Best China books of 2008

Jeffrey Wasserstrom took an interesting approach to naming 2008's best China books for the Far Eastern Economic Review: he created "thematic pairs of books that are particularly effective when read together."

One such pair:

China Noir. Philip Pan’s "Out of Mao’s Shadow" grew out of the stories he filed while covering China for the Washington Post (he’s since moved on to the Moscow bureau), and it is a carefully researched work of political journalism. The obvious thing to pair with it would be another nonfiction study of Chinese politics. I’ll suggest here, though, that it goes very nicely with the British-born and now Beijing-based Catherine Sampson's "Slaughter Pavilion," a crime novel, albeit one whose author used to cover China for the BBC. There is much that differentiates the books from one another, beyond genre. Philip Pan offers up set of only loosely connected tales, for example, while Sampson’s narrative threads end up tied together.

Still, there are important intersections between the books. Each draws on a deep familiarity with the PRC. Corruption and repression figure in both. And though Philip Pan insists that he remains hopeful about China’s future (due to the faith he has that brave individuals, like several he profiles, can make a difference even when the odds are stacked against them), each author stresses the dark side of recent trends. Read together, they make a powerful brief for a bleak view of the PRC.

Read about all of the books on Wasserstrom's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten best: identical twins in fiction

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best identical twins in fiction.

One entry on Mullan's list:

Claude and Eustace Wooster

Perhaps the Weasley twins owe their love of practical jokes to Bertie Wooster's tormenting twin cousins. They pitch up at Bertie's place having been sent down from Oxford for pouring lemonade over the junior dean. When they fall in love with the same girl, Jeeves tells them she has sailed for South Africa, and they set off in pursuit.

Read about all ten sets of identical twins on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten "other" Scottish poems

For the Times (London), Gerard Carruthers, editor of a new collection of Scottish Poems, selected his top ten Scottish poems not by the famous Robert Burns.

One poem on his list:

Tom Leonard, "A Summer’s Day"

The great Glasgow love poem where the speaker has difficulty expressing his feeling but the emotion says it all.

Yir eyes ur

eh

a mean yir

pirrit this wey

ah a thingk yir

byewtifl like ehm

fact

fact a thingk yir

ach a luvyi that’s

thahts

jist thi wey it iz like

thahts ehm

aw ther iz ti say

Read about all 10 selected Scottish poems not by Robert Burns.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on irrational decision-making

For the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and the forthcoming How We Decide, named a five best list of books on irrational decision-making.

One title on the list:

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
1841

There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the "schemes, projects and phantasies" that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a single bulb, to the South Sea Bubble of 18th-century England, in which a cheerleading press spurred a dramatic spike in the value of a debt-ridden slave-trading company, Mackay demonstrates that "every age has its peculiar folly." He notes that even the most intelligent investors are vulnerable to these frenzies of irrational exuberance: Isaac Newton is reported to have lost a small fortune after the South Sea Co. went bust.

Read about all five books on Lehrer's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Cumming: best books

Charles Cumming is a British spy novelist who has been hailed as the heir apparent to John le Carré.

For The Week, he named his favorite thrillers.

One title to make the list:

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carré (Scribner, $16).

Written in the early 1960s, while le Carré was working for MI6 in West Germany, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was described by Graham Greene as the finest spy novel he had ever read. Le Carré may have gone on to write denser, more emotionally complex novels, but none as powerful, nor as beautifully engineered, as this classic of the Cold War.

Read about all six titles on Cumming's list.

Learn more about the author and his work at Charles Cumming's website.

His most recent novel, Typhoon, was published in the UK to huge critical acclaim.

Cumming’s first novel, A Spy By Nature, was released in 2008 in the US in paperback. The sequel, The Spanish Game, is available in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press.

The Page 69 Test: A Spy By Nature.

My Book, The Movie: The Spanish Game.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten butlers in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best butlers in literature.

Number One on his list:

Stephano

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Stephano is a butler (to the household of the shipwrecked Alonso) who is also a murderous rebel. A comic drunk himself, he plies Caliban with booze in order to recruit him to the murder of Prospero, magician lord of the island. He and Trinculo, the court jester, think that they can become rulers, but are returned to service by Prospero's "art".

Read about the other nine butlers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books: William H. Macy

The actor William H. Macy named a "best books" list for The Week.

One title to make the list:

Electric Universe by David Bodanis.

I’ve been on a war and technology kick lately. My wife’s sister sent me his amazing book, which I have since given to many people. It traces the history of electricity—from primitive man wondering about those flashes in the sky to computers. Believe it or not, it’s a page-turner.

Read about all six books on Macy's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 rejected titles

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten great novels with terrible original titles.

The top two titles on the list:

First Impressions

Jane Austen's father submitted an early version of Pride and Prejudice to a publisher under this title. The publisher rejected it by return of post.

All's Well that Ends Well

Tolstoy's incongruously cheerful projected title for War and Peace, which was actually first published under the title 1805.

Read about all ten books on Mullan's list.

The Page 99 Test: Pride and Prejudice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker contributor and author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers: The Story of Success, named a "best books" list for The Week.

One title to make the grade:

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt.

One of the heirs to the Freakonomics legacy. A very clever young writer tells us all sorts of things about what driving says about us. I kept waiting for the moment when my interest in congestion and roads would run its course. It never did.

Read about all six books on Gladwell's list.

Read more about Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) at the Knopf website, and learn more about Tom Vanderbilt's work.

Writers Read: Tom Vanderbilt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top how-to books

Book reviewer Melissa Katsoulis named six top how-to books for the (London) Times.

One book to make the chart:

How to Talk to Girls by Alec Greven and Kei Acedera

Greven is 8. Probably the only correct use of the word “girls” in the whole dating-book genre, then.

Read about all six titles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books about Chinese women in 2008

From The China Beat's list of the "10 Best Books about Chinese Women in 2008:"

Lijia Zhang, Socialism is Great! Atlas and Co.

Journalist and freelance writer Zhang narrates the boredom and hilarity of her life as a munitions factory worker in Nanjing, where she becomes infatuated with an aloof young man partly as a means to escape her boredom, and her eventual leadership of worker protests in 1989.

Read about all 10 books on the list.

Writers Read: Lijia Zhang.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten smelly books

In 2006 Lara Feigel, a Lecturer at King's College London and author of A Nosegay: A Literary Journey from the Fragrant to the Fetid, named her top 10 smelly books for the Guardian.

Number One on the list:

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Still the last word in smell literature. Not only does he render a plethora of particular smells (hawthorns in bloom, petrol, the perfume of a beautiful woman), he also makes a convincing case for smell as the most evocative and memorable of human senses: "'When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls." Don't be scared by the size of Proust's tome: start with volume one and you won't look back.

Read about all ten books on Feigel's list.

--Marshal Zeringue