WasteRead about all ten secret societies on Mullan's list.
Waste is a surreptitious postal organisation: We Await Silent Tristero's Empire. Obscure? Not if you read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which features the centuries-old rivalry between two mail distribution companies. In this satire on paranoia (or paranoid satire?), Oedipa Maas, Pynchon's heroine, begins seeing the signs of Waste's covert activity all around her.
Clive Finlayson is the director of the Gibraltar Museum and author of The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived.Wonderful LifeRead about all five books on the list.
by Stephen Jay Gould
Norton, 1989This superb book recounts the discovery of a rich assemblage of invertebrate fossils high in the Canadian Rockies. For Stephen Jay Gould, the extinct animals of the Burgess Shales are the world's most important fossils, outranking even dinosaurs and ape-men. On the evidence found in the shales, an astonishing variety of strange creatures appeared on Earth in a burst of biological diversity some 570 million years ago. Most of these creatures then vanished in mass extinctions, but some made it through, including the seemingly insignificant little eel-like Pikaia. Gould saves the Pikaia for the end: From this plucky survivor descended the vertebrates and, ultimately, humans. As Gould reminds us, chance plays a role of staggering importance in the history of life.
The Behaviour of Moths [US title--The Sister]Read about the other five books on Beacham's list.
by Poppy Adams
A dark and funny tale of two elderly estranged sisters – reclusive moth expert Ginny and her younger sibling Vivi – reunited in the crumbling mansion that was their childhood home. I want to write a book and I’m very envious that this is her first.
He named his six best books for The Week magazine. One work of non-fiction on the list:The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb, with an introduction by Peter Benchley (Newmarket, $15).Read about all six books on Krasinski's list.
This is, without a doubt, one of the greatest books about making movies. Gottlieb, who wrote the screenplay for Jaws, gives a day-to-day account of the process of making the film, from choosing the location to building the shark ... or rather, sharks! You get to see the magic—and madness—of moviemaking, from the crazy shoot to the blockbuster hit. If you have ever had a fascination with how movies are made, why not learn it from the best?
At the Independent, Marjorie Kehe reports on the 10 books most downloaded on BitTorrent (a free file-sharing application). "Don’t look at this list if you want to believe that the Internet is feeding a hunger for a deeper kind of learning," she cautions: the list does "not include titles by Victor Hugo or Emily Brontë (or even Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling)."The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex by Sari Locker.Read about the other nine pirated eBooks.
The Rider by Tim KrabbéRead about the other nine books on Seaton's list.
Krabbé is probably best known in this country as the author of the novel adapted as the film The Vanishing, but in his native Netherlands The Rider is his bestselling book. As a young man, Krabbé's forte was chess - in his late teens, he was inside the top 20 players in Holland - and he only discovered a talent for cycle-racing relatively late in life, in his 30s. That new-found passion eventually found its way into this autobiographical novella about a bike race in south-west France, but the chess knowledge still figures as Krabbé narrates the intricate battle of tactics and psychology as the race plays itself out against the bleak landscape of les causses. Like much of Krabbé's oeuvre, The Rider has a strange, dark, philosophical flavour: it is both a paean to pain and a hymn to the fellowship of the road. Nothing better is ever likely to be written on the subjective experience of cycle-racing.
Their fiction selections:The Road by Cormac McCarthyRead about all of the books on the list.
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
The Science in the Capital series by Kim Stanley Robinson
One title on the list:Little Red Riding HoodRead about the other bloody bedtime stories.
"Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a village near the forest. Whenever she went out, the little girl wore a red riding cloak, so everyone in the village called her Little Red Riding Hood..." is the rather innocuous beginning to one of the most twisted bedtime stories there is. The sweet little girl in question secures a rather grisly fate for her poor defenceless grandmother when she blabs to a scary wolf she meets in the forest, telling him her grandmother's address and that she's not very well. The wolf knocks on grandma's door and impersonates Little Red Riding Hood's voice in order to get in, before gobbling grandma up in one go. Not content with his meal, he then takes up cross-dressing, adorning grandma's nightie, mob cap and glasses to await the arrival of her tasty young granddaughter before swallowing her in one go as well. Most modern versions would have you believe that a passing woodcutter heard the little girl's cries and slashed open the wolf with his axe to reveal the unharmed Little Red Riding Hood and granny. But the earliest known version by Charles Perrault (before Brothers Grimm) has no happy ending or retribution apart, perhaps, from a severe case of indigestion for the wolf.
When Hollywood Had a KingRead about all five books on Freeman's list.
by Connie Bruck
Random House, 2003
Master power broker Lew Wasserman is the "king" of the title. His colorful reign as an agent and studio executive at MCA and Universal Pictures, roughly from 1950 to 1990, is insightfully recounted by New Yorker writer Connie Bruck. Her fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait also provides a revealing account of collusion and insider deal-making. Particularly striking is the brazenness of the cozy relationship between MCA and NBC, which once reached the point where NBC allowed MCA executives to set the network's own prime-time schedule with "fourteen series that were either produced or sold by MCA." Wasserman cultivated presidents of both political parties, but he was especially proud of his bond with Ronald Reagan, who had been helpful to MCA as the leader of the Screen Actors Guild in the early 1950s and whose fading acting career MCA later helped revive. Bruck details how Wasserman used his connections to Washington and to another major power center, the mob, to great effect, contributing to his legendary "aura of invincibility."
Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (Bantam, $14)Read about the other five books on Barrymore's list.
This 1980 novel poses the question, by Page 2: “How do you make love stay?” And the psychedelic, fun, and adventurous way in which Tom Robbins goes about the exploration of this question is like a fairy tale for wild adults.
For the Guardian, she named a top ten list of "books that take her on a globe-spanning, literary adventure." One title on the list:Austerlitz by WG SebaldRead about the other books on the list.
As one of the Kindertransport children, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz arrives in Britain in 1939 to live with foster parents in Wales. All conscious memory of his previous life is obliterated. As a story about loss and redemption, trauma, repression and memory, this poignant narrative leads us through a maze of uncanny dialogues. An inconsolable Holocaust history, this is a major chronicle of our times.
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