Five of the least desirable fictional roommates

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Melissa Albert highlighted five interesting fictional characters who would make undesirable roommates. One entry on the list:

Miss Havisham.

Even if she offers to pay ALL the rent, you still shouldn’t move in with Miss Havisham. Not only will she leave rotten wedding cake on the counter for literally years, she’ll also never leave the house. Looking forward to some alone time? Just when you think you’re the only one in the house, what you thought was a pile of dirty laundry sitting in the corner will suddenly stand up and totter toward you. Surprise! It was Havisham all along.

Read about the other characters on the list.

Great Expectations appears on Janice Clark's list of seven top novels about the horrors of adolescence, Amy Wilkinson's list of five books Kate Middleton should have read while waiting to give birth, Kate Clanchy's top ten list of novels that reflect the real qualities of adolescence, Joseph Olshan's list of six favorite books, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature, ten of the best appropriate deaths in literature, ten of the best castles in literature, ten of the best Hamlets, ten of the best card games in literature, and ten best list of fights in fiction. It also made Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and numbers among Kurt Anderson's five most essential books. The novel is #1 on Melissa Katsoulis' list of "twenty-five films that made it from the book shelf to the box office with credibility intact."

Read an 1861 review of "Great Expectations".

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top child narrators

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Hanna McGrath tagged five favorite child narrators, including:

Ellen Foster (Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons)

The first line of Ellen Foster, “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy,” sure is a ballsy way to start a story, especially considering what “little” must mean to an 11-year-old. But it’s also fitting—Ellen is as bold and unabashed as this line. After her mother’s suicide, she sets out to find the family she knows she deserves, away from her abusive father and a series of uncaring family members. Though some scenes may give readers pause, or make them doubt such a young girl’s unflinching resolve—as when she gives a school psychiatrist a thorough telling off—you can always go back to the beginning and read that first line again to remind yourself what Ellen’s made of. (Not exactly sugar and spice.) She uses her quick wit and moxie to fight for what she’s looking for, and in doing so earns a place among the great precocious child narrators, like Huck Finn and Scout Finch.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top books about unhappy familes

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Alexia Nader tagged nine favorite books about unhappy families, including:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.

In this novel, family tension is not just destructive, it’s also a force that binds Diaz’s immigrant protagonists together in difficult circumstances.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also appears among Jami Attenberg's top six books with overweight protagonists, Brooke Hauser's six top books about immigrants, Sara Gruen's six favorite books, Paste magazine's list of the ten best debut novels of the decade (2000-2009), and The Millions' best books of fiction of the millenium. The novel is one of Matthew Kaminski's five favorite novels about immigrants in America and is a book that made a difference to Zoë Saldana.

The Page 99 Test: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books on 18th-century London's perils

Maria McCann's first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, was published in 2000 to huge acclaim. Her new novel, Ace, King, Knave, is set in Georgian London.

For the Guardian, McCann came up with a top ten list of books on 18th-century London's perils, including:

Wedlock by Wendy Moore: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match

Mary Bowes, an ancestress of our present Queen, spent years being tortured by her psychopathic husband. The story isn't entirely London-based but I couldn't resist including this book, revealing as it does how inequality before the law made marriage itself a peril for many women. Mary's story, as dramatic as any novel, inspired Thackeray's Barry Lyndon.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Wendy Moore's Wedlock.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten ghost stories

Sandra Greaves was born in Edinburgh and now lives in Devon with a husband and several badly-behaved chickens, midway between the moor and the sea. She won the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Undiscovered Voices competition in 2012 for her first novel, The Skull in the Wood.

One of her top ten ghost stories, as shared with the Guardian:

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

A perfect ghost story set in the frozen north of Spitsbergen (now Svalbard). Former science student Jack Miller sets out to change his depressing life as a clerk by joining an Arctic expedition to an island where the polar night will last for four months solid. But something is walking in the dark, and as expedition members drop away, Jack is determined to face it – alone. Michelle Paver is the author of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series for children, but Dark Matter is one for older YA readers and adults alike. Psychologically complex, and utterly terrifying.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see: Rebecca Armstrong's ten best ghost stories, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books of ghost stories, Kate Mosse's top 10 ghost stories, Peter Washington's top ten ghost stories, and Brad Leithauser's five best ghost stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books with Death as a character

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Nicole Hill tagged seven books with Death as a character, including:

Paradise Lost, by John Milton

Milton’s epic poem about the Fall of Man and Adam and Eve’s Eden eviction introduces the whole concept of death personified. It is not a flattering depiction. In Book II of Paradise Lost, we get the heinous familial backstory that produced Death: while in Heaven, Sin sprang from her father, Satan, who in turn raped his daughter to produce a son, Death, who himself rapes his mother to beget the pack of hell hounds ringing her waist. The three form, essentially, an Unholy Trinity. It’s allegory, it’s grotesque, it’ll stick with you.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Milton is on Stuart Kelly's list of five great darknesses in literature.

Satan from Paradise Lost is among the 50 greatest villains in literature according to the (London) Telegraph and appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best devils in literature.

Paradise Lost also appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best snakes in literature, ten of the best pieces of fruit in literature, ten of the best visions of hell in literature, ten of the best angels in literature, ten of the best visions of heaven in literature, ten of the best walled gardens in literature, and ten of the best coups de foudre in literature. It is also on Diane Purkiss' critic's chart of the best books on the English Civil War and Peter Stanford's list of the ten best devils in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jo Nesbø's seven favorite books

Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbø is the author of the best-selling Harry Hole series.

One of his seven favorite books, as shared with The Week magazine:

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

This is the first real Oslo novel, from back when Oslo was called Christiania. The narrator, in the first line, describes it as "that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him." Hamsun filled the pages that follow with powerful writing, anxiety, and insatiable love.

Read about the other entries on Nesbo's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best historical novels about prostitutes

Emma Donoghue's novels include Room, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Life Mask, Slammerkin, Hood and Stir-fry; short-story collections Astray, Three and a Half Deaths (UK ebook), Touchy Subjects, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, and Kissing the Witch; and literary history including Inseparable, We Are Michael Field, and Passions Between Women as well as two anthologies that span the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Frog Music, her new novel, comes out in Spring 2014.

At The Daily Beast Donoghue tagged five of the best historical fictions about the oldest profession, including:

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

This bodice-ripper about Restoration England, banned in fourteen US states, was the bestselling novel in 1940s America. Published at almost a thousand pages, it had been edited down from a manuscript five times as long. A meaty story of one woman trading her way up a ladder of men while saving her heart for one, it’s a richly satisfying, read, and contains the most memorable scenes of the Great Fire and Plague that I’ve encountered.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books for people who love "Eat, Pray, Love"

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Dell Villa tagged seven books for people who love Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

One title on the list:

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

Fierce emotions and complex psychology are close to the surface in this brilliant, searing novel. The protagonist, Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher, is the fastidious, self-proclaimed Woman Upstairs, who spends days with 8-year-olds and nights and weekends working on her art: creating shoebox-sized dioramas of the living spaces of heroines like Virginia Woolf. She lives quietly and meticulously, until the Shahid family—Skandar, Sirena, and their son, Reza—enter her world, and ambitions and passions long laid to rest quickly come to light. Nora is destabilized, entranced by the entire Shahid family: Skandar, the Harvard professor; Sirena, the flamboyant Italian artist; and beautiful Reza. For Nora, the Shahids come to represent all that’s missing from her isolated existence, and the end result is a novel of self-realization that will stay with you long after you finish.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten crime writers turned detective

At the Guardian John Dugdale came up with a top ten list of crime writers turned detective, including:

Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji case (1907)

After spending three years in jail for supposedly carrying out brutal attacks on farm animals and writing threatening letters, solicitor Edalji (by then unable to practise) wrote asking for help in clearing his name. Conan Doyle's resulting press campaign made the arguments in favour of the court of criminal appeal – founded in the same year – irresistible, and almost a century later inspired Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George.

Read about the other entries on the list.

George Edalji in Arthur & George is one of Simon Lelic's top ten lawyers in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nick Offerman’s twelve favorite books

Nick Offerman is a stage and screen actor (Parks and Recreation) and woodworker.

His new book is Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living.

One of Offerman’s twelve favorite books, as shared with The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

The Control of Nature, by John McPhee

John McPhee, who was educated as a geologist, takes seemingly dry subject matter and wrings the most fascinating human interest stories from it. In his other works you will read of a birchbark canoe, a stand of pines in New Jersey, or orange trees in Florida, but in this book he speaks of three disparate examples wherein we funny monkeys attempt to control the inexorable forces of nature, co-starring an Icelandic volcano, the Arroyo Seco in The San Gabriel mountains, and the belle of the ball, the mighty Mississippi.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books for people who love Harry Potter

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Amy Wilkinson tagged six books for people who love Harry Potter, including:

The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling)

Rowling performed perhaps her most impressive literary illusion yet, publishing The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith (a purported former Royal Military Police investigator) earlier this year. The crime novel was proclaimed an impressive debut by critics, until it was revealed that Rowling was, in fact, the brain behind the book. Cuckoo’s Calling follows grizzled private eye Cormoran Strike, who is is tasked with investigating the mysterious death of supermodel Lula Landry. We guarantee Potter fans will find plenty to love within the pages of Rowling’s foray into the genre (or else we’ll snarf down an entire Skiving Snackbox courtesy of the Weasley twins).

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue