Ten top books about vegetarians

Binnie Kirshenbaum is a novelist and short story writer. She has twice won the Critic's Choice Award and the Discovery Award. She was one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and one of Paper magazine's Beautiful People. Her books have been selected as Favorite Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, Vogue and National Public Radio. Her work has been translated into seven languages. She is a professor and Fiction Director at Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts.

Kirshenbaum's latest novel is Rabbits for Food.

At the Guardian, she tagged ten great books about vegetarians, including:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The classic film version featuring Boris Karloff as the murderous monster all too often eclipses Mary Shelley’s Creature. Despite evil Dr Frankenstein’s corruption of the natural order, the Creature was “born” innocent. He was gentle. He was a vegetarian. (“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite.”) All he wanted was love and companionship. His inherent sweetness, destroyed by human cruelty and rejection, turned him into the monster. After his killing spree, his diet is no longer mentioned. Can we assume his menu has changed?

Read about the other entries on the list.

Frankenstein is among Jeff Somers's top ten seemingly unrelated books that complement each other, Olivia Laing's top ten books about loneliness, Helen Humphreys's top ten books on grieving, John Mullan's ten best honeymoons in literature, Adam Roberts's five top science fiction classics and Andrew Crumey's top ten novels that predicted the future.

--Marshal Zeringue