Ten books that challenge what we think we know as "history"

Peter Dimock is the author of the novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time.

For Publishers Weekly, he came up with ten "works of literature, written or published between the 1927 and 2001, whose authors seem intent upon jolting their readers into radical distrust of the conventional history that they had been given through which to experience their present," including:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This novel puts an end to the perennial competition among American authors to award themselves, or to be awarded, the crown for having written “the great American novel.” Beloved puts an end to the competition not by winning it (although it may have done that too), but by refusing the competition itself as a limiting and stupid enterprise to begin with. History is not a vehicle for literature. What happens is what matters. Beloved ends this way: “This is not a story to pass on.... By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

Beloved also appears on Stuart Evers's top ten list of homes in literature, David W. Blight's list of five outstanding novels on the Civil War era, John Mullan's list of ten of the best births in literature, Kit Whitfield's top ten list of genre-defying novels, and at the top of one list of contenders for the title of the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top coming-of-age stories

Emily Bazelon's new book is Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.

For The Daily Beast, she named her five favorite coming-of-age stories.  One title on the list:

Moon Over Manifest
by Clare Vanderpool

This is one of the best books I’ve listened to with my kids and husband. Another Newbury winner, it unfurls as a historical detective story, moving back and forth between the Depression-era present in the made-up town of Manifest, Kansas, and the World War I past a generation earlier. In the audio version, different actors read various characters’ voices, adding to the drama. I especially love the relationship between the girl narrator, Abilene Tucker, and Miss Sadie, the wise older seer of Manifest. Their bond shows, without ever having to tell, what a lost child can gain in love and knowledge from someone who takes on the role of adoptive grandparent.

Read about the other books on the list.

Read "Don’t Be a Bystander: How to teach kids to step in and stop bullies in their tracks" by Emily Bazelon.

Writers Read: Emily Bazelon (September 2007).

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Mankiewicz's six favorite books

Among Ben Mankiewicz's six favorite books are three novels perfect for the screen, including:

Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard.

Django Unchained is a blast, but Quentin Tarantino's best film remains Jackie Brown, adapted from this novel. In Tarantino's skillful screenplay, Leonard's signature flair for dialogue comes through.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see: Top 25 book to film adaptations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top novels of the literary life

D.J. Taylor was born in 1960, went to Norwich School and St John's College, Oxford, and is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. He has written nine novels, the most recent being Derby Day (2011), At the Chime of a City Clock (2010), Ask Alice (2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006).

Taylor is also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s (1989) and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945 (1993). His journalism appears in the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, The Tablet, the Spectator, the New Statesman and, anonymously, in Private Eye.

For the Wall Street Journal he named five top novels of the literary life, including:

New Grub Street
by George Gissing (1891)

A fastidious classical scholar with a fraught emotional life who found himself compelled to make a living out of writing fiction, Gissing loaded this intensely felt study of the London literary bourse of the 1880s with boxcars full of autobiographical freight. Edwin Reardon, his diffident and humbly born hero, has a freak success with a novel. On the strength of this he marries an ambitious girl called Amy (who mistakenly assumes that she has hitched herself to a genius) and instantly falls prey to writer's block. All this is observed by the couple's young friend Jasper Milvain, a no-nonsense journalist unburdened by artistic scruples who writes "for the market" and lectures Edwin on the necessity of producing what the public wants. Behind the central pairing of Reardon and Milvain lurks a long procession of minor characters in hapless thrall to the dictates of the commercial behemoth that they serve and a pointed little fable about the difficulties of pursuing your creative vision in a world where art has become commodified. No prizes for guessing who, once the Reardons' marriage collapses and Reardon dies, marries the widow.

Read about the other books on Taylor's list.

Also see D.J. Taylor's top 10 literary parodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten animal stories

Sarah Lean is the author of A Dog Called Homeless and A Horse for Angel.

One of her top ten animal stories, as told to the Guardian:

The Call of The Wild by Jack London

Buck is a domestic dog who, because of his size and strength, is forcefully recruited as a sled dog. Buck's struggle is to adapt from domesticity to the brutal life he now leads and to overcome the difficulties he faces from people, other dogs and the harsh environment. But ultimately it's the reflection on how Buck reverts to his instincts to survive and triumph that makes this powerful.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Call of the Wild is among Ben Frederick's eleven essential books for dog lovers, Megan Miranda's top ten books set in a wintry landscape, Jill Hucklesby's top 10 books about running away, Charlie English's top ten snow books, and Thomas Bloor's top ten tales of metamorphosis. It appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best wolves in literature and Alice-Azania Jarvis's reading list on dogs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on crossing cultures

Pico Iyer is the author of several books about cultures converging, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, Abandon, and, most recently, The Man Within My Head.

One of his five top books on crossing cultures, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje (1992)

There's no leading character in Ondaatje's candlelit labyrinth of a novel and nothing like a dominant point of view. Instead, he ushers four wounded characters into a bombed-out convent, in 1944, and—at a time when people are dying for the passports they carry or the race they represent—allows them to interact without any of them caring or much noticing where the others are from. The English patient, almost fatally, isn't English; the one who is risking his life to defuse bombs for the British army is a Sikh, from India. The gypsy called Caravaggio has lost both thumbs to an Italian; and Hana, the nurse who tends to them all, has a name that could come from anywhere. It's wildly romantic and beautiful and very tough-minded, of course; but every time I go back to the novel, I'm reminded how much it's also revolutionary, charting the outlines of a mongrel society in which all simple divisions blur. If you think this is pure fiction, recall that in Toronto, Ondaatje's base for 40 years, the average citizen today was born in a foreign country.

Read about the other books on Iyer's list.

The English Patient also made John Mullan's list of ten of the best deserts in literature and Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpiece stories that worked as films.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top rock-and-roll books

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Paul Muldoon, whose new collection is The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics, picked his favorite rock-and-roll books for The Daily Beast.

One title on the list:

The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll
By Preston Lauterbach

Among those precursors to whom Keith Richards is deeply indebted are the blues guitarists so memorably summoned up in Preston Lauterbach’s The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll, including his near namesake Little Richard.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Chitlin' Circuit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on making movies

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on making movies:

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
by Peter Biskind

Peter Biskind's long, strange trip of interviews with the flower children who comprised the "New Hollywood" auteur youth movement in American motion pictures -- spanning from the late 1960s until the studio system’s return to power in the early '80s -- proved a powder keg upon publication. Either a debauched masterpiece or the greatest tabloid ever written, Easy Riders is utterly intimate, insightful, and scathingly honest about the films and chaotic lives of everyone from perennial mainstays Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Jack Nicholson to the era’s eccentric geniuses Hal Ashby, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture). Despite showing Hollywood’s finest at their best and worst, Biskind proves a thoughtful, dignified curator with a flair for capturing great scenes and an ardor for these artists who forever changed film culture.

Read about the other books on the list.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is on Leo Braudy's list of the five best books on Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

The seven best books by U.S. presidents

Allen Barra's latest book is Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee.

He named a list of the seven best books by U.S. presidents, including:

The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Adrienne Koch and William Peden

A treasure for lovers of American history as well as aficionados of Augustan prose, this is a superb combination of both personal writings (biographical sketches and more than 200 letters) as well as public papers including his two inaugural addresses and both the original and revised versions of the Declaration of Independence. The best one-volume Jefferson available.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books on people who have beaten the odds

Keith O’Brien is a former reporter for the Boston Globe.

His new book is Outside Shot: Big Dreams, Hard Times, and One County's Quest for Basketball Greatness.

For The Week magazine, O'Brien named his six favorite books about people who have beaten the odds, including:

King of the World by David Remnick

When Muhammad Ali dies, obituaries will recount his flair and his fists, his career statistics, and his penchant for poetry. We'll hear interviews with people who once knew Ali, the kid from Louisville who made good. Mostly, though, people should just read Remnick's book.

Read about the other books O'Brien tagged.

View the video trailer for Outside Shot, and visit Keith O'Brien's website and Facebook page.

The Page 99 Test: Outside Shot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top mythical creatures

Cressida Cowell lives in London with her husband, Simon; their children Maisie, Clementine, and Alexander; and two cats, Lily and Baloo. In addition to the How to Train Your Dragon series, she has also written and illustrated picture books including Hiccup, the Viking Who Was Seasick, Little Bo Peep's Library Book, and That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown.

For the Guardian, she named her top ten mythical creatures, including:

Witches: Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline l'Engle

Mrs Whatsit looks like a tramp, was once a star, and can transform herself into a centaur, among other things, so she is no ordinary witch. She is exactly 2,379,152,497 years old, and along with her friends Mrs Who and Mrs Which they are fighting the power of "the Black Thing". She has a fine way with words: "Wild nights are my glory," Mrs Whatsit said. "I just got caught in a down draft and blown off course." "Life is like a sonnet", Mrs Whatsit said. "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself."

Other great witches: The Grand High Witch from The Witches by Roald Dahl (this bald horror will scare your socks off), The White Witch from the Narnia stories, by CS Lewis, (I'd like to see her in a fight with the Grand High Witch – I'm not sure who'd win) Madam Mim from 'The Sword in the Stone' by TH White.

Read about the other entries on Cowell's list.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of Steve Cole's top ten space books for kids of all ages.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Dreyfus's six best books

In the film Notting Hill, James Dreyfus played Martin, the ineffective assistant at William's (Hugh Grant) bookshop.

One of Dreyfus's six favorite books, as told to the Daily Express:

JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR
by Salman Rushdie

I’m not a Rushdie fan but I was fascinated to read what happened in the 10 years after he had the fatwa put on him.

People didn’t realise that he had to find safe houses and pay for them himself. He’s also very open about how miserable he can be. I was hooked.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue