Ten of the best lawyers in fiction

For the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best lawyers in literature.

One lawyer on the list:

Euan MacIntyre

It is unlikely a wealthy young lawyer and racehorse owner should be a good egg, but in AS Byatt's Possession that's just what he is. Euan's legal knowhow is instrumental in wresting the Ash/LaMotte letters from the nefarious Mortimer Cropper, and he sportingly seduces the hero's girlfriend, allowing him to go off with the heroine, Maud.

Read about all ten lawyers on the list.

Possession also appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best locks of hair in fiction and ten of the best graveyard scenes in fiction, and on Christina Koning's top six romances critic's chart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Henry Winkler's best books

Henry Winkler, 64, is best known for playing The Fonz in the cult Seventies American sitcom Happy Days.

He named his six best books for the Daily Express. One novel on the list:

Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier

Thrillers might be my great love but I was blown away by this moving historical novel about a wounded deserter in the Confederate Army who walks for months in a bid to track down the great love of his life. The film’s good but the book’s even better.

Read about the other five books on Winkler's list.

Cold Mountain also appears on Tunku Varadarajan's five best list of the most delectable combinations of fiction and food.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Economist: books of the year, 2009

The Economist named its best books of the year.

One title on the list:

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. By David Kilcullen.

General David Petraeus’s adviser on counter-insurgency advocates mixing military theory with a deep knowledge of culture and tradition among tribal peoples to try and win the “war on terror”.

Read about the other books on the list.

Learn more about The Accidental Guerrilla.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 science fiction & fantasy books

The editors at Amazon came up with their Best of 2009 top 10 list for Science Fiction & Fantasy.

One book on the list:

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart
Jesse Bullington

About the book, from the publisher:

Hegel and Manfried Grossbart may not consider themselves bad men - but death still stalks them through the dark woods of medieval Europe.

The year is 1364, and the brothers Grossbart have embarked on a naïve quest for fortune. Descended from a long line of graverobbers, they are determined to follow their family's footsteps to the fabled crypts of Gyptland. To get there, they will have to brave dangerous and unknown lands and keep company with all manner of desperate travelers-merchants, priests, and scoundrels alike. For theirs is a world both familiar and distant; a world of living saints and livelier demons, of monsters and madmen.

The Brothers Grossbart are about to discover that all legends have their truths, and worse fates than death await those who would take the red road of villainy.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best cookbooks of 2009

T. Susan Chang is a New England-based freelance writer and a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow. She also is the Boston Globe's regular cookbook reviewer, and her articles on cooking, gardening and nutrition appear in a variety of national and regional publications. For NPR, she came up with a ten best list of 2009 cookbooks.

One title on the list:

The Pleasures of Cooking for One, by Judith Jones, hardcover, 288 pages, Knopf, list price: $27.95

Cooking when you're on your own can be a challenge. Who wants to slave over a single serving? And guess who's going to do the dishes? Often we just solve the problem with takeout or pizza. Thank goodness for Judith Jones! Widowed 13 years ago, the redoubtable magazine editor conclusively demonstrates that the joie de manger belongs to everyone, not just breeders, honeymooners and clans.

There are easy recipes, like Linguine with Smoked Salmon Sauce for nights when you come home late to a dark apartment and a howling cat. And there are slower recipes — even "A Small Cassoulet" — for lazy Saturdays when you are the envy of soccer moms everywhere and have all the time in the world to browse at the farmers market. Jones has a sure sense of portioning, and she provides recipes for leftovers. She labels them "Second Round" or even "Third Round" — mashups that can make too much of a good thing, well, still a good thing. Warning: Jones' lovingly photographed collection of single-serving gratin dishes and adorable lidded casseroles will have you nursing a cookware jones even if you're feeding a family of five. Ask me how I know.

Read about the other books on Chang's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Telegraph: best crime books of 2009

At the Telegraph (U.K.), Jake Kerridge pronounces on the best crime books of the year.

One title to make the grade:

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Heinemann, £12.99) is a black comedy in which a dying gangster demands that doctor Peter Brown keep him alive or he will reveal Brown’s whereabouts to some very dangerous characters: Brown, it turns out, is a former mafia hitman. This is the second funniest health care-based fiction to come out of the United States this year after the Republican Party’s descriptions of the NHS.

Read about the other 2009 crime books Kerridge likes.

Learn more about the book and Josh Bazell at the Beat the Reaper website.

The Page 69 Test: Beat the Reaper.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about reporting

Harold Evans is The Week’s editor-at-large and author of The American Century. His autobiography, My Paper Chase, is new in bookstores.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books about reporting. One title on the list:

A Bright Shining Lie
by Neil Sheehan
Random House, 1988

This Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a sophisticated yet spellbinding mix of history and biography: the story of the Vietnam War seen from the perspective of a military hero. John Paul Vann, who had fought in Korea, arrived in Saigon in 1962 as a U.S. military adviser to the South Vietnamese army. Soon perceiving that the war was being badly prosecuted, he developed ideas for countering guerrilla warfare, including the use of small-unit strikes instead of massive amounts of firepower and personnel. Vann dared to question the received wisdom, though, and suffered as a result—just as pilot Col. Billy Mitchell's career was wrecked during the 1920s in part by his insistent warnings that the Japanese might bomb Pearl Harbor. Neil Sheehan, who had been a correspondent in Vietnam, took 16 years to write his 800 pages, but the narrative moves fast, impelled by a passion for authenticity and truth.

Learn about the other books on Evans' list.

Read about Evans' six favorite­ bio­graphies and memoirs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best: deathbed scenes in literature

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

One book on the list:

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Everyone, it seems, is waiting for the death of the misanthropic miser Peter Featherstone. In his bedchamber he plots to torment those who hope for some share of his wealth, but, tended by the stalwart Mary Garth, still dies in fear and bitterness. A lesson to us.

Read about the other deathbed scenes on Mullan's list.

Middlemarch also made John Mullan's lists of ten of the best marital rows, ten of the best examples of unrequited love, and ten of the best funerals in literature, as well as Tina Brown's five best list of books on reputation. While it is one of Miss Manners' favorite novels, John Banville and Nick Hornby have not read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Al Roker's best crime books

Today show weatherman Al Roker's debut novel is The Morning Show Murders, a mystery co-authored by Dick Lochte.

For The Week magazine, he named six of his favorite works of crime fiction. One novel on the list:

Tell No One by Harlan Coben (Dell, $10).

The first chapter of this book grabs you and doesn’t let you go. When a man finds a webcam video that seems to show that his murdered wife is not in fact dead, the reader can’t help but be freaked out. Coben is a master of grabbing the social zeitgeist and ramping it up to a new level of paranoia.

Read about the other five novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 39 Arabic authors under 39

For Beirut39, "39 authors under 39" were chosen by a jury of four well-known and respected Arab writers, academics and journalists: Abdo Wazen, Lebanese poet and cultural editor of the international daily Al-Hayat newspaper; Alawiya Sobh, Lebanese writer; Saif Al Rahbi, Omani poet and editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Nazwa; and Dr. Gaber Asfour, Egyptian literary critic and Honorary President of the judging panel.

One author on the list:

Abdelkader BENALI (Morocco/Netherlands)

Abdelkader Benali was born in The Netherlands in 1975, of Moroccan origins. Benali published his first novel Bruiloft aan zee ('Wedding by the Sea') in 1996, which received the Geertjan Lubberhuizen Prize. For his second novel, De langverwachte ('The Long-Awaited', 2002), Benali was awarded the Libris Literature Prize. He has since published the novels Laat het morgen mooi weer zijn ('Let Tomorrow Be Fine', 2005) and Feldman en ik ('Feldman and I', 2006). He also writes plays and occasionally works in the field of journalism. In 2005, together with the historian Herman Obdeijn, he published Marokko door Nederlandse ogen 1605-2005 ('Morocco Through Dutch Eyes 1605-2005').

Read about the other writers on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 US crime novelists who "own" their territory

Edgar Award-winning author C. J. Box's novels include the Joe Pickett series. He’s also won the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, and the Barry Award. For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of US crime novelists who own their home turf.

One novelist on his list:

Louisiana / James Lee Burke

Burke incorporates the sights, smells, weather, politics, villains, and multiple histories and tangled racial storylines of south Louisiana into a world of its own that would be otherwise impenetrable. You'll find yourself sweating and smelling swamp water along with flawed hero Dave Robicheaux.

Suggested titles: Purple Cane Road, Tin Roof Blowdown.

Read about all ten novelists on Box's list.

The Page 69 Test: The Tin Roof Blowdown.

--Marshal Zeringue

Natalie Angier's 6 best books

New York Times science writer Natalie Angier won a Pulitzer prize in the category of beat reporting, for a series of 10 feature articles on a wide array of scientific topics. She is the author of Woman: An Intimate Geography and The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

She told The Week magazine about her six best books.

One title on the list:

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary ­Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

Hrdy is one of the most original thinkers in evolutionary biology, and this far-ranging exploration of why humans are the empaths among apes will make any reader feel like a genius.

Read about the other five books on Angier's list.

--Marshal Zeringue