Top ten visual art books

One of Michael Bracewell's ten indispensable visual art works, as told to the Guardian:

Edie: An American Biography by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

A biography created entirely out of interviews with those who knew the socialite, actress and one-time Warhol "superstar" Edie Sedgwick, this non-fiction novel seems to say more about the shadow of Warhol's obsession with glamour and money than any other treatise on the artist. Once read, you can never look at Warhol's work in the same way again. The ultimate tragedy of the tale is that Edie herself – so hopelessly desirous of a role and so unequipped to deal with life – remains eclipsed in death by Warhol's achievements as an artist.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best closing lines in literature

At the Observer, Robert McCrum came up with ten of the best closing lines of novels, including:

The Great Gatsby
by F Scott Fitzgerald

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Nick Carraway’s signing off after the death of Gatsby is my favourite last line in the Anglo-American tradition – resonant, memorable and profound. It is the magnificent chord, in a minor key, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close. Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, while giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.

Learn about the other entries on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among 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.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rob Reid's six favorite books

Rob Reid is the founder of the digital music service Rhapsody. His debut novel is Year Zero.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

As a British slacker grudgingly exits a very protracted adolescence, he sublimates his frustrations by bludgeoning bystanders with rapier displays of musical erudition. Certain nuances are meant mainly for music lovers. But this witty gem has much to offer anyone who has struggled with issues of commitment and adult identity.

Read about the other books on Reid's list.

High Fidelity also made Ashley Hamilton's list of 8 books to read with a broken heart, 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 mystery stories

John Lanchester's novels include the widely translated The Debt to Pleasure and the newly released Capital. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was awarded the 2008 E.M. Forster Award. He lives in London.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of mystery stories that don't get old. One title on the list:

The Broken Shore
by Peter Temple (2005)

An Australian literary editor told me that when American thriller-writers get off the plane, the first thing they say to him is: "Do you know Peter Temple?" That's because of this book, one of the most admired thrillers in recent memory, set in the countryside of Victoria state and in Melbourne, a civilized city with a lively criminal underworld. Something interesting has happened to thrillers in the past couple of decades: As the audience for the genre has become more and more global, the books that have done best are those with the strongest and most particular sense of place. "The Broken Shore" exemplifies the trend; you might not know or care about rural Victoria, but after reading this, you feel as if you do. The story and the central character are unglamorized and have the unusual quality of feeling completely true.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on clouds

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on clouds:

The Invention of Clouds
by Richard Hamblyn

A fascinating study of the shy Quaker and amateur meteorologist who, in the early 19th century, "forged the language of the skies." Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Latin, Luke Howard created the classifications -- cirrus, stratus, cumulus, nimbus -- which are used by scientists to this day. Along the way he inspired countless artists and authors, including Goethe, Coleridge, and J. K. Rowling, with his vision of the aerial landscape.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best works that explore marriage

Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of books including Early Auden and The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life. In 2008 he named a five best list of "works [that] explore marriage with uncommon clarity" for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on his list:

Love in the Western World (1940)
by Denis de Rougemont

This swift and sweeping history of eight centuries of romantic passion, from "Tristan and Iseult" to the modern novel of adultery, is more thrilling than most novels, and it is memorably clarifying about the emotional and erotic turmoil of entering adulthood. The book shows how romantic passion, in its most extreme form, can be satisfied only by the death of the lovers: Romeo and Juliet, like all their literary ancestors and heirs, prefer the intense purity of sudden death to the long, humdrum ordinariness of marriage. De Rougemont argues that marriages fail when the partners want a romance that can continue through a lifetime but succeed when the partners recognize that marriage can be more complex, more satisfying and more intense than even the brightest sudden flare of romance. Among the many surprises in this book, written a few months before the start of World War II, is its argument that modern warfare, with its unrelenting goal of total victory, emerged from the same frame of mind that produced the ideal of modern romance.

Read about the other works on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten comic book-classic mashups

Will Brooker is Reader and Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London. He is a leading expert on the Dark Knight, author of the cultural history of Batman, Batman Unmasked. His other books include Using the Force and Alice’s Adventures. He edited the Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience, and wrote the BFI Film Classics volume on Star Wars.

Brooker's new book is Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman.

For the Guardian, he named his top 10 comic book-classic mashups--examples that "demonstrate the criss-crossing, intertextual relationship between comic books and more traditionally literary texts." One entry on his list:

Haunted Knight by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

Loeb and Sale are now most celebrated for The Long Halloween and its sequel Dark Victory, both of which inspired Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight; but prior to those graphic novels, they worked together on three Halloween tales for the monthly title Legends of the Dark Knight. In the third, Ghosts, a sleepless Bruce Wayne is visited first by his father, in Marley-like chains, then by Poison Ivy, and finally by a spectral Joker, who takes Batman to his own grave. Like Scrooge, Wayne learns a new appreciation of life from his encounter with death, and starts a charitable foundation next morning.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kurt Andersen’s five favorite ’60s books

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Heyday and Turn of the Century, among other books. He writes for television, film, and the stage, contributes to Vanity Fair, and hosts the public radio program Studio 360. He has previously been a columnist for New York, The New Yorker, and Time, editor in chief of New York, and co-founder of Spy.

His new novel is True Believers.

One of Andersen’s favorite ’60s books, as told to The Daily Beast:

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
by Joan Didion

At age 33, Didion was astonishingly clear-eyed about the discombobulated culture going on around her. Everything was in flux, it seemed, except her unflinching, even-keeled powers of observation and moral analysis. So much written then seems so dated today. But not these essays:

“One of the mixed blessings of being 20 and 21 and even 23 is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

"[W]hen we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”

Read about the other books on the list.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a book David Rakoff keeps returning to.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on London

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on London:

Kraken
by China Miéville

The high priest of the "New Weird" delivers a marvelous comic thriller that tips a British Museum researcher into a shadow reality where London's accreted mythology and occult legacies take on a menacing life. What starts with the theft of a giant squid gets infinitely stranger and as sprawlingly entertaining as the city it's set in. (Miéville also penned the enchanting Un Lun Dun, a vision of London's doppelganger seen through an Alice in Wonderland-like looking glass.)

Read about the other entries on the list.

Kraken also appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best museums in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about war by authors who served

Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications; his memoir Jarhead was a major New York Times bestseller, and the basis for the movie of the same name.

Swofford's new book is Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails.

One of his five best books about war, written by authors who served, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Going After Cacciato
by Tim O'Brien (1978)

It happens a number of times a year: I'm going about my day, grocery shopping, walking the dog, and—blam—suddenly I'm inside this masterly Vietnam novel, sitting in the observation post with Paul Berlin, fantasizing about the chase to bring back Cacciato, a fellow soldier who has gone AWOL with the aim of walking all the way to Paris. This is the constant fantasy of every grunt, to walk out of the war toward a place that just might be better, possibly European, with wine and with women. The book has been labeled surrealist, but I would assert that it is a work of clinical and heartbreaking realism. The clarity and luminosity of the prose is uncompromising, and the war, after all, happened, and it happened to soldiers just like Paul Berlin and Cacciato. Paul dreams of what he will do after the war, a plan that includes touring Europe, learning French and going to Paris, where he will "drink red wine in Cacciato's honor," but the reader may be inclined to tip a glass in honor of both men.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Karl Marlantes's top ten war stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight great books about books

Michele Filgate is an independent bookseller at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. She is also a writer and critic, and has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, The Star Tribune, Bookslut, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, The Book Studio, Identity Theory, and other publications.

At The Daily Beast she tagged eight great books about books, including:

Phantoms On the Bookshelves
by Jacques Bonnet

Bonnet owns more than 40,000 books. It’s not the Library of Congress, but for a private collection, it’s pretty solid. In this slim ode to books, the author muses on the life of a serious reader—with Bonnet himself being the ultimate example. In only nine chapters, he talks about many aspects of book collecting: how to organize them, where to acquire them, and the idea of owning a working library rather than just collecting books. Bonnet brings an infectious enthusiasm to the genre. The written word is as important to his identity as his own memories: “To lose one’s books is to lose one’s past,” he says. His love of books is something serious readers can relate to: “I sometimes have the impression that I have really only existed through reading, and I would hope to die…with a book in my hand.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see John Sutherland's top 10 books about books.

--Marshal Zeringue

The fourteen best books on The Rolling Stones

In honor of the 50th anniversary of The Rolling Stone’s first concert--on 12 July 1962 the Rolling Stones went on stage for the first time at the Marquee Club in London’s Oxford Street--Brian H. Bookman picked out the best 14 books on the legendary band for The Daily Beast.

One title on the list:

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones
by Stanley Booth

Stanley Booth chronicles his experience as a member of the Stones touring family that unleashed itself upon America in 1969, following the release of Let It Bleed. Booth’s exquisite recounting of how the Altamont Free Concert, a show that had been dubbed “Woodstock West,” descended into madness and violence stands out as the book’s great contribution to Stones literature. Best when coupled with Ethan A. Russell’s Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties—a photographic bonanza from the ’69 tour.

Read about the other books on the list.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones is on Patrick Humphries's list of his 6 favorite rock 'n' roll books and Jim DeRogatis's list of the four greatest rock ’n’ roll books.

--Marshal Zeringue