Five thrillers to make you question how well you know your partner

At B&N Reads Jeff Somers tagged five novels to make you question how well you know your partner, including:

The Husband’s Secret, by Liane Moriarity

Moriarity weaves together three stories that involve secrets and lies, and partners lying to each other and to other people. Ultimately a study in the acidic effect of deception in a relationship, it begins when Cecilia discovers a letter written by her husband, marked to be read only in the event of his death. How could any spouse resist? What she reads in that letter changes her life and her marriage, bringing into question the value of knowing your partner’s secrets in the first place. What, Moriarity seems to ask on every page, is gained by knowing something that happened before you met your spouse, your girlfriend, your boyfriend? Is knowing automatically better than ignorance? The answers the characters come to may not be your answers, but the journey to them is gripping, and filled with twists and turns.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Husband’s Secret is among Ellen Wehle's five top marriage thrillers, Melissa Albert's top five books for fans of Orphan Black, and Sophie Hannah's top ten pageturners.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten great New York City novels

Michael Friedman’s latest book is Martian Dawn & Other Novels, a collection of three novels.

One of the author's ten best New York City novels, as shared at Please Kill Me:

Inferno: A Poet's Novel by Eileen Myles(2010)

Myles has such a great sensibility and is so astute that I am happy to go wherever she leads me. She is also a distinctive prose stylist. An elliptical fictionalized memoir, Inferno tracks Eileen as she arrives in NYC from Boston in the seventies, makes her way as a poet among the talented circle around The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, finds love. It takes guts to be as honest as Myles is, and the book is affecting. The character sketches sprinkled throughout (Rene Ricard, Ted Berrigan, among others) are just so well-drawn.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books of war and sacrifice

One title on People magazine's Memorial Day reading list:

Jarhead by Anthony Swofford

U.S. Marine Anthony Swofford's memoir reveals what it was really like to be in Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War. From being fired upon and contemplating suicide to the boredom and horror of the front line, his account is brutal and inspired the 2005 film. When it was time to go to battle with the Iraqis, "he was forced to consider what it means to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man."

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books from the 1980s

Wayne Koestenbaum’s 2013 book, My 1980s and Other Essays, explores, among other things, the age of Ronald Reagan and MTV. One of his five favorite books from the decade, as shared at the Daily Beast:

The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) by Avital Ronell

The smartest book ever written about the telephone. The smartest book ever written about the impossibility of direct communication. The smartest book ever written about the longing for communication. A wild classic.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top YA stories driven by lists

Maurene Goo's new novel is I Believe in a Thing Called Love. At the BN Teen Blog she tagged her five favorite YA stories driven by lists. One title on the list:

Kissing Ted Callahan, by Amy Spalding

Another set of best friends make a list together, this time after discovering their fellow bandmates were secretly hooking up behind their backs. So they decide to spice up their love lives and document it all in a “passenger manifest.” Hilarity and sweet first-love moments abound as the two document their romantic pursuits.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The forty greatest villains in literature

One title on ShortList's roundup of literature's forty greatest villains:

Uriah Heep (David Copperfield) by Charles Dickens (1850)

Another of Dickens' dastardly villains, Uriah Heep is perhaps the most cloying of all of them, being patronising and insincere whilst using manipulation to hide his true motivation: pure greed. Employing blackmail, fraud and treachery to gain control of the Wickfield Fortune, Heep's character is so ubiquitous that paragons of virtue such as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson have been compared to him. A vile villain from the master of vile villains.

Read about the other entries on the list.

David Copperfield is among Siri Hustvedt's six favorite books, Janet Davey’s top ten schoolchildren in fiction, Frank Rich's top ten books, John Boyne's top ten child narrators, Lynn Shepherd's top ten fictional drownings and Elizabeth Gilbert's six favorite books. It appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best seductions in literature, ten of the best trips to Canterbury in literature and ten of the best valets in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucy Worsley's 6 best books

Lucy Worsley's latest book is Jane Austen at Home: A Biography. One of her six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

EMMA by Jane Austen

My favourite Austen novel because it’s got a prickly, difficult heroine. It has elements of a detective story in it and also the nicest hero in Mr Knightley who is kind and wise. My new book is dedicated to my husband who I name as my own Mr Knightley.

Read about the other books on the list.

Emma is on John Mullan's list of ten of the best wines in literature, and among Sophie Kinsella's six best books, Tanya Byron's six best books, Judith Martin's five favorite novels, and Monica Ali's ten favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books on modern Germany history

Hester Vaizey is a lecturer in Modern European History, and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Her books include Surviving Hitler's War, Keep Britain Tidy and other posters from the Nanny State, and Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall. One of her five best books on modern Germany history, as discussed with Sophie Roell at Five Books:

Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992)

It’s horrendously difficult reading because it takes you through the psychological transformation from ordinary, middle-aged men into killing machines, almost. I remember, when I studied history at university, that it was one of the books—out of all the hundreds of thousands of history books out there—that really stayed with me. It was so vividly written.

We know a lot about the Holocaust and how it happened but less about what the killers themselves felt about what they were doing. And understandably it has been quite a taboo topic. In the book, there are descriptions of these men shooting people at close quarters. They end up with brains and blood on their faces. 20% of their battalion drop out because they found it too distressing, but 80% percent carry on.

Browning talks about how they drank a lot of alcohol to keep going. There’s some comfort to be had in knowing that this behaviour didn’t come naturally in some way. Alcohol was a crutch that they needed to get through.

It’s one of those things we wonder about the Nazis and the Holocaust—are these people other from us or are they just humans too? And Christopher Browning gives them a very human face.

I had a student who was quite disengaged and wasn’t sure whether he’d made the right choice studying history. He did an essay on the Holocaust and he read this book. It was a defining moment. He wrote me a letter, at the end of his degree, to say thank you. He cited this book as the reason that he carried on doing history.

Read about the other books on Vaizey's list at the Five Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top novels in which music is a character

At B&N Reads Jeff Somers tagged five novels in which music is a character, including:

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

Using an orchestral version of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” in much the same way Proust used his madeleine, Murakami’s protagonist Toru Watanabe is moved to sink into a reverie about his past. The song is repeatedly referenced throughout the text, as Toru remembers his love affair with beautiful, delicate Naoko. The song becomes a Greek chorus of regret and loss, rising up like a ghost at key moments, altering the tone of the story in unexpectedly powerful ways. You can easily imagine Murakami listening to Rubber Soul on repeat as he wrote; listening to it yourself while reading it creates an incredible sense of looping time and interconnectedness.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Norwegian Wood is among Matthew Carl Strecher's ten best Haruki Murakami books, Melissa Albert's five best books that inspire great mix tapes and Julith Jedamus' top ten Japanese novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten unlikely romantic heroes in fiction

Jenny Colgan is a novelist, journalist and occasional radio pundit. One of her top ten weird romantic heroes, as shared at the Guardian:

Amit Chatterji in A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Amit shouldn’t be an unusual love interest. He’s a handsome, well-connected lawyer/poet who writes Lata beautiful verses. Lata, on the other hand, disappointed by already losing Kabir, the real love of her life – SPOILER ALERT – unapologetically blows him off for some pushy upstart who wears two-tone shoes. Sigh.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Suitable Boy is among David Haig's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about space-faring history

Jeffrey Kluger's latest book is Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon. One of his five favorite books that make epic drama out of space-faring history, as shared at Tor.com:

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

The great sweep of all of the Apollo lunar missions is included in Chaikin’s landmark book. It’s not just Apollos 8, 11 and 13; it’s Apollo 15—one of history’s greatest scientific field expeditions; it’s Apollo 12, with its improbably precise landing within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had landed on the moon two and a half years earlier; it’s Apollo 17, the capstone—and the poignant end—of the Apollo lunar program. Chaikin’s book served as the basis of the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, but even without that spectacular TV treatment, it would be a triumph of powerful history masterfully told.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Theroux's six favorite books

Paul Theroux's latest novel is Mother Land. One of his six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Emma Bovary, married to a good-hearted drudge, has a healthy libido, a shopping addiction, and an unhealthy sense of romance. Flaubert's landmark work is both a romantic novel and a critique of romantic novels, and in its writing and observation it is modern and memorable.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Madame Bovary is on Peter Brooks's list of favorite Flaubert's works (at #1), Ed Sikov's list of eight great books that got slammed by critics, BBC.com Culture's list of the three of the worst mothers in literature, Alex Preston's top ten list of sex scenes from film, TV and literature, Rachel Holmes's top ten list of books on the struggle against gender-based inequality, Jill Boyd's list of six memorable marriage proposals in literature, Julia Sawalha's six best books list, 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.

Learn about Theroux's five top travel books about an intense experience of a particular place.

--Marshal Zeringue