Nineteen wonderful short books and stories

In 2016 Maris Kreizman tagged nineteen "of the most entertaining and mind-opening stories, novellas, essays, and short treatises from the recent past" for Vulture.com. One title on the list:

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson (2016)

You can read one of the best books of 2016 in an hour or two. Another Brooklyn follows the friendship of four girls in the 1970s. Jacqueline Woodson is a YA superstar, and although this novel is for adults, her subject matter reminds us of the great empathy with which she portrays teenagers. During a time when Donald Trump characterizes inner-city life is “devastating,” Woodson gives us a window into a way of life that’s full of struggle, yes, but also beauty and wonder.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top thrillers about when technology betrays us

Ezekiel Boone is the internationally bestselling author of The Hatching, Skitter, and Zero Day. His latest novel is The Mansion.

At CrimeReads he tagged five top novels about when technology betrays us, including:

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Ah, hubris! What is it about human nature that as soon as we can do something, we go for it without thinking through the consequences? Crichton was the king of “what if?” fiction, and in Jurassic Park he’s got a good one: what if we could make dinosaurs come alive again? The book is a typical Crichton page turner, filled with mayhem, corporate espionage, extremely dumb decisions by extremely smart people, a reasonable number of people chomped by dinosaurs, and some surprisingly thoughtful inquiries into the question of whether or not humans can conquer nature and if we should even try.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Jurassic Park is among Shawn Pryor's five top books with giant monsters, Nicole Hill's five weird science stories in which nothing could possibly go wrong, Kat Rosenfield's ten worst traitors in fiction, Chuck Wendig's five books that prove mankind shouldn’t play with technology, Jeff Somers's top seven books that explore what might happen when technology betrays us, Damian Dibben's top ten time travel books, and Becky Ferreira's eleven best books about dinosaurs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twenty-six very long books worth the time

Boris Kachka is the books editor for New York magazine and the author of Hothouse and Becoming a Veterinarian. At Vulture.com he tagged twenty-six very long books worth the time they’ll take to read, including:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1872, 880 pp.)

Eliot was a world-builder in the classic sense; her fictional Middlemarch is an English town like many others, exemplary of bourgeois mores and the site of many parallel plots. The epic is made ordinary, and vice versa.

Learn about the other books on the list.

Middlemarch also made Mary Gordon's list of ten desert island books, Kirsty Gunn's top ten list of books about unrequited love, Jeff Somers's top five memorable books set on New Year’s Eve (and Day), Lauren Groff's list of six favorite portrayals of marriage in literature, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best bankers in literature, ten of the best marital rows, ten of the best examples of unrequited love, ten of the best funerals in literature, and ten of the best deathbed scenes in literature. It is among Emrys Westacott's five top books on philosophy & everyday living, Selma Dabbagh's top 10 stories of reluctant revolutionaries, Philip Pullman's six best books, Rebecca Goldstein's five best of novels of ideas, Tina Brown's five best books on reputation, Elizabeth Kostova favorite books, and Miss Manners' favorite novels. John Banville and Nick Hornby have not read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight notable books about female friendship

Jacqueline Mroz is the author of Scattered Seeds: In Search of Family and Identity in the Sperm Donor Generation.

At LitHub she tagged her eight favorite books about female friendship. One title on the list:

The Burning Girl, by Claire Messud

A semi-gothic novel about the intense friendship between two pre-teenage girls, Julia and Cassie, best friends since they were small. They were two opposites: Julia was quiet and sensitive; Cassie was the mischievous one. When Cassie’s home life is upended by the appearance of her mother’s new boyfriend moving in, she begins to pull away from Julia, and their friendship starts to fall apart. Cassie starts running with a racy crowd, and their class differences start to become more apparent. Julie starts to question what happened to their relationship: “Maybe I made her feel trapped like she’d outgrown me. It was like I knew her too well ... she wanted to try out a new role and didn’t want to be reminded that it was fake.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top Victorian Gothic novels

Laura Purcell is the author of The Silent Companions and The Corset. At CrimeReads she tagged ten favorite Victorian Gothic novels, including:

Alison Littlewood, The Hidden People

One of the many wonders of Littlewood’s story is its deviation from the tropes. Rather than a crumbling mansion in desolate countryside, she presents a homely cottage surrounded by verdure. Instead of winds and rain, the action takes place at the height of summer. Yet this is still a Gothic novel, infused with suspicion and obsession. Albie travels to the village of Halfoak to investigate the horrific murder of his young cousin. But rather than blaming human agency, the locals spin him a tale of fairies and changelings. Living alone in his cousin’s house, his scepticism is soon put to the test. A great blend of both human and supernatural monsters.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about the seasons

Axel Lindén lives with his family on a farm in Sweden. Counting Sheep: Reflections and Observations of a Swedish Shepherd is his first book.

One of the author's ten best books about the seasons, as shared at the Guardian:

The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

This is a debut novel about the honey bee’s crucial significance to humankind’s life on Earth. To me, it is an autumnal book because this is the time when I feed my bees – we have five hives on the farm. The autumn is when I sense the bees’ desperation, knowing they will have to face the cold and wintry conditions ahead. Lunde poignantly depicts our fragile relationship with the environment in the stories of succeeding generations of beekeepers. Just as bees tirelessly produce their honey milligram by milligram, Lunde builds her story detail by detail into an intricate treat for her readers.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top holiday-themed SFF books

E. J. Wenstrom believes in complicated heroes, horrifying monsters, purple hair dye and standing to the right on escalators so the left side can walk.

Her award-winning fantasy series Chronicles of the Third Realm War features a peculiar mashup of Greek mythology, Judeo-Christian folklore, and an extra dash of her own special brand of chaos.

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog Wenstrom tagged ten top holiday-themed science fiction & fantasy books, including:

NOS4A2, by Joe Hill

If you’ve read Horns, it is chilling to think of Hill taking on the holidays, but here we are all the same. Convicted child-napper Charles Manx was notorious for the presumed murders of countless children, but he wasn’t exactly killing them: instead, he took them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce, and into an alternate reality with a sinister amusement park he calls Christmasland, to await a fate more terrible than death. When Manx escapes and heads out on the road again, one of his past near-victims, now an emotionally scarred adult, must track him down and rescue his latest quarry. Easter Eggs for fans of Hill’s father (that would be Stephen King) abound, pulling in some seasonally appropriate nostalgia even beyond the climax that hinges upon a giant tree and cursed ornaments—and at 700-plus pages, this is a quest epic enough to sustain you through those long winter nights.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten dirty cop novels

Adrian McKinty's books include the Detective Sean Duffy novels The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone, Gun Street Girl, Rain Dogs and Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, and the standalone historical The Sun Is God. The Cold Cold Ground won the Spinetingler Award. I Hear the Sirens in the Street won the Barry Award and was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. In the Morning I'll Be Gone won the Ned Kelly Award and was selected by the American Library Association as one of the top-10 crime fiction novels of 2014. Gun Street Girl was shortlisted for the Anthony, Ned Kelly, and Edgar Awards.

In 2017 at CrimeReads he tagged his ten top dirty cop novels, including:

Maxine Paetro and James Patterson, 11th Hour

When millionaire Chaz Smith is killed the very pregnant Detective Lindsay Boxer discovers that the murder weapon is linked to the killings of four San Francisco mobsters and that it was taken from her own department’s evidence locker. Boxer puts her life and reputation on the line to solve the case.

Read about the other book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that inspired Liz Pichon's love of reading

Liz Pichon is an award-winning children's book author and illustrator. At the Guardian she tagged five books that inspired her love of reading, including:

Dr Dog by Babette Cole is one of my all-time favourite funny books, and one I’d happily read again and again to my kids. Poor Dr Dog has to look after the Gumboyle family, who are all pretty hopeless at taking care of themselves (nits, smokers’ coughs – as if these ailments would be given the green light in a publishing meeting today!). The characters all suffer from mostly self‑inflicted illnesses, and after Grandad’s dangerous gases build up and he blows the roof off the house, Dr Dog needs a holiday. Babette’s humorous illustrations are superb and subversive, which is something I love about all her books.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anuradha Roy's 6 favorite books

Anuradha Roy is the author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth, as well as Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. Her latest novel is All the Lives We Never Lived.

One of Roy's six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:

Raga'n Josh by Sheila Dhar (2005)

Writing on music is often stupefyingly technical, but Sheila Dhar's collection of essays and biographical stories is a book like no other. It is comic, compassionate, observant, and exhilarating, and brings alive the secret world of Indian classical music as no work before it has done.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Perrotta's ten desert island books

Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of nine works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. His other books include Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, The Abstinence Teacher, Nine Inches, and his newest, Mrs. Fletcher.

In 2017 he shared his ten favorite books at Vulture.com. One title on the list:

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I hated this in high school, because I was young and couldn’t see myself or my world in the story of Hester Prynne. But then I reread it a few years ago, and realized that it contained a blueprint for the sexual revolution, the eternal clash between unruly desire and oppressive social convention. It’s all right here.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Scarlet Letter is among Harold Bloom's 6 favorite books that helped shape Harold Bloom's "the American Sublime," Gabe Habash's ten biggest book-to-film flops, Sara Maitland's top ten books of the forest, Susan Cheever's six favorite Massachusetts books, John Mullan's ten of the best reformations in literature, and Paul Auster's five most important books.

Also see Tom Perrotta's 6 favorite funny books.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten books that defined the 2000s

At LitHub Emily Temple tagged the ten books that defined the 2000s, including:

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

The most popular novel by our most recent Nobel Laureate in literature (though I’d argue The Remains of the Day is still his best) was much acclaimed and much purchased when it was published in 2005, though it seems critics are still arguing over whether it’s dystopian sci-fi or coming-of-age or a complex metaphor about race or horror or literary fiction of the highest caliber (the answer being, of course, all of these, and a hearty duh to you). Rachel Cusk reads the novel as being as much about art itself as it is about...[read on]

Read about the other books on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue