Nigella Lawson's ten best books

One of TV host and food writer Nigella Lawson's ten best books, as shared at Vulture.com:

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

This may not just be my favorite Dickens novel, but my favorite novel period. I read it regularly, and every time is an undimmed pleasure. More, every time it feels fresh. That is the mark of greatness. Although the comic characterization is as juicy as ever, and it’s impossible to read without laughing out loud, Dickens here gives the fullest expression — through the hero who tellingly bears, if back to front, his initials — of horror at the heartbreak, savagery, and injustice of the world. It is the ultimate bildungsroman and the truest story of how a person comes to be. Not for nothing was it Freud’s favorite novel.

Read about the other entries on the list.

David Copperfield is among ShortList's forty greatest villains in literature. Siri Hustvedt's six favorite books, Janet Davey’s top ten schoolchildren in fiction, Frank Rich's top ten books, John Boyne's top ten child narrators, Lynn Shepherd's top ten fictional drownings and Elizabeth Gilbert's six favorite books. It appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best seductions in literature, ten of the best trips to Canterbury in literature and ten of the best valets in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight suspense novels that explore nature vs. nurture

Kate Moretti's new novel is In Her Bones.

At CrimeReads she tagged eight suspense novels that explore nature vs. nurture, including:

Baby Teeth, by Zoje Stage

Told in alternating perspectives, a mother and her unbalanced and possibly murderous seven-year-old daughter, Hanna. Suzette tries everything to get her daughter to behave but Hanna is hell-bent on destruction of her mother. She wants a happily ever after with Daddy! This novel was endlessly disturbing, mainly because it plays directly into the nature/nurture debate. Suzette and Alex are both upstanding citizens (if not flawed in their own ways, but certainly not murderous). So where does Hanna get her evil from? Is it nurtured by her happy, oblivious father and increasingly frustrated and impatient mother? Or is it something she was born with?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about living with cancer

Adam Kay is a writer and comedian. He writes extensively for TV and film and is the author of the international number one bestselling and multi-award-winning book This is Going to Hurt. One of five of the best books about living with cancer he tagged at the Guardian:

If we trust the Pulitzer prize panel about this kind of thing, and I suspect we should, then read The Emperor of All Maladies by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is an in-depth, but clear and at times poetic depiction of the “lethal, shape-shifting entity” – its past, present and putative future.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Austin Duffy's top ten books about cancer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daisy Johnson's book recommendations

Daisy Johnson's first novel, Everything Under, has been short-listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

One of six books she recommended at The Week magazine:

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi (2009).

Oyeyemi's third novel takes the typical haunted-house narrative and uses it to examine racism and the inevitable pull of the past. Nothing here is quite normal: Apples grow in the cellar, the house speaks to us, and the protagonist — a sufferer from an eating disorder that compels her to eat things that are not food — has gone missing.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books to read after bad dates

Kass Morgan is the author of The 100 series, which is now a television show on the CW. She received a bachelor's degree from Brown University and a master's degree from Oxford University. Her new novel is Light Years.

At Tor.com Morgan tagged five books to read after bad dates, including:

Rootless by Chris Howard

Sometimes, you just need to spend time with a guy who isn’t intimidated by powerful women who make bold fashion choices. That’s one of the many reasons I’m head-over-heels in love with Rootless, a dystopian eco-thriller set in the near future, when genetic modification has resulted in the death of every tree on Earth. The main character, Banyan, is a tree-builder who crafts elaborate metal trees for rich people. And in addition to being good with his hands, he happens to have excellent taste in women—namely female pirates who sport mohawks and six-inch heels as they terrorize the wasteland beyond the walled city. If Banyan were on Tinder, I’d totally use one of my “super-likes” on him.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey Abrams's recommended reading

Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor, is the author of a political memoir (Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change) as well as eight romance novels (written under the pen name Selena Montgomery). One of eight books she tagged at Vanity Fair:

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

Her novel about Estebanico, a Moroccan slave who was part of Narváez expedition, uses the narrative device of a fictional memoir to excavate the horror faced by African slaves and native peoples in 16th-century Florida. His story makes the reader uncomfortable, angry, and bereft by turn—yet willing to endure all to see it through to the end.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best revenge novels

Jo Jakeman's debut psychological thriller is The Exes’ Revenge (UK title: Sticks and Stones). One of her ten top crime novels featuring "satisfying comeuppance, bloody vengeance, and ice-cold revenge," as shared at CrimeReads:

Stephen King, Carrie

The moral of this story is, don’t mess with a sixteen-year-old girl with telekinetic powers. Bullied by her classmates and mother, and even laughed at by some of her teachers, Carrie White goes on a rampage that kills her tormentors. Teenage cruelty at its worst and revenge to match. I remember reading this when I was about twelve and then practicing telekinesis every night with my hairbrush. In case you were wondering, it didn’t work. I’ve been slightly obsessed with King ever since.

Learn about the other entries on the list.

Carrie is on Ania Ahlborn's list of ten of the scariest books of all time, Jeff Somers's list of the five worst mothers in literary history, Becky Ferreira's list of six of the most memorable bullies in literature, Julie Buntin's list of favorite literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads, Gregg Olsen's top ten list of deadly YA books, and James Dawson's top ten list of books to get you through high school.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twenty-one books from a crash course on the literary horror world

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and the Ustari Cycle from Pocket/Gallery, including We Are Not Good People. At the B&N Reads blog he tagged twenty-one books that will give you an idea of how the horror genre has evolved, including:

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron, 2013

Barron may represent the future of horror; he combines a literary flare with long, complex sentences, and lush descriptive passages with a fusion of genres; his most successful stories mashups of noir, crime, horror, and fantasy. Because why can’t everything be terrifying? Consider the first season of HBO’s True Detective: a crime thriller that was flat-out a horror story for a few episodes before resolving into a crime story again. Who’s to say what’s horror and what’s not?

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is among Kelly Link's six notable books that warp reality and Jeff Somers's five great under-the-radar reads of 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathy Bates's ten best books

One of actor/director Kathy Bates's ten best books, as shared at Vulture.com:

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

This remarkable novel, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, takes place in a cemetery the evening after the burial of Lincoln’s son, Willie. The chorus of the dead, an astonishing cast of over 60 characters, are trapped in the Bardo, the state of existence between life and death. Another kind of bardo is taking place at the White House on the night before Willie dies. Historical diaries and letters written by those who attended the grand ball illustrate the struggle in Lincoln’s soul. His role is to be president, but he longs to be with his beloved son.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five plausible sci-fi novels in the spirit of "First Man"

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and the Ustari Cycle from Pocket/Gallery, including We Are Not Good People. At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog he tagged five "mundane sci-fi books in the spirit of First Man"--"mundane SF eschews the deliriously futuristic in favor of the possible and the soon-to-be"--including:

Moonfall, by Jack McDevitt

McDevitt is one of the authors whose work often falls just outside the mundane sci-fi sphere—his stories are usually just a bit too fictional or fanciful to be truly mundane. But Moonfall is as close to it as he’s ever come—and it’s pretty close. In a future where a small lunar base has been established, a huge, fast-moving comet is discovered—and calculated to impact the moon in just a few days. When that happens, the moon will be vaporized, and destruction and fire will rain down on the Earth. Desperate measures are launched to evacuate the base and somehow avoid an extinction-level event, and McDevitt keeps a steady hand on the reins of plausibility the whole time, resulting in a story that trucks in realism, and shares a spirit of can-do science with First Man; it seems humanity can achieve anything if we can just find the right engineers.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about psychiatry

Elizabeth Lowry was born in Washington DC and educated in South Africa and England. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Her first novel, The Bellini Madonna, was published in 2008 to great acclaim and will be reissued in 2019.

Her second novel, Dark Water, appeared in September 2018.

One of Lowry's top ten books about psychiatry, as shared at the Guardian:

Darkness Visible by William Styron

Styron’s account of being overtaken in late middle age by clinical depression’s “toxic and unnameable tide” is an urgent frontline report of how it feels when the mind turns “agonisingly inward”. Its publication in 1990 helped initiate a public conversation about the condition and launched the contemporary trend in depression memoirs. Yet the candour and paradoxical beauty of Styron’s remains unequalled. His description of the hospital where he slowly recovers as “a kinder, gentler madhouse than the one I’d left” is rich in tender humour; his final message charged with hope: that those who dwell “in depression’s dark wood” will at last emerge, like Dante climbing out of hell’s black depths, into “the shining world”.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books for fans of "A Star Is Born"

At Entertainment Weekly Esme Douglas and Maureen Lee Lenker tagged ten books to read if you loved A Star Is Born, including:

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True: 1907-1940, by Victoria Wilson

When A Star Is Born was first released in 1937, rumors swirled that it was based on the real-life marriage of rising star Barbara Stanwyck and vaudeville actor Frank Fay. Their careers followed similar reverse trajectories, with Stanwyck breezing toward immortality as Fay sank into alcoholism. Whether Stanwyck was the real inspiration for this myth or not, Wilson’s in-depth, long-in-the-works biography is the first of its kind — and it’s only volume 1. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with Stanwyck’s colleagues and family, as well as her private papers, it examines her iconic, complex life with care.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue