One of his ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:The Man Who Loved Children by Christina SteadRead about the other entries on the list.
Great Australian author Stead wrote this brilliant novel about the Pollits family, and set it in the USA at the behest of her agent. Jonathan Franzen said it best when he said that it “makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. She has been named BBC Radio's food writer of the year and is a three-time Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year. She writes a monthly column on food in the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Cambridge, England.Vegetarianism had a surprising flowering in late 19th-century Britain, as Colin Spencer describes in his comprehensive Vegetarianism: A History. As he recounts, there were multiple groups of campaigners in the 1880s who saw a non-animal diet asRead about the other books Wilson tagged.part of wider social radicalism. Many Victorian vegetarians were also pacifists or Fabians. Some of them were what Gandhi called “vegetarian extremists”, abstaining from milk and butter and well as meat.
Clearly, there have been de facto vegans for a long time, but the word itself was only invented in 1944. That year, the Vegan Society broke away from the Vegetarian Society on the grounds that, as Spencer explains: “The dairy herd is inextricably mixed up with the meat industry; three-quarters of beef production stems from it, and milk production entails the removal of the calves from their mothers when they are a few days old.”
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).Read about the other entries on the list.
Anna and Vronsky run away together to Italy and he resigns his commission in the Russian army. How to fill his days: Why not take up painting? Tolstoy enjoys some painful comedy at the expense of the dilettante aristocrat as he tries to learn from a real artist.
A.F. Brady is a writer, psychotherapist and mental health counsellor. Her latest novel is Once a Liar.American Psycho, by Brett Easton Ellis (1991)Read about the other entries on the list.
Patrick Bateman, Vice President at Pierce & Pierce, living in a gorgeous apartment with a coveted address, invited to all the important parties, and able to secure almost every exclusive restaurant reservation.His days are spent daydreaming about the brutal murders he’s just committed or those he is about to commit. He manipulates and uses people, only for his own benefit, never willing or able to connect on any deeper level. Set in the restaurants, offices and homes of New York’s wealthy elite, Bateman slowly loses his mind. Seemingly in possession of exactly what the world tells us we want out of life—good looks, charm, elite education and employment—in the end, it’s loneliness and fear that define Patrick Bateman’s life.
Precisely what happened to the climate in Poul Anderson’s The Winter of the World is unclear; it’s set far enough in the future that Mars is green (presumably a hat tip to now outmoded models of Martian climate), so it’s possible that Earth is simply the victim of natural processes. Still, references in the novel suggest that the first phase of the cooling that ended our civilization involved a large number of extreme heating events provided courtesy of our pal, the nuclear bomb. (Presumably using them made sense at the time?) Millennia later, humanity is well on its way towards recovering what was lost under the ice—not least of all, epic imperialism. While the political machinations are familiar from history, time and isolation have given rise to something entirely novel in the far north.Read about the other entries on the list.
One of his ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul MonetteRead about the other entries on the list.
Paul Monette’s memoir is a devastating account of his encounter with a disease that would kill him. It is so intimate and personal that I often felt I was reading someone’s diary and was ashamed to be committing such a gross invasion of another person’s privacy. Paul Monette was not a careless man. He wanted us to know and remember what AIDS did to him. He succeeded more than he could ever have realized. Books about what it means to be human have no expiration date.
The Binti Trilogy, by Nnedi OkoraforRead about the other entries on the list.
Okorafor’s recent, Hugo-winning Binti Trilogy fits nicely here; the protagonist is a woman from a marginalized human tribe who is the first of her people to be offered a chance to study at a the galaxy’s most elite university, but doing so will require her to give up her identity—but it is ultimately that uniqueness that will help her to save her own life and form new bonds of understanding across a vast cultural divide. But if you can stomach something unremittingly darker, the World Fantasy Award-winner Who Fears Death also applies. Set in a post-apocalyptic future Sudan where a light-skinned race oppresses a darker-skinned one, a girl of both societies, born out of violence and gifted with magical abilities, sets off to murder her father. Incorporating scenes of barbaric female genital mutilation and the use of rape as a weapon of control, it is a harrowing, angry novel about a woman who refuses to be a victim.
Cane Toad Wars by Rick ShineRead about the other books on the list.
In 1935, white Australians (an alien invasive species) imported 101 cane toads (also an alien invasive species, as it turned out) from South America to eat beetles that were devastating the sugar cane crop (another alien species) in Queensland. What happened next is chilling because cane toads did not eat the insects they were supposed to eat, but they did quickly invade all of northern Australia, becoming fabulously, wildly successful. But more than just re-telling the history of this most fearsome of all man-made ecological disasters, Rick Shine, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney, explores the complex and often nuanced story: the adaptation of the toads to their new environment and of their new environment to them, writing that these events have much to teach us about evolution and ecological resilience. This engaging firsthand account tells the personal story of Professor Shine’s lifetime of research into cane toads and how rigorous natural history studies can effectively inform conservation policies and practices. Professor Shine also makes a strong argument in support of that (apparently) most quaint of scientific practices: field work.
Kristyn Kusek Lewis is the author of the novels Save Me (2014) and How Lucky You Are (2012), both from Grand Central. Her new novel is Half of What You Hear. The Perfect Mother by Aimee MolloyRead about the other entries on the list.
When The May Mothers, a Brooklyn mother’s group that typically meets at a local park, decide one summer night to blow off steamand go out drinking, the unthinkable happens: One of the mother’s babies goes missing. The scandal rocks the community, most of all the mothers in the group, who begin pointing fingers—and drawing suspicion—as the story deepens and more questions arise about what actually happened to the baby and who is to blame.
Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts.Six of Crows, Leigh BardugoRead about the other entries on the list.
I was a big fan of Leigh Bardugo’s original Grisha trilogy, with its Russian aesthetic and fascinating magic, but Six of Crows and The Crooked Kingdom really raised the bar. Six of Crows manages to pack in a fascinating cast, an amazing city that feels real, and a lot of wonderful character moments and still have room for a pulse-pounding magical heist. I loved every minute of both of these.
School of Music, and several years later, she received her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University. She currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She is the author of Another Place You’ve Never Been, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the acclaimed The Gunners.Station Eleven by Emily St John MandelRead about the other entries on the list.
“‘The thing with the new world,’ the tuba had said once, ‘is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.’” Members of the Traveling Symphony roam a post-apocalyptic world performing Shakespeare and musical numbers for the remaining humans. The book opens with a scene from King Lear and uses classic motifs throughout. It is a wonderfully bizarre and haunting tribute to the endurance of art in the face of an unrecognisable world.
Wil Medearis is the author of Restoration Heights. At CrimeReads he tagged seven favorite novels that explore real estate swindles, including:Attica Locke, The Cutting SeasonRead about the other entries on the list.
Belle Vie, once a sprawling Louisiana plantation, is now a tourist attraction managed by Caren Gray, a black woman whose mother was a cook for the family who owns the estate. The staff—most of them also black—perform pageants that perpetuate the standard myths of the Old South, full of happy slaves and genteel, good-hearted masters. Yet Caren maintains a deep affection for the place—a conflict that anyonewho grew up in the South will recognize as requiring the kind of mental and moral gymnastics that are routinely expected of black Americans—and it is this affection that drives her suspicion of the sugar-cane company that has been buying up land around the plantation. The narrative is set in motion when the body of a migrant worker is found in the cane fields just across the fence from Belle Vie, but it is the tension of the descendants of slaves trying to make a good life for themselves while the crimes of their history go unacknowledged that drives the novel.
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