Top 10 books on the ancient world

Annabel Lyon is a Vancouver fiction writer and teacher. Her books include Oxygen (stories), The Best Thing for You (novellas), All-Season Edie (juvenile novel), and The Golden Mean, her first novel for adults.

At the Guardian, she named her top ten books on the ancient world.

One book on the list:

I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)

Violent, dirty, shocking, funny, erudite, utterly compelling – Graves's account of the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome has become a classic, immortalised in the great 1973 BBC series of the same name. The novel is supposedly the autobiography of the emperor Claudius, who survived to adulthood only by pretending to be an idiot. Graves himself is supposed to have claimed to dislike the books, and wrote them only out of financial need.

Read about the other entries on the list.

I, Claudius also appears on Lindsey Davis' top ten list of Roman books and John Mullan's list of ten of the best poisonings in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about obscure presidents

At the Christian Science Monitor, Randy Dotinga named five great books about obscure presidents.

One title on the list:

Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart (2009)

Andrew Johnson's brief term as vice president of the US began poorly. Very poorly.

He had too much "medicinal" liquor before his inauguration and ended up giving a gloriously addled speech, including the immortal sentence, "What's the name of the secretary of the Navy?"

Within weeks, the humorless and stubborn Johnson was president. To put it mildly, he was not the ideal man to extend the legacy of the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, and it didn't take long for a severely divided Congress to decide he needed to get the heave-ho.

The suspenseful "Impeached" brims with fascinating characters, although profiles in courage – or honor – are hard to find.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: David O. Stewart's Impeached.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 must-read novels of the fall

At The Daily Beast, Janice Kaplan named the ten must-read novels of the fall.

One book to make the grade:

Exley by Brock Clarke

In this oddly brilliant book , a young boy believes his father has gone to Iraq and now lies dying in the local VA hospital. He tries to find Frederick Exley, his father’s favorite author, believing Exley’s bedside presence will save the wounded man. The boy and his psychiatrist alternate as narrators—neither is terribly reliable—and the luminously engaging plot reveals the deceptions we cling to in order to survive. “I’m telling you the truth,” the mother tells her son at the end, to which he replies, “Please don’t.” The long-dead Exley appears, though everyone understands he’s not real, and Clarke’s breathtaking creativity gives unexpected power to his quirky, touching story.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best disguises in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named a list of ten of the best disguises in literature.

One book on the list:

Madame Doubtfire, by Anne Fine

Unemployed actor Daniel Hilliard dresses up as a woman and applies for the job as nanny to his children, who live with his estranged wife Miranda. The elder two of his three children recognise him immediately, though his wife is completely fooled. When she discovers his ruse, she agrees to give him more access.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Val McDermid's top ten Oxford novels

Val McDermid won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for The Mermaids Singing (1995).

Her latest novel released in the US is Fever of the Bone.

For the Guardian, she named her top ten Oxford novels. One title on the list:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I was instantly seduced by Waugh's portrait of the collision between a decent middle-class chap and a dysfunctional bunch of Catholic toffs. Although superficially I had nothing in common with his characters apart from studying at Oxford, I couldn't avoid all sorts of emotional identification with them. This is the quintessential novel of Oxford gilded youth flying too close to the sun.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Learn about the fictional character who McDermid think she most resembles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best memoirs

Gail Caldwell is the author of Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship. The former chief book critic of the Boston Globe, she was in 2001 awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of memoirs. One book on the list:

Dispatches
by Michael Herr (1977)

Every war has its Stephen Crane, its Robert Graves—and Vietnam had Michael Herr. He spent a year in-country in 1967, then nearly a decade turning what he saw there into a surreal narrative of the war's geography, from its napalmed landscape to the craters of a soldier's mind. Soldiers talked to Herr—told him things they hadn't said before or maybe even known. "I should have had 'Born to Listen' written on my helmet," he told me in London in 1988. What Herr dared to write about was war's primal allure: "the death space and the life you found inside it." That he created this gunmetal narrative with a blend of fact and creative memory was acknowledged from the first; his netherland of "truth" mirrored the dream-like quality of the war and influenced its literature for a decade to come.

Read about the other memoirs on the list.

Dispatches appears on Judith Paterson's list of the 10 best books of social concern by journalists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on globalization

Stephen King is HSBC’s Group Chief Economist and the global head of economics and asset allocation research at the bank, where he has worked since 1988. He is the author of Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity, and since 2001 has written a weekly column in The Independent.

For FiveBooks, he discussed five books on globalization with Tom Dannet. One title he mentioned:

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Another huge historical sweep on economic development and, perhaps controversially, this time more a view of why the West has been particularly successful and why other countries have not. I think there’s a danger that recent events may begin to question some of those assumptions, but as a tentative exploration of the issue of economic progress and culture, it’s fascinating.

One of the stories here is about clocks, and how the Europeans would bring their clocks along when it came to trading with China. Europeans used clocks as a coordinating mechanism: what time you arrived for work, and what time you went home in the evening. Whereas the Chinese initially regarded clocks as being almost a decorative toy, so you’d end up with this weird situation throughout China with extremely long hours being worked in the summer and extremely short hours in the winter, which were all determined by the lack of understanding of this particular technology.

I think what’s clever about the book in one sense is that it points out that it’s not just the technology that’s important but how you use it. If you invest in lots of computers, unless you can do something with them and work out how you can become more productive, the computers in themselves are utterly useless. There are lots of examples of this in the world: you have to work out how best to use a technology before investing in it.

Landes believes the Western world has been well placed to exploit new technologies?

Yes, there’s a lot of Enlightenment thinking going on in this particular book. I’m not 100 per cent sure that this still stacks up, because one big challenge to the whole Enlightenment process is the rise of Asia over the last 50-60 years. It has proved to have been successful for a number of decades now, so it does raise some big questions as to whether it’s either the same model and we haven’t understood it, or a different model, in which case it’s a challenge to Western assumptions about liberal democracy, and so on.

New technology can cause tremendous upsets. I think often people forget that the technologies partly explain why it is that some countries have become rich or some others have remained poor or become poor. What of course we don’t know is whether countries that are currently wealthy might subsequently become poor in the future, and I think this is a big question for the West, actually. If China and Brazil and India trade increasingly with each other, and the demographics of the world’s population continue to change in a way that makes the West increasingly unimportant, there are some big questions as to whether the West itself, having unleashed this wonderful new information technology, will go the same way as, say, Islam in the 14th and 15th centuries: of having a technology that has been so disruptive that it makes life much more difficult for the West than it assumed 20 or 30 years ago.

Historically speaking, all empires lose it at some stage.

They do. The one thing you could say is that countries which have recently lost it, like say the UK, or maybe Austria, have remained relatively wealthy. But it may be like the demise of the Roman Empire: it took hundreds of years to fall flat on its face, and maybe we’re seeing the same kind of process in the West. Landes wouldn’t support that view: he’d say there’s a particular model that’s worked well and here are the reasons why. But the lessons from history seem to be that those who think they’re going to be powerful suddenly find that their power has gone. I’m not sure I agree with all of it but it’s a fascinating book, particularly for these examples of how technologies were used in different parts of the world with completely different conclusions.

Read about the other books on King's list.

Also see Moisés Naím's top ten books on globalization.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 5 historical true-crime books of the last decade

For the Christian Science Monitor, Randy Dotinga named five favorite historical true-crime books from the last decade.

One title on his list:

"The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America," by Erik Larson (2003)

One of the best-selling true-crime books of all time, this is a two-headed tale of the glory of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair – stunningly, an estimated 27.5 million people flocked to it – and the misery sown by one of America's first known serial murderers.

In his next true-crime book, "Thunderstruck," Larson tried too hard to blend two disparate topics together. But his approach works perfectly here, with both the World Fair and the murders serving to open the curtain on a new age and a new century, for both better and worse.

If you're ever in Chicago, by the way, you can take tours based on the book and visit the fairgrounds that captured the country's attention.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Ann Rule's five best true-crime books and Sarah Weinman's seven best true crime books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 stories about sisters

Bestselling children's author Cathy Cassidy's books include Dizzy, Driftwood, Indigo Blue, Scarlett, Sundae Girl, Lucky Star, Gingersnaps, and Angel Cake. Her latest novel available in the UK is Cherry Crush, about five very different sisters.

For the Guardian, she named a ten best list of stories about sisters.

One title on the list:

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The story of five teenage sisters in 1970s Michigan … five sisters who each kill themselves as their family disintegrates around them. Narrated by anonymous neighbourhood boys, this is a fascinating, mysterious story that intrigues and confuses.

Read about the other stories on the list.

Also see Zoë Heller's five best list of literary portraits of sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven new books for the spiritually starved

For The Daily Beast, Spencer Bailey tagged seven new books for the spiritually starved.

One title on the list:

God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter by Stephen Prothero

God is Not One is 2010’s must-read for anyone religiously illiterate. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the author Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University, also wrote the 2007 bestseller Religious Literacy.) Here Prothero outlines clichéd American stereotypes (“Buddhism conjures up the Dali Lama and his Nobel Peace Prize, but Islam conjures up Osama bin Laden and his assault rifle”), then puts these ignorant, usually misguided beliefs to rest. More than an educational guide, Prothero’s book is a lively retrospective of today’s major religions: Islam (“the path of submission”); Christianity (“so elastic that it seems a stretch to use this term to cover the beliefs and behaviors of Pentecostals in Brazil, Mormons in Utah, Roman Catholics in Italy, and the Orthodox in Moscow”); Confucianism (“a philosophy, ethic, or way of life”); Hinduism (“an over-the-top religion of big ideas, bright colors, soulful mantras, spicy foods, complex rituals, and wild stories”); Buddhism (“more about experience than doctrine”); Yoruba religion (“a system of communication and exchange between human beings and the divine”); Judaism (“unusually cacophonous”); Daoism (“a tradition of sacred mountains and pilgrimages and festivals and wine and incense and hymns and sexual practices and alternative medicine and martial arts and meandering conversations”)—and, for good measure, atheism (“a postreligious utopia”). Don’t know much about the world’s faiths? Get a copy now.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best umbrellas in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named a list of ten of the best umbrellas in literature.

One book on the list:

Amerika, by Franz Kafka

Young Karl Rossmann is on a ship arriving in New York. As it docks he realises that he has left his precious umbrella below deck. He goes below to find it, and soon gets lost. The umbrella search becomes duly Kafkaesque, leading to encounters with a series of odd individuals who will shape his fate.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Amerika is one of Arthur Phillips' six favorite books set in places that their authors never visited.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best World War II memoirs

Andrew Roberts is the author of Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of World War II memoirs.

One title on the list:

Quartered Safe Out Here
by George MacDonald Fraser

George MacDonald Fraser, British author of the Flashman series of novels, fought in the 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division of the 14th Army during the siege of Meiktila and the battle of Pyawbwe in Burma. He believed, probably correctly, that soldiering in Burma rivaled flying in the RAF's Bomber Command as "the worst ticket you could draw in the lottery of active service." This was so not just because of the Japanese enemy; there were also 15-inch poisonous centipedes, malaria, "spiders the size of plates," typhus, jungle sores on the wrists and ankles, dysentery, and leeches. In terse, unsentimental language, Fraser's superb war memoir, "Quartered Safe Out Here," relates how the soldiers in his close-knit company fought their battles, mourned their friends and simply tried to survive from day to day.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue