Top seven funny books

Jamie Thomson is a British writer, editor and game developer, and winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012.

He named his seven favorite funny books for the Guardian. One title on the list:

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Now this really is a work of comic genius! The film is one of my favourites of all time too, but people tend to forget that it was a book first and foremost. It's a wonderfully zany re-working of the fairy tale and a brilliant satire of the genre as well as a great example of a fairy tale in its own right, while also being a cracking adventure story. I can think of no better thing to say than the product description from an online retailer (lazy of me I know, but it just works): "So starts a fairytale like no other, of fencing, fighting, torture, poison, true love, hate, revenge, giants, hunters, bad men, good men, beautifulest ladies, snakes, spiders, beasts, chases, escapes, lies, truths, passion and miracles."

Plus it has some of the best one liners ever written.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free book: "How America Eats"

Rowman & Littlefield and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture by Jennifer Jensen Wallach.

HOW TO ENTER: Visit the Campaign for the American Reader Facebook page, scroll down, and "like" the post for How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture.

Contest closes on Monday, December 24th. Winner must have a US mailing address. Good luck!

Learn more about How America Eats at the Rowman & Littlefield website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top toy stories

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

Winnie-the-Pooh
by A. A. Milne

Let's journey together again to The Hundred-Acre Wood and revel in the adventures of the bear "of very little brain," a very gentle soul, and a band of unforgettable friends. No family should miss the joy of reading aloud Milne’s delightful scenes, which are subtly unfused with sly humor and wordplay. Age 5 and up.

Read about the other books on the list.

AA Milne and EH Shepard made Chris Riddell's top ten list of author/illustrator double acts. When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne is on Glen Roven's list of seven poetry books to ignite your imagination. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner is a book to which Jonathan Kozol will always return; and Winnie-the-Pooh is a book Walter Mosley hopes parents would read to their children.

--Marshal Zeringue

Free book: "Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives"

Princeton University Press and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives by Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood.

HOW TO ENTER: Visit the Campaign for the American Reader Facebook page, scroll down, and "like" the post for Becoming Right.

Contest closes on Monday, December 24th. Winner must have a US mailing address. Good luck!

Learn more about Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about family love

Andrew Solomon is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, A Stone Boat, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

He named his five favorite books about family love for The Daily Beast. One title on the list:

The Siege
by Clara Claiborne Park

This is the first of the great autism memoirs and the first to describe autism as not merely an illness, but also an identity. Park’s daughter was born in 1958, at a time when mothers were routinely blamed for their children’s autism, but somehow Park made it through with an intact sense of self—and with, moreover, an intact sense of her daughter, who ultimately seemed different rather than damaged. Park summed it up: “I write now what 15 years past I would still not have thought possible to write: that if today I were given the choice to accept the experience, with everything that it entails, or to refuse the bitter largesse, I would have to stretch out my hands—because out of it has come, for all of us, an unimagined life. And I will not change the last word of the story. It is still love.”

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten Colombian stories

Michael Jacobs, author of The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia, named a top ten list of Colombian stories for the Guardian, including:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The defining novel of "magical realism", and a book that has given rise to so many works of pure whimsy, is a family chronicle revolving around an imaginary village based on the author's native Aracataca. The haunting strangeness of the Colombian interior, as it must have been perceived by the first Spaniards, is beautifully conveyed in the course of a journey in which the village's early settlers encounter a Spanish galleon mysteriously stranded in the middle of a jungle. The rest of the book develops into what can be interpreted as a poetic history of Colombia, a country torn apart by an internal conflict that has gone on for so long that no one can remember exactly their reasons for fighting. The novel, read today in the light of García Márquez's current gradual loss of memory, can also be seen as a work of uncanny prescience.

Read about the other entries on the list.

One Hundred Years of Solitude made Simon Mason's top ten list of fictional families and Rebecca Stott's five best list of historical novels. It is one 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

Six notable books about nature

James P. Sterba has been a foreign correspondent, war correspondent and national correspondent for more than four decades, first for the New York Times and then for the Wall Street Journal. His new book is Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds.

One of Sterba's six favorite books about nature, as told to The Week magazine:

Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish

A delightful account of growing up in rural Iowa during the Depression — a time and place when money, indoor plumbing, and leisure were rare. Kids learned early how to dispatch chickens, skin rabbits, and do daily chores. In other words, they worked.

Read about the other books on Sterba's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven 2012 books not to be missed

Newsweek and The Daily Beast came up with eleven 2012 books you may have missed but should now catch up with, including:

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe

How do you end a war? A peace treaty often means nothing for the millions displaced, injured, and seeking revenge, as Lowe brilliantly shows in his history of ravaged Europe after the end of World War II. The relative success of the European Union seems all the more remarkable in light of 
what he describes.

Read about the other books on the list.

Learn more about the book and author at Keith Lowe's website.

The Page 99 Test: Savage Continent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Giveaway: "Why Jazz Happened"

The University of California Press and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of Why Jazz Happened by Marc Myers.

HOW TO ENTER: Visit the Campaign for the American Reader Facebook page, scroll down, and "like" the post for Why Jazz Happened. Contest closes on Monday, December 24th. Winner must have a US mailing address. Good luck!

Learn more about Why Jazz Happened at the University of California Press website and Marc Myers's JazzWax website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top historical novels for young readers

Lydia Syson is the author of A World Between Us, an historical adventure for teens set during the Spanish Civil War.

At the Guardian she named her ten favorite historical novels for young readers. One book on the list:

The House of Arden by E Nesbit

A wonderfully argumentative pair of Edwardian siblings and a magical white mole slip in and out of British history, getting tangled up with Gunpowder Plotters, Anne Boleyn, Walter Raleigh, the Old Pretender, a Napoleonic invasion and even escaping from the Tower of London. They are in search of the lost family treasure that will allow them to rebuild Arden Castle – and also improve the living conditions of the cottagers on their estate. E Nesbit was a socialist and an activist, who wrote political hymns as well as creating a new genre of children's fiction. You might call it everyday magic – my favourite kind. Compassionate, clever and ironic, E Nesbit makes me laugh out loud.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top nautical yarns

Herman Wouk's novels include The Caine Mutiny (one of the best books on World War II) and The Winds of War.

His new book is The Lawgiver.

Wouk named five notable nautical yarns for the Wall Street Journal, including:

The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'
by Joseph Conrad (1897)

Nobody, but nobody, could write about storms at sea like Conrad. Nor could anyone drench a plot crackling with action—that of a ferocious struggle for survival—in as much moral complexity as Conrad did in this novel about merchant seamen in a square rigger homeward bound from India. As they round the Cape of Good Hope, a stolid captain stands like a rock in terrifying gales for days, while the sailors' true natures emerge in the ways they help (or don't) a black crewman lying sick with TB in the tossing ship. Jimmy, the black crewman, is, Conrad said, the center of the ship's collective psychology and an impostor of sorts. "We had so far saved him; and it had become a personal matter between us and the sea. We meant to stick to him," the narrator observes. But the men hate Jimmy, too, suspecting him as a malinger, feelings that burdened them with guilt. "But then, what kind of men were we—with our thoughts!" Above and beyond the drama of morality and conscience, the great sea storm rages, buffeting the ship—a terror the reader is made to feel in the bones. Conrad would have been gratified. Through the power of the written word, he wanted, he wrote, "to make you hear, to make you feel," above all, "to make you see. That—and no more and it is everything."

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Giveaway: "Dead Women Talking"

The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Campaign for the American Reader are giving away a copy of Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature by Brian Norman.

HOW TO ENTER: Visit the Campaign for the American Reader Facebook page, scroll down, and "like" the post for Dead Women Talking. Contest closes on Monday, December 17th. Winner must have a US mailing address. Good luck!

Learn more about Dead Women Talking at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue