's list of six favorite books, Sue Townsend's 6 best books list, Helena Frith Powell's list of ten of the best sexy French books, the Christian Science Monitor's list of six novels about grand passions, John Mullan's lists of ten landmark coach rides in literature, ten of the best cathedrals in literature, ten of the best balls in literature, ten of the best bad lawyers in literature, ten of the best lotharios in literature, and ten of the best bad doctors in fiction, Valerie Martin's list of six novels about doomed marriages, and Louis Begley's list of favorite novels about cheating lovers. It tops Peter Carey's list of the top ten works of literature and was second on a top ten works of literature list selected by leading writers from Britain, America and Australia in 2007. It is one of John Bowe's six favorite books on love.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable YA novels

L.J.R. Kelly, who happens to be Roald Dahl’s grandson, is the author of the new children's book, Blanket and Bear, A Remarkable Pair, illustrated by Yoko Tanaka.

One of Kelly's favorite young adult novels, as told to The Daily Beast:

Refugee Boy
by Benjamin Zephaniah

This beautifully composed book by the British poet Benjamin Zephaniah follows the half Ethiopian and half Eritrean Alem through the horrors of events in a war between those two countries. On a visit to England, Alem’s father sneaks away, trusting the government to look after him and protect him from the hatred his mixed race parentage inspires at home. Alem navigates the oppressive world of U.K. children’s homes, before eventually finding the support of a caring foster family. He has to fight a court battle to stay in the UK and deal with the death of his parents from afar, but throughout we are taught fundamental lessons about acceptance with a lyrical, flowing simplicity that is highly natural and digestible.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Learn about Benjamin Zephaniah's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Palin's six favorite books

Michael Palin was a lifelong (so far) member of Monty Python.

His recent books include the travelogue Brazil, and The Truth, a novel about a would-be biographer of a famed environmentalist.

One of Palin's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A short, powerful tale about where an obsession can take you, about a character pushing into the unknown and entering a world whose values are turned upside down.

Read about the other books on Palin's list.

Heart of Darkness also appears on Robert Twigger's list of five of the best books about rivers, Robert McCrum's list of ten of the best closing lines of books, Mark Malloch-Brown's lis of six favorite novels of empire, John Mullan's list of ten of the best fogs in literature, Tim Butcher's list of the top 10 books about Congo, Martin Meredith's list of ten books to read on Africa, Thomas Perry's best books list, and is #9 on the 100 best last lines from novels list.

In 2012, Palin told the Daily Express about his six best books, a somewhat different list from his latest.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten vicious literary hatchet jobs

In February 2013 Rupert Hawksley tagged his top ten vicious literary hatchet jobs for the Telegraph. One entry on the list:

Henry James on Anthony Trollope (1866)

Well before Henry James went on to become the celebrated author of The Portrait of a Lady, he was dismissing some of the great novelists. Even Dickens did not escape James’s sharpened quill, but it is his treatment of Anthony Trollope in a review of The Belton Estate that is still so devastating: "It is utterly incompetent to the primary functions of a book…", he wrote.

"We do not open his books with the expectation of being thrilled, or convinced, or deeply moved in any way, and, accordingly, when we find one to be as flat as a Dutch landscape, we remind ourselves that we have wittingly travelled into Holland, and that we have no right to abuse the scenery for being in character."

"Our great objection to The Belton Estate is that, as we read it, we seemed to be reading a work written for children; a work prepared for minds unable to think; a work below the apprehension of the average man and woman…"

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best time travelers

At the Guardian, Tom Lamont came up the ten best time travelers. Most are from the big and small screens, but the list includes a couple of figures with prominent literary pedigrees, including:

Billy Pilgrim

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Kurt Vonnegut’s hero in Slaughterhouse-Five lived a luckless, meandering life and became a luckless, meandering time traveller. “[He] has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun… he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” Now a bullied private in the second world war, now a widowed optometrist, now a sex slave on an alien planet, Pilgrim ultimately found spiritual peace. Having seen “his birth and death many times”, he learned that “it is just an illusion we have on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five also made Melissa Albert's list of six favorite fictional book nerds, Jon Ronson's five top list of books on madness, Charlie Yu's top ten list of time travel books, John Mullan's list of ten of the best aliens in science fiction, Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of twelve great stories to help you to cope with mortality, Sebastian Beaumont's top 10 list of books about psychological journeys, and Tiffany Murray's top ten list of black comedies.

Also see: Top ten time travel books and Linda Buckley-Archer's's top ten time-travelling stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top tales for whiny kids

Whitney Collins is the author of The Hamster Won't Die: A Treasury of Feral Humor and the creator and editor of two humor sites -- errant parent and The Yellow Ham.

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog she tagged five top books for whiny kids, including:

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, by William Steig

Most of us are familiar with this haunting classic—the tale of a little donkey named Sylvester who finds a magic pebble that grants wishes. What starts as an exciting, fantastical tale—with Sylvester wishing for sunshine and warts removed—quickly turns dark when he’s confronted by a hungry lion and accidentally wishes to become a rock. Which he does.

From there the story continues with Sylvester as a giant, mute boulder in a field all alone. The seasons change, his parents grieve what they assume is his death, and Sylvester is trapped, cold and hopeless, while coyotes howl and search parties give up.

Thankfully, his parents finally have a picnic on this boulder and Sylvester comes back to life, but by then, most of us readers are so traumatized we pledge to NEVER wish for anything again.

This one teaches kids to be happy with what they have. And also to never pick up a rock.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Three of the best books on Brazil

At the Guardian, Pushpinder Khaneka named three of the best books on Brazil. One title on the list:

A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb

Robb eruditely entwines food with history and politics. His book is littered with fascinating digressions and his appetite for culinary delights is matched by an appetite for knowledge.

The sweep through 500 years of history – from colonisation by the Portuguese, through decades of military dictatorship to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's first term as president – is entertaining and informative, and often reads like a novel (and a thriller at that). It covers the brutal slavery that lasted longer than anywhere else in the western hemisphere, the destruction of the fugitive slave settlement in Palmares, and the war against the religious community at Canudos. Along the way Robb introduces us to classic Brazilian literary works.

The death of the title is the grisly and mysterious end of PC Farias – fixer and bagman to the corrupt president Fernando Collor de Mello – but there are many other deaths, through genocide, massacres, assassinations and crimes of passion.

The Australian writer, who has lived for many years in Italy and Brazil, paints an affectionate, perceptive portrait of the country – but burns with anger at the monstrous inequities in Brazilian society.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books of adventure and lust

Louisa Ermelino named five recent "rugged, kick-ass, leg breaking, can’t get them out of your head" good books for PWxyz, the news blog of Publishers Weekly, including:

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, about twin boys born to an Indian nun from Kerala who’s come to work in a clinic in Addis Abbaba and dies in childbirth. The saga follows the brothers thorough political upheaval, revolution and time spent in the U.S. for 560 ever more thrilling pages. (Verghese is a doctor born of Indian parents who immigrated to Ethiopia under the Emperor Haile Selassie.)

Read about the other books on Ermelino's list.

Writers Read: Abraham Verghese (March 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top laid-back pregnancy books

Claire Zulkey is a writer who lives in Chicago.  Her books include the novel An Off Year. She also edits the aptly named website, Zulkey.com.

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Zulkey tagged five top books for "the type of pregnant woman who wants information, minus the finger-wagging or tantric herbal perineal massage," including:

Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born, by Tina Cassidy

I did not attend a birthing class. I was signed up for one ($120 for a seven-hour class on a weekend? UGH), but then my cousin, after taking hers, told me that I’d learn the same things from the reading material she received in the class, which she then loaned to me. However, thanks to Cassidy’s book, I wasn’t completely ignorant as to the ways birth operates. While definitely cringeworthy, and sad at times (until fairly recently, it was hard out there for both a newly pregnant woman and a new baby), it’s a fascinating glimpse at the human body and the history of obstetrics, and will definitely—definitely—make you think twice before wishing you’d been born in an earlier era.

Read about the other books on the list.

Visit Claire Zulkey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James McBride's six favorite books

James McBride is an author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, rested on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. It is considered an American classic and is read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna was translated into a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee. It was released by Disney/Touchstone in September 2008. McBride wrote the script for Miracle at St. Anna and co-wrote Spike Lee's 2012 Red Hook Summer.

McBride's latest novel, The Good Lord Bird, is about American revolutionary John Brown.

One of the author's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

There's no book that better captures the frustrations, hopes, dreams, and disappointments of black American girls. This book was written before Ms. Morrison outgrew the storytelling form that most writers must adhere to. She's a genius. She can fly. The rest of us have to wait for the subway.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Bluest Eye is among Susheila Nasta's top ten cultural journeys.

--Marshal Zeringue