Ten top recent witchy novels

Zoraida Córdova is the award-winning author of The Vicious Deep trilogy and the Brooklyn Brujas series. At the BN Teen blog she tagged ten top recent witchy novels, including:

Summer of Salt, by Katrina Leno

A lyrical novel about a young witch waiting for her magic to appear. Georgina Fernweh’s eighteenth birthday is looming, but her power has yet to show itself. Every woman in her family has a gift and knack for potions, which reveals itself before they come of age. But this summer on her small island is stranger even than usual—full of storms and unexpected love. There’s a darkness, too, that Georgina is forced to learn the truth about if she is to uncover who she truly is.

Learn about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten cliques in fiction

Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott's debut novel is Swan Song.

One of her ten top cliques in fiction, as shared at the Guardian:

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides presents the reader with two distinct groups – the collective voice of the narrators, a group of teenage boys in suburban Detroit, and the objects of their obsessive fascination: the beautiful, doomed Lisbon sisters, whose tragic fate is revealed in the opening line. The Lisbons are the most enduring example of the familial clique. They are connected not only by blood, but by increasing isolation from their peers, voiceless victims of an overprotective, evangelical Catholic mother. The boys observe from afar, haunted by their memories even in middle age. It’s their shared requiem that lingers.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Virgin Suicides is among David Nicholls's five favorite coming-of-age stories, Julia Fierro's thirteen most dysfunctional parents in literature, Rosa Rankin-Gee's ten top novellas about love, Kate Finnigan's top ten fictional fashion icons, Patrick Ness's top ten "unsuitable" books for teenagers, Cathy Cassidy's top ten stories about sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best books about family dynamics

Salley Vickers's newest novel is The Librarian.

One of the author's favorite books about family dynamics, as shared at the Guardian:

Mansfield Park is perhaps Jane Austen’s least loved novel, but in my view it is possibly her best for its depiction of the upper-middle-class neglect suffered by Maria and Julia, the spoilt Bertram girls; this in turn leads to their failure to make happy marriages. The novel also adumbrates something that is often overlooked but reads to me like a pre-Freudian grasp of the allure of incest: Fanny, the book’s principal, falls in love with Edmund, the cousin she grows up with, and ultimately he with her (an idea I borrowed for my own novel, Cousins).

Read about the other entries on the list.

Mansfield Park is among Travis Elborough's top ten books featuring parks. Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park is among Melissa Albert's five fictional characters who deserved better than they got.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve books that capture the sparkle of first love

Zoraida Córdova is the award-winning author of The Vicious Deep trilogy and the Brooklyn Brujas series. At the BN Teen blog she tagged twelve books for fans of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, including:

Not the Girls You’re Looking For, by Aminah Mae Safi

Even though To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a heartwarming romance, there are truly poignant and sad moments, making it the perfect blend. Debut author Aminah Mae Safi also strikes that sweet spot. The star of the novel is Lulu Saad, who’s set on world domination with her three best friends. But everything she touches seems to go awry, including causing a scene during Ramadan. Lulu’s story is about a girl who’s a mess trying to make things a little less messy. To do this she needs to let people into her life and open herself up to love, friendships, and self-love.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mimi Swartz's six favorite books about the medical field

Mimi Swartz's new book is Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart. One of her six favorite books about the medical field, as shared at The Week magazine:

Hearts: Of Surgeons and Transplants, Miracles and Disasters Along the Cardiac Frontier by Thomas Thompson

This is an oldie but a goodie. Thompson, a writer for Life during the magazine's golden age, had near-complete access to Houston's Methodist Hospital and its world-famous doctors in the late 1960s and early '70s — when heart surgery was taking off just like the space program. High drama and high gossip.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen books to read on a Spanish vacation

At the Waterstones blog Martha Greengrass tagged fifteen books to take on a Spanish vacation. One title on the list:

Thus Bad Begins
Javier Marias

Award-winning author Javier Marias weaves a darkly thrilling tale of love, betrayal and lives played out in the unhappy shadow of history. He presents a study of the infinitely permeable boundaries between private and public selves, between observer and participant, between the deceptions we suffer from others and those we enact upon ourselves.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Williams's 6 best books

Kate Williams is a British novelist and historian. One of her six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

THE GREAT GATSBY by F Scott Fitzgerald

An old favourite that shows the glittering, meretricious, empty world of the 1920s.

It was a period of huge transition after the war that would never go back to how it was. Fitzgerald lived the life he chronicled and his descriptions are incredible.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among Jeff Somers's ten best book covers...ever and seven most disastrous parties in fiction, Brian Boone's six "beloved classic novels whose authors nearly cursed with a terrible title," four books that changed C.K. Stead, four books that changed Jodi Picoult, Joseph Connolly's top ten novels about style, Nick Lake’s ten favorite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books, the Independent's list of the fifteen best opening lines in literature, Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the lamest girlfriends in fiction, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books, Elizabeth Wilhide's nine illustrious houses in fiction, Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Gatsby's Jordan Baker is Josh Sorokach's biggest fictional literary crush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten notable books in the history & future of the Western

John Larison is the author of Whiskey When We’re Dry.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged ten books that represent the evolution of the Western, including:

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

The funniest Western. Dewitt’s book rejects Proulx’s realism and the genre’s instance on sentimentality and heroics to deliver a darkly comic subversion of the Western. The book’s heroes would be, in another writer’s hands, the bad guys. But we find ourselves draw to them thanks to a voice that is dry, reflective, and downright addictive.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five recent books that explore the secret lives of robots

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog T.W. O'Brien tagged five recent books that explore the secret lives of robots, including:

That brings us to All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells, this year’s winner of the Nebula and Hugo awards for best novella. The Murderbot universe includes a continuum of sentient beings, from totally artificial robots, to ‘bots that are constructions combining organic and machine parts, as well as augmented humans, and old-fashioned un-augmented ones. The narrator, who calls itself “Murderbot,” is emphatic that it is “bot,” not robot—more specifically, it is an Imitative Human Bot Unit. (As it has no gender or sex-related parts, I am going with “it” for the pronoun.)

The whole book (which has expanded into three additional novellas and an eventual novel or two) is something of a window into the artificial mind; Murderbot, we learn, prefers the future equivalent of a TV binge to interacting with meatbags, which is an all too relatable stance, even for us humans. It has hacked the internal controls intended to restrict its free thought, but usually decides to carry out its prescribed functions anyway, figuring it’s easier to go along to get along.

Case in point: despite its own autonomy, Murderbot innately understands humans are more comfortable interacting with it when it is wearing its armor that covers its organic parts and makes it look like a robot. For this and other reasons (for one, the threat of deactivation), Murderbot guards its private life from the humans for whom it serves as security detail; even for robots, hell is other people.

Read about the other entries on the list.

All Systems Red also appears among Sam Reader's top six science fiction novels for fans of Westworld and Nicole Hill's six robots too smart for their own good.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about strange towns

Shaun Prescott edits Crawlspace magazine and PC Gamer AU. His debut novel is The Town. One of his ten favorite books about strange towns, as shared at the Guardian:

What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry

I’ve read this to my daughter countless times. It takes place in Busytown, so named because its animal inhabitants are very busy. All of the industries support each other. The farmer sells to the market, and the wheat growers also mill the flour, which is then shipped off to the local baker. The lumberjacks fell trees, and the wood is used to build houses nearby. Children’s authors write books upstairs, which are then sold in stores downstairs. Rarely does a working person survive a day without witnessing some devastating-yet-comical disaster. Folk are jailed for stealing bananas. Women are paid for their labour with shoddy jewellery. Busytown has the resources to fund its own space travel too, but what on Earth for? Just more of this, in space? Busytown on Mars?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about the financial market

Mariana Mazzucato is a Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and Director of UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Her latest book is The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy.

At the Guardian she tagged five books to help us understand how political forces shape the markets, including:

But what is the “market”? As we close in on the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis, and the Turkish lira crisis draws the eyes of the world back to financial markets, this is worth interrogating in more detail. The word market is often confused with the words “business” and “private sector”, which miss the point. Karl Polanyi, a radical Austro-Hungarian thinker, wrote his highly influential book The Great Transformation during the second world war. In it he argues that markets are not “natural” or inevitable – rather, they result from the ways in which movements shape them and also from purposeful policy-making. He describes not market forces but markets as outcomes of the interactions between business, policy and forces in civil society. Without trade unions we would not have the eight-hour work day that has shaped the market. It is therefore not market forces themselves that are the problem – nor is privatisation – but the way in which markets have evolved to become overly embedded in the narrow interests of speculative finance.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five inhospitable planets

Kelly Jensen is the author of a number of novels, novellas and short stories, including the Chaos Station series, co-written with Jenn Burke. Her latest novel is To See the Sun.

Jensen tagged five inhospitable planets in film and fiction at Tor.com, including:

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is not the first book of Le Guin’s I ever read, but the one I remember the best. I find the themes of gender identity refreshingly challenging. But when I talk about The Left Hand of Darkness, I usually end up describing the part where Genly and Estraven spend eighty days traversing the northern Gobrin ice sheet. The environment is unspeakably harsh and Le Guin makes it enthralling. I could feel the fat melting away from Genly and Estraven as they balanced their daily calorie expense against necessary exertion. I shivered when I learned that it doesn’t snow when the temperature drops below a certain threshold. I didn’t ever want to know how cold that must be.

Not lost on me was the fact that the beyond bitter cold was the backdrop for the most important part of the book—Genly and Estraven learning to trust each other. It’s similar to putting two adversaries in a remote cabin with only one way in and one way out—and blocking that entrance with a grizzly. Makes a good argument for even a temporary truce, doesn’t it?

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Left Hand of Darkness is among Ann Leckie's ten best science fiction books, Esther Inglis-Arkell's ten most unfilmable books, Jeff Somers's top five sci-fi novels that explore gender in unexpected and challenging ways, Joel Cunningham's top twelve books with the most irresistible titles, Damien Walter's top five science fiction novels for people who hate sci-fi and Ian Marchant's top 10 books of the night. Charlie Jane Anders included it on her list of ten science fiction novels that will never be movies.

--Marshal Zeringue