Five best baseball books

Fay Vincent, commissioner of baseball from 1989 through 1992, and author of The Only Game in Town: Baseball Stars of the 1930s and 1940s Talk About the Game They Loved (2006), named the five best books on the so-called national pastime for Opinion Journal.

The only novel on his list:

Highpockets by John R. Tunis (Morrow, 1948).

When I was about 12 years old and haunting our local library outside New Haven, Conn., the librarian pointed me to this lyrical little baseball novel. The story concerns a self-absorbed young Brooklyn Dodgers player who injures a boy in a car accident, befriends him and then finds his life--and his approach to the game--altered much for the better. I have never forgotten "Highpockets." Everyone else seems to have done so, but for me John R. Tunis reinforced my conviction that I would someday be a great player. It is that lesson in failure that binds all of us in a love for the game that we could not play well.

Read the entire list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 psychological thrillers

Dublin-born Alex Barclay's much-praised debut novel Darkhouse will be released in the U.S. in May; her second novel The Caller comes out in Britain this week.

She named her top 10 psychological thrillers for the Guardian.

Number One on her list:

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

You'd probably like Sheriff Lou Ford if you lived in his small town and saw him behaving "nice and friendly and stupid". But sucked into his disturbed mind in this outstanding first-person narrative, you'll meet the madman behind the slowly unravelling exterior. Chilling, unsettling, flawless.

Read the entire list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Hird's literary top 10

Pulp Net has posted an interesting "literary top 10" list by Laura Hird, the Orange and Whitbread nominated author of the collection, Nail and Other Stories and novel, Born Free.

Number three from Hird's literary top ten:

Best ‘film of the book’

Stanley Kubrick was able to adapt books for film like no other director I can think of – ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Lolita’ I think set a pretty high benchmark that few people since have managed to come close to. I also enjoyed Pawel Pawlikowski’s recent adaptation of Helen Cross’s ‘My Summer of Love’. Probably my all-time favourite film of the book though is ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.’ Both Muriel Spark’s original novella and the film are gems and were way ahead of their time.

I like and admire Kubrick's Lolita but I think Adrian Lyne's Lolita is a more faithful adaptation of the novel and arguably a better film. (See them both.)

Read the entire literary top ten, and visit Laura Hird's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best combinations of fiction and food

Tunku Varadarajan, an assistant managing editor at the Wall Street Journal, selected a short list of the "most delectable combinations of fiction and food" for Opinion Journal.

Number One on his list:

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (Viking, 1978).

Solitary eating: Charles Arrowby, the protagonist in this dense stew of a novel, is the most pedantic eater in English literature. He shops and cooks for one--himself--with the inspired simplicity that marks a certain sort of good eating: "For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil.... Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese." The opening chapters are studded with these little, jeweled repasts. But visitors arrive, his seaside seclusion is lost, and the delicious, self-pleasuring meals dwindle to nothingness.

Read Varadarajan's entire list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top books on the 1980s

Chris Power, who reviews fiction for the Times (U.K.), named his six top books on the 1980s.

At the top of the list:

American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

Easton Ellis proposes a brutal ethics of consumption wherein murder, an Armani suit and Phil Collins are morally equivalent.

Read about Power's five other picks.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Millet's list

Novelist Lydia Millet, author of Everyone’s Pretty, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and the award-winning My Happy Life, came up with a list for The Week magazine.

As it happens, two of her picks -- American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman, and Tin God by Terese Svoboda -- were recently featured on CftAR blogs.

Read what Millet had to say in praise of these books and her four other picks.

See:

The Page 69 Test: American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman.

The Page 99 Test: Tin God by Terese Svoboda.

--Marshal Zeringue

Atul Gawande's 10 favorite books

In 2002 Atul Gawande told Barnes & Noble about his ten favorite books.

The top three:

Lewis R. Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell -- [B]ecause it was beautiful and vivid and human and intensely curious about science and the world. And also because it put before me the notion that a person, even a physician, could find a place in public life writing and talking about science and human beings in their many dimensions.

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms -- One of the great novels of all time; my model of succinct, clear, and also morally inspired writing. And also, unexpectedly, some of the best observed writing on medicine there has been.

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea -- It is the model of dramatic tension drawn out, description, and parable.

Read the entire list.

Learn more about Gawande's new book, Better.

--Marshal Zeringue

Picks of the chicks

Last week, Diane Shipley wrote in defense of chick lit.

Some of her readers, she now writes:

didn't entirely buy my argument - but asked me to convince them: where were all these great books I was talking about?

"Persephone 251" said: "...I agree with you about Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday ... but Keyes is the only chick lit writer I can stand to read. I'm absolutely open to reading good chick lit but where is it to be found?"

It's a fair point: given the sheer volume of these novels, some of them (by the law of probability) are bound to be stinkers. So how do you know where to start?

So Shipley named names -- "Not a comprehensive list, but a good starting point for anyone open to discovering that great chick lit exists...."

Her list includes:

Stupid and Contagious by Caprice Crane - a deliciously snarky and unsentimental love story.

Emily Giffin's Something Borrowed, and Something Blue tell the same story from two different angles. Wonderfully written and well plotted.

I loved Laura Zigman's debut, Animal Husbandry, which weaved animal anthropology with clever social commentary. She recently took a break to have a baby and her latest book Piece of Work is about what happens when a mother enjoys working more than raising her child.

Read on: she names more titles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books in which things end badly

The novelist Richard Gwyn explains how he came up with his list of "books in which things end badly" for the Guardian:

"I had already selected this topic for the column when I discovered that an earlier contributor, Elise Valmorbida, had chosen as her subject 10 books with a happy ending. She saw this as a challenge, and it is easy to see why: the unhappy ending is such a profoundly embedded feature of contemporary life and literature.

Our predilection for the sad ending can be traced to the stories of Greek mythology and ... to the Bible, in which I read Christ's torture and execution as an allegory of human suffering in general.

The piece was originally going to be called 10 books with a bad ending until it occurred to me that a 'bad' ending could either be one of catastrophe and malevolence, or else one that is ill-conceived or poorly-written. For the purposes of this list, of course, I meant the former, and consequently changed the title to avoid an (admittedly rather satisfying) ambiguity."

Number One on Gwyn's list:

The Bible by various authors

I am thinking specifically of the New Testament here, the gospels, where the protagonist, an illegitimate carpenter from Nazareth, is crucified. By an extraordinary twist of events, this act of crucifixion provided western culture with its predilection for unhappy endings as well as a template for suffering, and a philosophy of childcare and education based on the twin bastions of fear and guilt. The template of the crucifixion presupposes that we all have a personal cross to bear in order to traverse this vale of tears that constitutes our earthly existence. We are told "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life." I don't get it at all. I realise that redemption and eternal life is the pay-off, but what kind of a father sacrifices his own child for an ideal when it is that same father who made up the rules in the first place? And what a horrid way to die, nailed to a cross while stinking legionnaires jibe and scoff. Having said that, it has to be added that the figure of Christ presents the archetype of the wounded healer: what makes you sick can also make you well.

Read about the whole list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best business management books

Ken Roman, the former chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, named the five best books about business management for Opinion Journal.

Number One on the list:

The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker (Harper & Row, 1967).

The Effective Executive is the quintessential guide to management principles by the acknowledged master of the subject, Peter F. Drucker. He defines effectiveness as "a habit ... a complex of practices that can always be learned." Those practices include knowing where time goes, focusing on outcomes rather than work, building on strengths and not weaknesses, and concentrating on a few areas that will produce outstanding results. Drucker once observed that there are not 24 hours in a day but only two or three; the difference between the effective executive and everyone else, he said, is the ability to use those hours productively and "get the right things done."

Read about the other four titles on Roman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top explorer books

Giles Whittell, leader writer for the London Times and author of Extreme Continental: Blowing Hot and Cold Through Central Asia, recently named his top explorer books.

Number One on Whitell's list:

The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta

The great Uzbek shows just what the East thought of the West in the 14th century.

Read about all six titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books about political scoundrels

Sam Coates, political correspondent for the London Times, named six top books about political scoundrels earlier this month.

The list is of course U.K.-centric, and a mix of the factual and fictional.

Number six on Coates' list:

House of Cards by Michael Dobbs

Francis Urquhart would stop at nothing to become PM in Thatcher-era satire.

I haven't read the book, but the television version is brilliant stuff. Ian Richardson as "F.U." (as the tabloids like to call Francis Urquhart) is at the top of his game.

Read Coates' entire list.

--Marshal Zeringue