Seven books that explain the biodiversity crisis

At the Guardian seven writers tagged "titles that explain the issues at stake [in the the biodiversity crisis], from animal extinction to marine degradation and loss of habitat."

Patrick Greenfield's pick:

The Value of a Whale by Adrienne Buller

As nature takes centre stage at Cop15, so too will market-based solutions to the ecological collapse of life on Earth. Biodiversity offsets have become law in the UK, while conservation NGOs are teaming up with investment banks, asset managers and private equity firms to make nature an investable asset. But do these solutions actually work? Can green capitalism help avert the dual climate and nature crises?

Canadian author Adrienne Buller, director of research at the thinktank Common Wealth, provides a clear, accessible critique of these concepts in The Value of a Whale. The title is based on a 2019 IMF paper that assigned a $1tn-plus value to the world’s living “stock” of whales – about $2m a whale – and Buller explores why, despite apparent overwhelming recognition of the crisis in nature and the climate, humanity is so far from actually responding to the problem.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four K-9 thrillers that defy the dangers of the wilderness

Sara Driscoll is the pen name of Jen J. Danna and Ann Vanderlaan, authors of the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries. Danna is an infectious disease researcher at a cutting edge Canadian university near Toronto, but loves to spend her free time writing the thrilling and mysterious. Vanderlaan lives in western North Carolina with five rescued pit bulls, including Kane, now a certified therapy dog. She also trains with Kane for competitive nose work.

[Coffee with a Canine: M. Ann Vanderlaan & her dogs; The Page 69 Test: Lone Wolf; The Page 69 Test: Storm Rising; The Page 69 Test: No Man's Land; The Page 69 Test: Leave No Trace]

Their new novel is Still Waters.

At CrimeReads they tagged four "K-9 thrillers which tackle the treachery of the wilderness head on," including:

Burning Ridge by Margaret Mizushima

Timber Creek Colorado Sheriff’s Office Deputy Mattie Cobb and her K-9, Robo, are assigned a new case when a decomposing foot is found in a charred boot high up on Redstone Ridge, a rugged mountain wilderness accessible only on horseback. Using the boot and human remains as a scent sample, Robo tracks down the rest of the charred body, buried in a shallow grave on the ridge. As they scout the area, looking for clues, they discover additional graves, all with burned bodies, but now skeletonized with decades of age. They must be related, but how? In Burning Ridge, Mizushima vibrantly shows the beauty and the danger of such a remote location, one populated mainly by bighorn sheep, but used as a dumping ground because of its isolation from mankind. Additionally, the terror of an out-of-control forest fire only reinforces the concept that man will never be in control of nature, no matter how hard he tries.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah, Bertie, Lily and Tess.

Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah.

My Book, The Movie: Burning Ridge.

The Page 69 Test: Burning Ridge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best books about the new West

Kay Chronister is the author of the collection Thin Places (2020). Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and elsewhere, and her work has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards.

Her new novel is Desert Creatures.

At Lit Hub Chronister tagged seven "books that will take you on a literary tour of the new West: a place where neon sign graveyards abound, schools still take time off for the rodeo, and people bring their pet tortoises along when they evacuate for wildfires." One title on the list:

Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs

This meditative novel follows an orphaned trust-fund millionaire who relocates from Manhattan to Phoenix after a break-up, supposing that Arizona is “as different as you can get, in the lower forty-eight.” Once there, the formerly isolated Gil finds himself enfolded into the joys and obligations of living in community—within his neighborhood, at the women’s shelter where he works, and with the desert itself. As Gil develops into an avid birder and fledgling conservationist, Millet uses images of the relationships between communities of desert birds to mirror the compassionate, violent, and symbiotic bonds also formed between human beings.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books set in Indiana

Deborah E. Kennedy is a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut, Tornado Weather, came out with Flatiron Books in 2017 and was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe best first novel prize by the Mystery Writers of America. Kennedy has worked as a reporter, teacher, and editor, as well as a cookie packer, ice cream scooper, and children’s baseball coach. She also holds a Master’s in Fiction Writing and English literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She currently lives in Forest Grove, Oregon with her mother and young son.

[My Book, The Movie: Tornado Weather; The Page 69 Test: Tornado Weather; Writers Read: Deborah E. Kennedy]

Kennedy's new novel is Billie Starr's Book of Sorries.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven "stories set in Indiana [that] have a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf," including:

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

Read enough books set in Indiana, by Indiana writers, and you’ll start to notice the rust. The rust and rot and despair at the center of things, and that’s because the state used to be one of America’s most productive industrial hubs. Well-paid manufacturing jobs were everywhere… until they weren’t.

In this luminous National Book Award-winning debut, Tess Gunty takes us to the fictional town of Vacca Vale and the affordable housing complex, La Lapinière, commonly referred to as the Rabbit Hutch, where a smart and ambitious young woman named Blandine ruminates on Christian female mystics and ponders an act of eco-terrorism. Without resorting to spoilers, I’ll just say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you’ve noticed this book’s title being bandied about for some of the top awards in publishing, that’s no coincidence. It manages to achieve that much-sought after but rarely realized goal of an ending that is both surprising and inevitable. I can’t wait to see what Gunty writes next.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine (crime or gothic) novels with romance at the center

Molly Odintz is the Senior Editor for CrimeReads and the editor of Austin Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller at BookPeople, and

recently returned to Central Texas after five years in NYC. She likes cats, crime novels, and coffee.

At CrimeReads she tagged nine "recent and upcoming novels in which love is at the center," including:

Alicia Thompson, Love in the Time of Serial Killers

The premise of this one is simple: a woman obsessed with true crime podcasts meets a handsome and charming man. Is he a serial killer? Or has she finally, at long last, met someone she can trust?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top dogs in post-apocalyptic books

Lorna Wallace has a PhD in English Literature and is a lover of all things science fiction and horror. She lives in Scotland with her rescue greyhound, Misty.

At Tor.com Wallace tagged eleven of the best dogs in post-apocalyptic books and films, including:

Kojak — The Stand (1978) by Stephen King

Kojak is literary proof that humans don’t deserve dogs. Captain Trips, the superflu that kills off the majority of humanity in The Stand, is also deadly for dogs. Glen Bateman comes across a rare doggy survivor, an Irish Setter formally known as Big Steve, and renames him Kojak, after the ’70s TV detective. After initially establishing himself as a great guy by looking after Kojak, Glen then becomes a villain in my eyes by leaving him behind (!) to travel across the United States with Stu Redman, instead of figuring out a way to bring him with them. Even Randall Flagg, the real villain of the story, wouldn’t sink that low.

But Kojak is a loyal hound (not that Glen deserves it) and makes the difficult trip on his own. We even get an amazing, but deeply harrowing, section recounting the journey from Kojak’s point of view. Kojak isn’t just a good boy…by the end of the story he’s an absolute hero.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Stand is among David Koepp's seven top contagion novels, Claudia Gray's five top books about plagues and pandemics, and Michelle Tea's top ten books about the apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top crime novels for details of legal & illegal professions

Lia Matera is the author of twelve crime novels in two series, one featuring politically conflicted lawyer Willa Jansson and the other, high-profile litigator Laura Di Palma. Matera has also published eleven short stories and a novella.

She is a graduate of Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where she was editor-in-chief of the Constitutional Law Quarterly. She is a member of the California Bar and was a Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School before becoming a full-time writer.

Two of her novels were nominated for the mystery genre's top prize, the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Three were nominated for the Anthony Award, and two were nominated for the Macavity Award.

At Shepherd Matera tagged five of the "best crime novels for details of legal, intermittently legal, and definitely illegal professions," including:

Whip Hand by Dick Francis

What is it like to be a jockey? Dick Francis offers a master class in using workplace details to develop characters. Readers bond with his jockeys at a gallop (or sometimes when they’re under galloping hooves). Each book is a feast of information about a different related job. We see the power of stewards and bookies and the racing press, the schemes of fixers, the pride and agonies of owners and trainers, the grievances of lads mucking out stables. We learn about transporting horses, filming them, painting them, investing in them. In Whip Hand, Francis’s lean prose and fast pace establish his jockey-turned-detective's personality and backstory in a single page of prologue. The book holds a special place in my heart because it inspired me to try writing legal mysteries.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven of the best literary evocations of winter

At the Waterstones blog Anna Orhanen tagged eleven of "the very best literary evocations of winter," including:

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Off season in a tourist town on the border of South and North Korea, everything falls eerily quiet. Against the muted backdrop of snow-filled, bleak winter days, Dusapin's exquisite debut charts the relationship between a young French Korean woman working as a guesthouse receptionist and a random winter visitor, a French cartoonist in search of inspiration. Charged with emotional candour, Winter in Sokcho is a stunning exploration of what it means to feel alienated from oneself and of the intimacy that is sometimes possible between strangers.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top speculative fiction books featuring tarot

Electra Pritchett is a lapsed historian who splits her time between reading, research, and her obsession with birds and parfait. Born in New Jersey, she has lived on three continents and her studies have ranged from ancient Rome to modern Japan.

At Tor.com she tagged "five works of genre fiction that incorporate the tarot or a tarot analog into the worldbuilding of their novels," including:

Nova by Samuel R. Delany

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, this is one of Delany’s best and most readable books. Set in the year 3172, the novel follows Lorq Von Ray’s quest to secure a supply of the power source Illyrion. This will allow him to win his feud with his arch-nemesis, and therefore shift the galactic balance of power away from Earth and towards younger political entities like Von Ray’s own Pleiades Federation. Nova is immensely clever on multiple levels, one of them being that it is a classic Grail Quest narrative—and what’s more, characters in the book are aware of it, discussing in the text about how to thwart the supposed fatal curse that falls upon those who finish their Quest tales.

In Delany’s space opera, tarot has become a mainstay of galactic society: the cards are not only widely used for games, as they are in parts of Europe today, but readings are also extremely common and considered scientific. As the would-be novelist Katin tells the Mouse, a skeptic, “…the cards don’t actually predict anything. They simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations—” Astute readers will realize that these remarks describe Lorq’s entire journey, but relating the reading to the plot is part of the enjoyment.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twenty-five novels based on true stories

At Oprah Daily Carole V. Bell and Trish Bendix tagged twenty-five novels based on true stories, including:

By Her Own Design, by Piper Huguley

This is an All-American story in the best sense of the term. When Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, it was the society event of the season. Even the highly scrutinized and celebrated dress secured a place in history. The talented woman who designed the piece of fashion history was Ann Lowe, a Black woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, who learned to sew from her own mother and her formerly enslaved grandmother, both legendary seamstresses in their own right. Now this fascinating artist is enjoying renewed and long overdue attention thanks to this moving novel by storyteller and chronicler of African American history Piper Huguley.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five SFF books about spies and espionage

Elijah Kinch Spector is a writer, dandy, and rootless cosmopolitan from the Bay Area who now lives in Brooklyn.

His debut novel is Kalyna the Soothsayer.

Ava Reid, internationally bestselling author of The Wolf and the Woodsman, called Kalyna “a gorgeous, layered debut, both intricate and propulsive, with a singularly brilliant heroine at its center. Kalyna is a twisty, entrancing, and totally unique entry into epic fantasy.”

At Tor.com Spector tagged "five books featuring lies and espionage on a national (or intergalactic) scale." One title on the list:

Dragon by Steven Brust

This, on the other hand, was an easy choice. Over the years, Brust’s antihero Vlad Taltos has been involved in a lot of espionage and trickery, but in the eighth book we get that epic fantasy classic: a war.

The beauty of Dragon is how petty, small, muddy, and unimportant that war is. Vlad, the supremely competent assassin and sometimes mafia boss, has to pretend to be a normal foot soldier in order to get close to an enemy. He’s utterly out of his element: uncomfortable, bored, and terrified. As the story wraps up, it expertly combines the satisfaction of a plot well-executed with dark satire and just a touch of sadness at such a useless loss of life.

All this is told in Brust’s spare and almost Hammett-like first person prose, which describes epic fantasy figures and eldritch magic weapons as though they’re everyday nuisances.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about tycoons

Peter Stothard is an author, journalist, and critic. He is a former editor of The Times of London and of the Times Literary Supplement.

He is the author of The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar and most recently, Crassus: The First Tycoon.

“Peter Stothard is a master of modern writing about ancient Rome," says Mary Beard. "In Crassus] he cleverly explores the life of one of the most puzzling and elusive ‘big men’ in the history of Rome, and why it matters.”

At the Guardian Stothard tagged ten "books, each one based in different ways on power seekers who want it all," including:

Tycoon by Harold Robbins

In his trailblazing career as a novelist of the rich and powerful, Robbins improved with age. The hero of his 23rd bestseller, reputedly based on William Paley, founder of CBS, is as much concerned with sexual positions as those of the media markets where he makes his money.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue