Five Best: Secret agents featured in series

Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of A Century of Spies and Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America's Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad, named a five best list of books for the Wall Street Journal. His subject: secret agents featured in series.

Number One on the list:

Murderers' Row
by Donald Hamilton
Fawcett, 1962

In the 27 paperbacks by Donald Hamilton featuring Matt Helm -- published between 1960 and 1993 -- there is an echo of Raymond Chandler, as when Helm says a character has "the smooth rich tan you get by working at that and not much else." But Helm is not paid to solve murders; he is paid to commit them -- as a professional assassin for a classified U.S. government agency. That puts Helm's work firmly in the realm of the fanciful, but other elements are rooted in the real world of Cold War intelligence activities. In "Murderers' Row" a key element is detecting enemy submarines. Helm's chief orders him to find a missing scientist who designed an aerial submarine-tracking system and either bring him back, secrets intact, or kill him. In a refreshing alternative to TV and movie heroes who worry more about "fair play" than completing their missions, Helm takes the no-nonsense approach: When he subdues a villain, there is no tying him up and hoping for the best; Helm dispatches the poor fellow with a single bullet.

Read about all five titles on Richelson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Peace's Literary Top 10

David Peace is the author of GB84 and the Red Riding Quartet, which features the years Nineteen Seventy Four, Nineteen Seventy Seven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty Three. His most recent books are The Damned Utd and Tokyo Year Zero, the first of a trilogy set in Tokyo in the aftermath of World War II.

From his Literary Top 10 at Pulp.Net:

My favourite novel that no one else seems to have heard of:

Dogura Magura (1935) by Yumeno Kyusaku

Read more of David Peace's Literary Top 10.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books of 2008: Time Out Chicago

One of the titles that appeared on Time Out Chicago's top ten books of 2008 list:

Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, by Kirsten Menger-Anderson. Algonquin, $22.95.

The scope of Menger-Anderson’s debut story collection, combined with her intellectual curiosity when it comes to archaic medical procedures, is dizzying. Yet her prose is equally rich, which still has us baffled as to how she pulled it all off.

Read an excerpt from Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, and learn more about the author and her work at Kirsten Menger-Anderson's website and the "Regarding Dr. Olaf" blog.

The Page 69 Test: Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain.

Read about the other nine titles on Time Out Chicago's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books of the year: fiction

The Week tabulated the "best book" end-of-year choices of critics for The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, New York, The New York Times, the Denver Rocky Mountain News, Salon.com, Time, The Village Voice, and The Washington Post.

Number One on the list:

2666
by Roberto Bolaño
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)

“Reviewing Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is like reviewing the ocean,” said Adam Mansbach in The Boston Globe. Split into five loosely connected parts that range in tone from “romantic farce” to the literary equivalent of a black hole, this is a novel of “devastating power” written by an artist as cannily indirect as “the great post-bop jazz drummers.” Bolaño, who died at age 50 in 2003, set most of the action in a Mexican border town. But it’s not until a chilling catalogue of unsolved rape and crime unfolds in the long fourth section that readers can see that he’s been circling an evil so grand in scale that it seems to challenge any belief in life’s meaning. The lingering question this new masterpiece raises, said the editors of Salon.com, is whether humanity’s worst acts are “redeemed or ameliorated to the slightest degree by our most sublime achievements.”
A caveat: People shouldn’t use the term “masterpiece,” said The New Yorker, for a novel that doesn’t cohere.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's Chart: top Christmas reading

Margaret Reynolds, a broadcaster and academic who reviews classics for the (London) Times, named her top Christmas reading for the paper.

Number One on the chart:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane “cleans down” the house and makes mince pies, though St John disapproves of “household joys”.

Read about all six titles on Reynolds' list.

The Page 99 Test: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre also made the Guardian's top 10 list of "outsider books," a top ten list of romantic fiction, and a top 25 list of boarding school books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amazon's top ten of 2008: mystery & thrillers

One title to make the Amazon top ten mystery & thrillers of 2008 list:

Meg Gardiner's The Dirty Secrets Club

Read about all ten titles to make the Amazon editors' list.

Read an excerpt from The Dirty Secrets Club, and learn more about the author and her work at Meg Gardiner's website and blog.

Meg Gardiner has practiced law and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Originally from Southern California, she now lives with her family in London.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirty Secrets Club.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on Christmas traditions

The Boston Sunday Globe called Penne L. Restad's Christmas in America: A History "a fine book of far greater than merely seasonal interest."

At the Wall Street Journal Restad named five books that "display a gift for exploring Christmas traditions."

One title on her list:

The Battle for Christmas
by Stephen Nissenbaum
Knopf, 1996

"The Battle for Christmas" explains how a rowdy public holiday -- one with lots of drinking, eating, mocking, begging and loud merry-making -- was tamed into a quiet family affair in the 19th century. Unsettled by the urban concentration of the lower classes during the Industrial Revolution, upper-class folks encouraged the celebration of a civilizing version of the holiday. Traditional year-end roistering gave way to rituals of gifts and good cheer. The promoters of the new Christmas offered a cleaned-up version of St. Nicholas (his religious cloak removed and censorious coal taken away), placed a candy-trimmed evergreen in the parlor and gathered the children 'round. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history, "The Battle for Christmas" isn't about traditions; it's about the social tensions that newfound traditions helped resolve, if only for a few days each year.

Read about all five titles on Restad's five best list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 Texas books of 2008

Glenn Dromgoole of the Abilene Reporter-News named his top ten Texas books of 2008.

One title to make the list:

Texas Wildlife Portraits by Greg Lasley

A retired Austin police officer and consummate wildlife photographer, Greg Lasley has produced a stunning coffee table book, featuring close-up portraits of snakes, owls, cardinals, bats, spiders, hummingbirds, beetles, caracas, turkeys, alligators, ducks, prairie chickens, armadillos, coyotes and jackrabbits, to mention just a few.

Read about the other nine titles on Dromgoole's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Salon's top 10 books of 2008

One book from Salon's top 10 of 2008 list:

The Likeness by Tana French

Ostensibly a detective novel, French's follow-up to her 2007 novel, "In the Woods," is, like that earlier book, willfully disobedient to the dictates of genre; French refuses to offer complete resolutions or strictly realistic scenarios. Cassie Maddox, the partner of the self-destructing detective who narrated "In the Woods," is drawn into a ménage à cinq of college students living a seeming charmed existence in an Irish country house. One of the five, a girl who is Cassie's doppelgänger and has been living under an alias Cassie once used as an undercover narcotics agent, turns up murdered in a ruined cottage. Cassie is given the unlikely task of pretending to be a woman who was pretending to be a woman whom Cassie once pretended to be. As you might expect, "The Likeness" wrestles with matters of identity and intimacy as its heroine comes to prefer this triply false life to her real one. The hypnotic prose and eerie atmosphere conspire to make this ostensible mystery novel much, much more than it appears to be.

Read about all ten titles on Salon's list.

Learn more about The Likeness.

The Page 69 Test: Tana French's In the Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best nonfiction of 2008: Christian Science Monitor

From the Christian Science Monitor's list of the best nonfiction of 2008:

The Forger’s Spell
By Edward Dolnick

Edward Dolnick tells the riveting story of a second-rate painter who fooled some very powerful Nazis with his Vermeer forgeries.

Read about all titles to make the Monitor's list.

Read an excerpt from The Forger's Spell, and learn more about the author and his work at Edward Dolnick's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Forger's Spell.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Economist: best books of 2008

From The Economist's best books of 2008 list:

Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.
By Matthew Connelly.

A vivid account of how the road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work.

Read about all the books to make The Economist's list.

Read an excerpt from Fatal Misconception and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Visit Matthew Connelly's website.

The Page 99 Test: Fatal Misconception.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 20 movers-and-shakers in science fiction

Charlie Jane Anders, news editor for io9, compiled a list of the 20 biggest science fiction movers-and-shakers of 2008.

Most of the individuals who made the list don't write books but Number 14 on the list does:

Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Not only did his literary work of alternate history win Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay has championed the literary worth of science fiction with his book Maps And Legends and his two anthologies of science fiction by literary authors.
Up next: Supposedly the Coen Brothers are filming Yiddish.

Read about all 20 movers-and-shakers to make io9's list.

--Marshal Zeringue