The top 10 nonfiction books of 2010

One title on Time magazine's list of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010:

Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

When they first met, Gail Caldwell was a book critic for the Boston Globe and Caroline Knapp had just published Drinking: A Love Story. They could have been competitors but instead became best friends. The recovering alcoholics, both devoted dog lovers, walked the Massachusetts woods together, rowed the rivers and talked. When Caldwell bought a house, Knapp carried her over the threshold. And then Knapp got cancer. Heartbreaking but never maudlin, Let's Take the Long Way Home is a testament to the power and beauty of mature friendship and the most powerful memoir about loss since Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking.

Read about the other books on the list.

See Gail Caldwell's list of the five groundbreaking memoirs and learn more Let's Take the Long Way Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about books

John Sutherland is the Lord Northcliffe professor emeritus of Modern English Literature at UCL and author of the new book, 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten books about books, including:

Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? (1980)

Winner of the wittiest title ever coined for a book on lit-crit (the question was initially asked by an artless student in his seminar). Fish's simple/hard questions: what's the difference between a "text" and a "work of literature"? How, when the best seminars tend to finish with more disagreement than they started with, do we reach a consensus reading of any text? Is there any such thing?

Read about the other books on Sutherland's list.

Learn more about Sutherland's list of the best books about listing.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best fictional hangovers

For the Guardian Sean O'Hagan named the ten best fictional hangovers in print, film and song.

One novel on the list:

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

Women have, in general, been less specific about hangovers than men – but Bridget Jones, the voice of her generation, put an end to that. “11.45pm. Ugh. First day of New Year has been day of horror. Cannot quite believe I am once again starting the year in a single bed in my parents’ house. Having skulked at home all day, hoping hangover would clear, I eventually gave up and set off for the Turkey Curry Buffet far too late. When I got to the Alconburys’… I was still in a strange world of my own – nauseous, vile-headed, acidic… I leaned against the ornament shelf for support”

Read about the other entries on the list.

Bridget Jones's Diary also appears on Christina Koning's list of the best of chick-lit and a list of eight books for the broken-hearted.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top five health, wellness books of 2010

At the Wall Street Journal, Laura Landro named her top five health and wellness books of 2010.

One title on the list:

"After the Diagnosis: Transcending Chronic Illness," by Julian Seifter with Betsy Seifter

A kidney specialist, writing with his wife, combines his own experience as a diabetic with case studies from his patients to provide a road map for dealing with chronic disease. After coming to terms with a life-threatening diagnosis, the most important step is to have a flexible and evolving strategy for coping with illness, dealing with setbacks as they come along, but never letting the disease define the patient. In an information-crammed society, we're supposed to be on top of every detail of our health, Dr. Seifter notes. But he suggests forgetting about what ails us sometimes "in order to create a space that transcends the hard realities of illness and allows for moments of vitality and well-being."

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten Anglo-Asian books

Nikesh Shukla is a writer, performance poet and filmmaker. His first novel, Coconut Unlimited, is shortlisted for this year's Costa first novel award.

For the Guardian he named his top 10 Anglo-Asian books, including:

Hanif Kureishi - The Black Album

While The Buddha of Suburbia is a masterfully comic tale of rise and fall that loves its characters, there's something a lot more sinister about The Black Album, making it the oddball in his output. It seems to foreshadow works like Four Lions, City of Tiny Lights and even the forthcoming Ours Are the Streets by decades, and is written with the energy and exuberance of Kureishi's early work, embodied by the raw funk of Prince's eponymous album, and the dizzying chemical overload of the ecstasy that fills the rave scenes. It charts clean-cut Shahid's trip into hedonism and flirtations with fundamentalism with eerie prescience, and its take on the classic Anglo-Asian identity crisis tale throws a cleancut, sheltered lad in at the deep end of a naked rave party.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

10 great books about cycling

For the Christian Science Monitor, Marjorie Kehe came up with 10 great books about cycling, including:

"The Rider," by Tim Krabbé.

This classic in the field of biking literature can be described as a love letter to bike racing. It puts the reader inside the head of Dutch novelist and cyclist Tim Krabbé as he rides a 137-kilometer race through some of the toughest mountain terrain of the Tour de France. As he rides he meditates on his own attachment to the sport, as well as that of other cyclists.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Matt Seaton's top 10 books about cycling and William Fotherham's top ten cycling novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best crime fiction of 2010: Part II

The editors of January Magazine came up with a list (in two parts) of the best crime fiction of 2010. One title to make the grade:

Print the Legend by Craig McDonald (Minotaur) 352 pages

The Hector Lassiter series took a significant step forward in 2010 when author Craig McDonald released his third book about the renegade hard-boiled writer, Print the Legend. Set in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1965, four years after Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, old Papa pal Lassiter finds himself the keynote speaker at a symposium about his drinking and writing rival and fellow spirit. Hemingway is on the verge of becoming the literary cottage industry that we know today with dissertations, journals, and academic jealousies. On top of it all, Mary Hemingway, the black widow herself, is still ensconced in the Ketchum home where she is said to be ready to release a posthumous memoir Hemingway wrote about his experiences in 1920s Paris, a book familiar to us today as A Moveable Feast. Yet all is clearly not right, since a rogue CIA agent named Donovan Creedy is lurking about the symposium, apparently hell-bent on destroying Papa’s reputation -- and take Lassiter out in the process. Meanwhile, Lassiter is trying to subdue the widow Hemingway, retrieve some long-lost papers, and keep Creedy from screwing Papa over once and for all. McDonald helps to keep this story timely by dovetailing it nicely into the recent controversy surrounding a re-editing of A Moveable Feast by one of the great author’s grandson, Sean Hemingway -- a “restored” version that received significant criticism from Hemingway loyalists. Like the previous entries in the Lassiter series, Head Games (2007) and Toros and Torsos (2008), in Print the Legend McDonald pulls from the archives of conspiracies and skullduggery to compose a rollicking yarn, taking no prisoners and never letting up on the adrenaline. One can’t help but be reminded, when reading several sections of this novel, of that old joke about why battles in academia are so vicious: because the stakes are so modest. -- Stephen Miller

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Print the Legend.

My Book, The Movie: Print the Legend.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best crime fiction of 2010: Part I

The editors of January Magazine came up with a list (in two parts) of the best crime fiction of 2010. One title to make the grade:

City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley (Minotaur) 352 pages

Kelli Stanley’s latest historical thriller is set against the backdrop of San Francisco in 1940. As Europe boils with war, Northern California’s largest city is enjoying its third world’s fair, a two-summer-long celebration called the Golden Gate International Exposition. But Stanley’s alter-ego, private eye Miranda Corbie, is paying more attention to the recent violent death of a Japanese teenager, Eddie Takahashi. It’s an investigation that will send the sexy, cynical and surprisingly resilient, 33-year-old Corbie trawling through the tensions of a segregated city, navigating the undercurrents of the Chinese and Japanese communities in order to discover why Takahashi’s life ended so soon. No one else seems to care about what happened to him, least of all the local cops, who are content to sweep the whole affair under the nearest Oriental rug. Corbie does, though. A former Spanish Civil War nurse and erstwhile female escort, the chain-smoking, tough-talking and romantic-despite-herself shamus does much to make City of Dragons a standout among this year’s crime novels. Her back-story is both exciting and eclectic, and rolls out in satisfying dribs as she combs her city’s venues high and low, straightening out the kinks that she uncovers as she unearths the sad truth and puts herself in danger. Stanley’s first P.I. escapade follows the conventions of the genre, especially as established by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Yet it’s much more than pastiche, with a rich political commentary, characters that come alive and descriptions of San Francisco between the two world wars that make it clear Stanley not only knows, but loves her town. City of Dragons is a choice treat in a crowded genre. There’s every reason to look forward to its planned sequel. -- Ali Karim

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

My Book, The Movie: City of Dragons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books that made a difference to Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy's books include The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, South of Broad, and the recently released memoir My Reading Life.

One book that made a difference to him, as told to O, The Oprah Magazine:

The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien

"I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown," Conroy says—books like Tolkien's famous high-fantasy epic about a dark lord determined to conquer a magical land. "I was on a quest to be a writer that mattered, and a friend told me that I must read and remember everything. 'You cannot call yourself educated or literate,' he said, 'if you do not know the secrets of Middle-earth, if you have not trekked with the Hobbits.' I mark the time I spent reading these splendid books among the richest days of my life. They are like the elevation of the host to me, their presence transformed, their effect indelible and everlasting. What is the loss of a job or a bad review when you've followed Gandalf the Grey through the mines of Moria?"

Read about the other books that made a difference to the author.

The Lord of the Rings also made Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs' list of ten classic SF books that were originally considered failures, Lev Grossman's list of the six greatest fantasy books of all time, and appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best towers in literature, ten of the best volcanoes in literature, ten of the best chases in literature, and ten of the best monsters in literature. It is one of Salman Rushdie's five best fantasy novels for all ages.

Also see: Pat Conroy's favorite contemporary Southern novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best devils

For the Guardian, Peter Stanford, author of The Devil: A Biography, picked the most majestic Satans in film and literature.

One entry on his list:

Dante's Inferno

In this peerless early 14th-century description of life after death, the final one of the concentric spheres of hell is presided over by the devil. But he is impotent, encased up to chest height in ice, with one head but three faces, all of them weeping as he chews in each of his jaws a notorious sinner – Judas Iscariot, Jesus's betrayer, and Brutus and Cassius, conspirators against Caesar. In contrast to depictions of the devil in Dante's day as a cunning foe ready to prey on human weakness, his Lucifer is strikingly modern, a metaphor for nothingness, all hype and menace but no delivery.

Read about the other devils on the list.

Dante is one of Angus Clarke's favorite religious poets.

Inferno appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best visions of hell in literature, and The Divine Comedy is one of George Weigel's five essential books for understanding Christianity.

--Marshal Zeringue

8 books to read with a broken heart

At O, The Oprah Magazine, Ashley Hamilton came up with a list of eight great books to read when you're going through a breakup.

One novel on the list:

High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby

Want to know what's going on in his head? Of course you do! You may remember John Cusack in the movie adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, a cynical breakup tale told from the male perspective. After being dumped yet again, music addict Rob looks back on his "all-time top five" breakups. Read along as he relives the losses, and then ask yourself, "Does this breakup really make my top five?"

Read about the other books on the list.

High Fidelity also made Tiffany Murray's top 10 list of rock'n'roll novels, Mark Hodkinson's critic's chart of rock music in fiction, and John Sutherland's list of the best books about listing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best novels on time and memory

Edmund Morris is the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex; the concluding book in the trilogy, Colonel Roosevelt, is now out from Random House.

For the Wall Street Journal, Morris named a five best list of novels on time and memory.

One title on the list:

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

The title hints at the vast chronology of this novel, as do the first words of its unforgettable opening ("Many years later, as he stood facing the firing squad ..."). But although generation after generation of the Buendia family lives and dies in the story's course, there is no real sense of time passing. All is dimensionless dream. One does not finish the book so much as awaken from it, crying like Caliban to "dream again."

Read about the other books on the list.

One Hundred Years of Solitude made Rebecca Stott's five best list of historical novels. It is on he lists of Lynda Bellingham's six best books, Walter Mosley's five favorite books, Eric Kraft's five most important books, and James Patterson's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue