Top 10 books of good sex in fiction

Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of the best fiction about sex.

One novel on the list:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Although about a sociopath's utterly self-serving "love" for a minor this is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. The force of the writing is unparalleled. The balance of humour and horror, sex and satire, irony and delusion is extraordinary, and to me, without flaw. Just as the narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert seduces Lolita through deceit and thus reveals himself, so we too are seduced, deceived and revealed to ourselves with an artistry and uncompromising cruelty that it an appropriate and profoundly moral commentary on society.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Lolita appears among Henry Sutton's top ten unreliable narrators, Adam Leith Gollner's top ten fruit scenes in literature, Laura Hird's literary top ten, Monica Ali's ten favorite books, Laura Lippman's 5 most important books, Mohsin Hamid's 10 favorite books, and Dani Shapiro's 10 favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Irvine Welsh's 5 best crime novels

Irvine Welsh is the author for Trainspotting and other works.

At FiveBooks, he discussed crime novels with Daisy Banks, including:

Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane

Next up is Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone, which is a classic detective novel.

Yes, a classic detective novel from a classic detective writer. And he brings so much to the table as a thriller writer. His sense of place with this novel, which is set in Boston, is pretty much unbeatable. He is one of the few classic thriller writers who really writes about contemporary social issues. The quality of the writing is absolutely superb and it moves you along.

And the book is about two private detectives, Kenzie and Gennaro, working with a drug dealer to track down a kidnapped four-year-old girl.

Yes. One of the things I like about Lehane is that he is very strong on character. I am often disappointed with a standard crime book because genre fiction is all about the plot and not about character. But I like really strong characters in a book. I am really interested in characters. I kind of feel short changed by a lot of genre fiction but I don’t get that with Lehane.

Read about the other books on Welsh's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best handkerchiefs in literature

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

One entry on the list:

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Tristram's father gets himself in a tangle trying to extract "a striped India handkerchief from his right coat pocket, in order to rub his head". He has used his right hand to take off his wig so he tries to use his left. "In the latter end of Queen Anne's reign, and in the beginning of the reign of King George the first – 'Coat pockets were cut very low down in the skirt.' – I need say no more."

Read about the other entries on the list.

Tristram Shandy also appears among Peter Carey's top ten works of literature, Thomas C. Schelling's influential books, Bamber Gascoigne's six best books, and John Mullan's list of ten of the best deathbed scenes in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best novels about failure

Howard Jacobson's most recent novel, The Finkler Question, won this year's Man Booker Prize.

At the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of novels on failure. One title on the list:

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
by Mario Vargas Llosa (1977)

'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" is a novel on a thousand errands, not the least of them a sort of spoofing of magic realism while reveling in its conventions. There is so much comic gusto in the spiraling decline of Pedro Camacho, a phenomenally successful writer of radio soap operas, that it is hard to remember that what we're watching is Camacho's mind "falling to pieces." The joy of the story lies in its brilliant confusion of Camacho's scripts, as overproduction (10 serials a day) leads him to forget which characters belong in which soap opera and each spills uncontrollably into the other. Camacho's hospitalization no more distresses us than his final demotion to the job of hack reporter. Call it callousness, but comic failure, too, must have its place. Especially when, in the telling, it has felt so much like creative success.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best books about college basketball

Majorie Kehe picked a list of the ten best books about college basketball.

One title on the list:

A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein.

Feinstein, a noted sportswriter, follows a year in the life of coach Bobby Knight and his 1985-86 Indiana Hoosiers. Some call it the best book ever written about basketball.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 female detectives

Anne Holt is one of Norway's most successful crime novelists.

For the Guardian, she named her top 10 female detectives. One character on her list:

Lisbeth Salander

In Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson created the toughest nut in Sweden. Like Modesty [Blaise, the heroine of the cult comic strip created by writer Peter O'Donnell], she's also a relative orphan, abandoned and abused by a corrupt state. On the outside, she is a socially awkward diminutive gothic punk, but smouldering under the surface there's a tough, kick-boxing, Taser-wielding terror. She's as indifferent to physical pain as she is to people, a world-class computer hacker with a fierce intelligence and a photographic memory. A complete original.

Read about the other detectives on Holt's list.

See Adrian McKinty's list of the ten best lady detectives.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best survival stories

For the Observer, writer and mountaineer Ed Douglas named ten of the most courageous tales of survival and the books and films they have inspired.

One entry on his list:

Andes, 1972

Uruguayan rugby compadres Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa not only survived when their plane crashed in the Andes in 1972, killing 29 of the 45 passengers on board, but then made an epic trek across the mountains to raise the alarm. The story of their fight for survival, resorting to cannibalism, became the 1974 bestseller Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivor by Piers Paul Read. Director Frank Marshall then made the film Alive, with Ethan Hawke starring as Parrado, who became a TV personality in Uruguay and wrote Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home.

Read about the other survival stories on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best portraits of women's lives

At the Wall Street Journal, author Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra) named a five best list of books about women's lives.

One book on the list:

Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
Edited by Caroline Moorehead (2006)

'It is quite a job being a woman, isn't it?" Martha Gellhorn grumbled, in an April 1944 letter. She was at the time Mrs. Ernest Hemingway. Her correspondent was Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt. Gellhorn, a fine war correspondent, was in an unjolly state of mind; she believed that she was about to miss out on the Allied landings in France. (The U.S. Army did not allow women reporters at the front. Gellhorn smuggled herself to Normandy anyway, aboard a hospital ship.) A Bryn Mawr drop-out, she reported on the Spanish Civil War; saw and was changed forever by Dachau; covered the Eichmann trial; flew to Saigon in 1966. Always she wrestled with the competing demands of life and work. As for the rest, she was clear: "I knew what I wanted to do and went ahead doing it," she noted, casting a skeptical glance at feminism. What she wanted more than anything else was to be courageous, and she was, as graceful under pressure as on the page. She knew what she liked: laughter, words, honesty, men. She disliked tyranny, pretension, lies, sex. She couldn't cook, but oh could she write.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on pain

David Biro has a medical degree from Columbia University and a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University. He is an Associate Professor of Dermatology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He also teaches in the medical humanities division there, directing a course on medicine and literature.

Biro’s first book, One Hundred Days: My Unexpected Journey from Doctor to Patient, chronicles his experience undergoing a bone marrow transplant. His second book is The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief. His articles have been published in various medical journals as well as the New York Times Magazine, Slate, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He shared a list of five books on pain with Daisy Banks at FiveBooks, including:

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry

Let’s move on to your next book, The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, which discusses people in pain and people who cause pain.

This book left a profound mark on me and actually inspired me to write about pain myself. I love its thoughtfulness and poetic style, its interdisciplinary nature and the fact that a scholar of literature has so much to say about the world outside the academy.

Scarry starts out with two main premises. Number one, that pain is not merely indescribable but that it actively destroys language, reducing the sufferer to a state before language, to primal screams. The second premise is that pain radically separates the sufferer from the observer of pain. For the sufferer, pain is the prototype of certainty – there’s no way to doubt that you have pain. But it is the exact opposite for those who observe a person in pain. How can we be really sure another person is in pain? Scarry then goes on to explore the far-reaching consequences of these two observations, in medicine, in torture, and in war.

So there is this idea that the people who are torturing have a licence to do it because they can easily choose not to see their victim’s pain?

Yes, and also because the victim is often voiceless. In torture and in war, there is an enormous toll of pain which goes unnoticed or misrepresented and which can then be used to substantiate the power of the torturer or the regime or the warring state. It’s probably not difficult to imagine how these two problems of pain – its inexpressibility and unverifiability – can also have a negative impact in the field of medicine.

You have written about this as well. Why do you think it is so important to be able to describe your pain as precisely as possible?

If patients can’t communicate their pain well and physicians harbour doubts just like other observers, then there’s a good chance medicine won’t always be so effective at alleviating pain. And unfortunately this is indeed the case – the under-treatment of pain is well-documented in medical literature, and a large part of this has to do with failures in communication.

On the other hand, if patients can provide good descriptions of their pain, and if doctors can help them do so and are willing to listen, those descriptions can be as useful in pinpointing the source of pain as an abnormality seen on a CAT scan or X-ray.

How would you encourage people to articulate their pain as successfully as possible?

Well this is the flipside of Scarry’s book. While she talks a lot about the world-destroying aspects of pain, she also talks about the world-building capacity which we might summon in response to pain. That capacity depends upon the imagination and metaphor.

Because pain is so blurry – perceptually and conceptually – there’s nothing to point to or grab on to. So the only way to go is to fill the blur with objects that we can see and describe. We are forced to speak of pain in terms of other, more visible objects, ie we are forced to speak metaphorically. The most common metaphor of pain is the weapon. We say, for example, that pain is shooting or stabbing or crushing.

When you think about it, these words are all being used metaphorically – since most of the time we haven’t been shot or stabbed or crushed but are just imagining that something like this must be happening. So one way of talking about pain is to talk about guns, knives, and hammers, or the damage those weapons can inflict on the human body. There are also other ways to represent pain metaphorically which I discuss in my book. The bottom line is that we have to be exceptionally imaginative when it comes to pain or else it will remain incommunicable and invisible, not only for the sufferer but also for friends and doctors trying to help.

Read about the other books on Biro's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Winchester's 6 favorite books about sailing

Simon Winchester is the author of Krakatoa and The Map That Changed the World. His new book is Atlantic, a history of the world’s second-largest ocean.

At The Week magazine he named his six favorite books about sailing. One title on the list:

In Hazard by Richard Hughes

Best known for his trilogy The Human Predicament, Hughes had decades earlier written this fictional account of a hurricane in the Caribbean. He tells the story from the perspective of the crew of a merchant ship called the Archimedes, and the writing is truly sensational: You huddle beneath the covers, relieved to be safe and dry.

Read about the other books on Winchester's list.

Also see Robin Knox-Johnson's five best books about sailing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best Hamlets in literature

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

One entry on the list:

Ulysses by James Joyce

In the "Scylla and Charybdis" section Stephen Dedalus opines about the Dane, hinting at Shakespeare's covert Catholicism. "Not for nothing was he a butcher's son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palm. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one, Our Father who art in purgatory." He reckons the play was written out of Shakespeare's anger at being cuckolded.

Read about the other Hamlets on the list.

Ulysses also made Mullan's lists of the ten of the best parodies, ten of the best visits to the lavatory, and ten of the best vegetables in literature. Unsurprisingly, it appears on Frank Delaney's top ten list of Irish novels and five best list of books about Ireland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexei Sayle's six best books

Liverpudlian Alexei Sayle is a comedian, actor and author, who is more familiar to British viewers than American audiences even though he had a role in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and signed a 7 year deal for The Golden Girls spinoff The Golden Palace before quitting after only two weeks: "Those old ladies are horrible," he said.

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

An Awfully Big Adventure
by Beryl Bainbridge

I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge, a Liverpudlian like myself. This is a brilliant novel in its own right, which is set in a Liverpool theatre company but it’s also a brilliant evocation of Liverpool in the Fifties, a vanished Liverpool.

A wonderful novel that was adapted for the big screen.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue