Eight top holiday coloring books

At the BN Kids blog Jen Harper tagged eight great holiday coloring books, including:

Christmas Coloring Book, by Thaneeya McArdle

Put the whole family in a festive mood by doling out pages from Thaneeya McArdle’s whimsical Christmas-themed coloring book. Artists will enjoy coloring the 30 pages of fun patterns and designs like reindeer, Santa Claus, snowmen and snowwomen, candles, wreaths, and more. Pick your medium—markers, colored pencils, gel pens, or even watercolors—and start filling in these beautiful images printed on extra-thick paper to avoid bleed-through.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gene Wilder's all-time favorite books

Gene Wilder starred in several modern classic movies, including Young Frankenstein and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In 2005 he published a memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, and shared his favorite books in the pages of The Week magazine. One title on the list:

Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Irving Stone

The letters of my favorite painter to his younger brother Theo. Van Gogh gives an insight into his creative process, which I found fascinating. I carried this book with me for many years and it always gave me courage when I was depressed.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top romances that invoke the holiday spirit

At B&N Reads Tara Sonin tagged five top romance novels that invoke the holiday spirit, including:

Her Naughty Holiday, by Tiffany Reisz

Clover Green resents Thanskgiving: it’s just another opportunity for her annoying family to pester her with a blooper reel of all her previous mistakes. But this year, she has a plan—bring a fake boyfriend to the festivities so everyone will be focused on him and leave her alone. And she has just the guy in mind: Eric Fields, the contractor she’s been holding a candle for. But when Eric agrees, and passion ignites between them, Clover’s fake holiday could turn into something all too real, too fast.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books for comedy nerds

At B&N Reads, Brian Boone tagged six books for hardcore comedy fans, including:

Young Frankenstein, by Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is responsible for at least three of the top five comedy films of all time, and topping that list is Young Frankenstein. In this coffee table book, Brooks relates in tantalizing detail the process of how his classic spook of classic monster movies was conceived, produced, and received. (In short, it was the idea of dearly departed star Gene Wilder to make a movie about the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein, a legitimate scientist who can’t but help to reanimate live tissue in an old castle. He took it to Brooks, who took it to studios, who somehow let him do it in black and white.) Actors, designers, and other people involved in the film add in their two cents (along with a forward by comedy icon Judd Apatow), which weave around script excerpts and never before seen set photos.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathy Reichs's 6 best books

Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist and bestselling crime novelist. Her books include Déjà Dead, Cross Bones, and the story collection The Bone Collection, as well as the Virals series for young adults. She created the TV series Bones. One of her six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving

This follows Garp through his whole life. I love the combination of humour and very dark topics and the idea of the strong, independent single mother. There are separate framed narratives within the book and I admired that as a way of revealing the character.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The World According to Garp is among ten books that changed Sean Beaudoin's life before he could drive and John Niven's ten best writers in novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten gothic novels

Lynne Truss is the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Cat Out of Hell, the newly released The Lunar Cats, and other books. One of her ten top gothic novels, as shared at the Guardian:

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

While there are now some classy editions of The Monk (1796), with scholarly introductions and fine art on the covers, my own copy is a Sphere paperback from 1974. It is proudly announced as number 24 of the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult and features a photograph of a busty loose-haired woman wearing a crucifix, with a dark cowl obscuring the top of her face. It is ghastly, but mainly for the wrong reasons. “She lifted her veil slowly. What a sight presented itself to my startled eyes! I beheld before me an animated corpse.” Wheatley’s introduction may not be academic in nature, but it does come with a facsimile signature (readers always appreciate that), and also provides the knockout information that “Monk” Lewis was the first tenant of a particular apartment (K1) in Piccadilly’s famous Albany. By a creepy coincidence, it was in K1 itself that the idea of the Library of the Occult series was first proposed…

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six famous novels that don’t have an ending

Jeff Somers is the author of the Avery Cates series, The Ustari Cycle, Lifers, and Chum (among many other books) and numerous short stories.

At the B&N Reads blog he tagged six novels "that have been published and praised despite the fact that they’re clearly unfinished," including:

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon unfolds The Crying of Lot 49 like a detective novel. Along the way, Oedipa Maas goes from determined to worrying about her sanity, from intensely interested in the mystery to being almost exhausted by it. Just as she seems about to give up, a final clue draws her to the titular auction, and readers might be forgiven for assuming at least some resolution to the mystery would be on offer, but instead, the book ends just as the auction begins. To paraphrase Willy Wonka, we get nothing. Now, Pynchon’s probably the genius here, but wouldn’t it be fun to imagine that he also tried to write a novel in one month, and just typed out “The End” when the deadline hit?

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Crying of Lot 49 is among the Barnes & Noble Review's six top books on surveillance and John Mullan's ten best secret societies in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best road trips in YA lit

At the BN Teen blog, Jenny Kawecki tagged seven top road trips in YA lit, including:

Back When You Were Easier to Love, by Emily Wing Smith

Joy has no idea if her relationship is over. All she knows is her boyfriend, Zan, just left for college without so much as an “It’s over” text. So she does what anyone would do: she grabs his best friend, hops in a car, and drives to California to find Zan and figure things out. But she’s not prepared for is how much Zan has changed in such a short time—or has he really changed at all? Smith’s writing is hilarious and quirky, and it’s hard not to relate to Joy’s relationship blinders. Don’t worry, Joy. We’ve all been there.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five fantasy novels with perfect opening lines

At Tor.com, Soman Chainani tagged five SFF novels with perfect opening lines, including:

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Character often works better than setting as the subject of a stirring first line, but here Gibson uses an image so stark, arresting, and memorable that we can both clearly visualize the gray, drab world as well as sense the flat monotony of a new dystopia. Though the image itself is bleak and stagnant, that itself is the point: already we’re asking the question what kind of hero can rise above it.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Neuromancer made Abhimanyu Das and Gordon Jackson list of eleven science fiction books regularly taught in college classes, Steve Toutonghi's list of six top books that expand our mental horizons, Ann Leckie's top ten list of science fiction books, Madeleine Monson-Rosen's list of 15 books that take place in science fiction and fantasy versions of the most fascinating places on Earth, Becky Ferreira's list of the six most memorable robots in literature, Joel Cunningham's top five list of books that predicted the internet, Sean Beaudoin's list of ten books that changed his life before he could drive, Chris Kluwe's list of six favorite books, Inglis-Arkell's list of ten of the best bars in science fiction, PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time and Annalee Newitz's lists of ten great American dystopias and thirteen books that will change the way you look at robots.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ibram X. Kendi's 6 favorite books

Ibram [EEE-brum] Xolani [ZO-LAA-NEE] Kendi [KEN-DEE] is currently an assistant professor of African American History at the University of Florida. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won this year's National Book Award for nonfiction.

One of his six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:

Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

Giddings microscopically renders not only the life of Ida Wells and all her courageous anti-lynching activism, but the life of the 19th- and early 20th-century United States that Wells navigated and endlessly challenged. It is the best biography I have ever read of an American activist.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve top 1960s science fiction novels

At io9, Annalee Newitz tagged twelve 1960s science fiction novels everyone should read, including:

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)

Though the post-apocalypse subgenre is nearly as old as SF itself, it wasn't until Ballard came along that people really started to enjoy it. Literally. The Drowned World is a global warming story, where "solar radiation" has melted the poles — and our naturalist hero loves nothing more than to watch the city of London slowly melting into a neo-Triassic muck. This novel paved the way for a whole subgenre of darkly satirical apocalypse tales that suggest the end of the world might be what we secretly want (and deserve).

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top romances for a good cry

At B&N Reads Tara Sonin tagged five of the best romances for a good cry, including:

Yours Until Dawn (Fairleigh Sisters #3), by Teresa Medeiros

Gabriel Fairchild may be a hero, but the costs of valor are more than he can bear: has lost his sight, and the woman he loved. Darkness has descended on every part of his life, a darkness that even nurse Samantha Wickersham can’t lift. The nurse charged with caring for him, Samantha may be a woman, but she is no doormat, and refuses to let Gabriel wallow in self-pity. Eventually, Samantha determines that the key to healing Gabriel may not be trying to bring him into the light, but meeting him halfway, in the shadows, where their love begins to grow.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue