Five top historical YA novels about adventurousness women

At the BN Teen Blog Nicole Hill tagged five top historical YA novels about adventurousness and independent-minded women, including:

Under a Painted Sky, by Stacey Lee

The drama in Under a Painted Sky works precisely because of its protagonists: two girls on the fringes of 19th-century American society. There’s Samantha, a 15-year-old Chinese American who wants nothing more than to pursue a music career. And then there’s Annamae, a 16-year-old runaway slave who longs for freedom. Together, they shed their unwelcome pasts on the Oregon Trail, disguising themselves as boys for safety and making some unexpected allies. It’s a striking tale of adventure, danger, and survival.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Under a Painted Sky is among John Hansen's ten must-read YA novels you've probably never heard of, Sarah Skilton's top six YA books featuring cross-cultural friendships, and Dahlia Adler's seven top YA novels about best friendship.

My Book, The Movie: Under a Painted Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five worst fictional characters to invite to Thanksgiving

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Jill Boyd tagged five of the worst fictional characters to invite to Thanksgiving. One entry on the list:

Dr. Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs)

And you thought it was going to be difficult to accommodate the dietary needs of your vegan cousin…

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Silence of The Lambs is among Monique Alice's six great fictional evil geniuses, sixteen book-to-movie adaptations that won Academy Awards. Red Dragon appears on Kimberly Turner's list of the ten most disturbing sociopaths in literature and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best dragons in literature and ten of the best tattoos in literature, and the (U.K.) Telegraph 110 best books; Andre Gross says "it should be taught as [a text] in Thriller 101."

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten genre-bending books

Lincoln Michel's new story collection is Upright Beasts.

One of his ten favorite genre-bending books, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem made his name as genre mash-up master with a string of books that combined two genres to form new literary hybrids. His best of those early books is Gun, with Occasional Music, which takes the hardboiled prose style of Raymond Chandler and drops it in a Philip K. Dick-esque paranoid SF world. Conrad Metcalf is hired by a man who says he is being framed for murder. The case leads Metcalf into a world of memory-suppressing drugs, genetically-engineered mob muscle, and Karma debit cards. Above all, Gun, with Occasional Music is a plain old fun read, and Lethem’s wit shines on every page.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five fabulous food-focused works

At B & N Reads Jenny Shank tagged five top books to get you in the mood to eat, including:

The Devil’s Larder, by Jim Crace

Crace, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors, turns his attention toward food in 2001’s The Devils Larder. The book consists of 64 short, surprising tales that all revolve around food in some unexpected way, including a story in which a daughter asks her mother, “Do you think that pasta tastes the same in other people’s mouths,” and they experiment to find out. “The finest food, like the best of marriages, is bound to break the rules,” Crace writes.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Barry's six favorite books

Kevin Barry is the author of the highly acclaimed novel, City of Bohane, and two short-story collections, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. His new novel is Beatlebone.

One of Barry's six favorite books, as shared with The Week magazine:

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

I risk the wrath of O'Connorians everywhere when I suggest that there's a particular time in life when her short stories have the most charge or reverb, and it's in one's late teens or early 20s. That was when I read this collection, and I was awed by the dense emotional humidity of the world it depicted.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Everything That Rises Must Converge is one of four books that changed David Vann.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten wilderness adventures

Alexander Yates was born in Haiti and grew up in Mexico, Bolivia, and the Phillipines. He is the author of the critically acclaimed adult novel Moondogs and his debut YA novel, The Winter Place. He lives with his wife in Hanoi, Vietnam. One of the author's top ten wilderness adventures, as shared at the Guardian:

Wilderness by Roddy Doyle

Beyond having a title that makes it perfectly suited for this list, Wilderness lands at the intersection of two of my favorite things - the winter forests of Finland, and the fiction of Roddy Doyle. At once a family story and an adventure in the snowbound woods, Doyle’s novel follows three children navigating very different wild spaces. Brothers Tom and Johnny have the more straightforward adventure, racing through the woods of Lapland on dogsled to rescue their mother on a winter safari gone awry. Half-sister Gráinne, on the other hand, has stayed home in Dublin to meet the mother who long since abandoned her. It’s a beautiful little novel, one that captures not only the exhilaration of the boys as they course into the darkness, but the bewildering process of growing up and coming to terms with past hurts.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top Nordic noir novels

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well. One of Somers's five top Nordic noir titles, as shared at B & N Reads:

The Keeper of Lost Causes, by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Adler-Olsen is Denmark’s bestselling novelist, and has lately been taking the world by storm. In The Keeper of Lost Causes he creates Department Q, a police division assigned to work on unsolved cases. Carl Mørck, who has been in a personal tailspin ever since a shooting gone wrong, is assigned to lead the division, with his first case centering on the five-year-old disappearance of a politician everyone assumes is dead. Even as the investigation unveils a shocking crime, the real attraction is Mørck himself, a man ruled by curiosity and written as a fully-fleshed out, haunted human being. He’s a character who will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best Vladimir Nabokov books

Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, wrote an MA thesis that Vladimir Nabokov called “brilliant” and a PhD thesis that Véra Nabokov thought the best thing written about her husband to date. His biography of Nabokov won awards on four continents; his criticism has been translated into eighteen languages. He has edited Nabokov's English-language novels, autobiography, butterfly writings, and translations from Russian poetry. Boyd is the editor of Letters to Véra.

One entry on his list of the ten best Vladimir Nabokov books, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Pale Fire (1962)

Crystalline perfection within fractured form makes for what has been called the world’s first and best hypertext novel, and the greatest novel of its century. An Appalachian campus poet’s long autobiographical poem is commandeered and annotated line by line by his insanely egoistic neighbour, whose notes foreground himself and Zembla rather than poem and poet. A torrent of stories, a magic whirl of opposites, poetry and prose, realism and untrammelled fancy, solid homeliness and wild exile, stasis and haste, sanity and madness, serenity and despair, hilarity and heartbreak. Beneath the radiant surface that dazzles from the first lie endless depths and echoes, sunken cities with trapdoors into more mysteries and wonders.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Pale Fire's John Shade is among John Mullan's ten best fictional poets. The novel appears among David J. Peterson 's five best books with invented languages, Jane Harris's five best psychological mysteries and Edward Docx's top ten deranged characters. It is one of Tracy Kidder's six best books as well as the novel Charles Storch would save for last. It is one of "Six Memorable Books About Writers Writing" yet it disappointed Ha Jin upon rereading.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books that give women their apocalyptic due

Jackie Hatton is the author of Flesh and Wires, a post-apocalyptic, post-alien novel that imagines women as the agents of their own destiny. One of her five top books that give women their apocalyptic due as shared at Tor.com:

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

Almost everyone is dead of an unknown plague that returns like a fever every now and again. There are no more live births. Only one in ten survivors are women, many of them shackled to gangs of men who use them for sex. Most of the world has devolved into savagery. Decent men and free women are rare and vulnerable creatures, safe only in awful and total isolation. Danger lurks in desolate corners and boldly stalks the empty highways. Enter the unnamed midwife, dressed like a man, armed like a cowboy, capable of surviving on her own and sometimes willing to save others. Written both in the first and the third person (a slightly unnerving literary device that offers both emotional proximity and critical distance) this is a strikingly powerful story of one woman’s physical and emotional resourcefulness under the most dire of circumstances. An apocalyptic page-turner that picks up where Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale left off.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten celebrity appearances in fiction

John O’Farrell's latest book is There’s Only Two David Beckhams. Among his top ten celebrity appearances in fiction, as shared at the Guardian:

James Joyce in Any Human Heart by William Boyd (2002)

This is the imagined memoir of a British writer, Logan Mountstuart, whose life spans most of the 20th century. Boyd uses these journals as a way of interrogating the idea of celebrity, particularly literary celebrity, and on his travels he comes across various authors and well-known people, including James Joyce in Paris. He makes the Irish legend laugh and Joyce informs him he will have to steal that joke – something I’ve had more than one celebrity say to me.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Any Human Heart also appears among Eoin Colfer's six favorite books and John Mullan's ten best novels about novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight fantastical airborne societies

David Dalglish's books include, Skyborn, the first installment of his all new fantasy series. One title on his list of eight top airborne societies in fantasy fiction, as shared at the B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells

Like many flying islands and cities, those in the Three Worlds, home to Wells’ Books of the Raksura, are buoyed by magical rocks. Naturally, some of the (many and varied) earthbound humanoids have harnessed their power (the rocks retain their anti-gravity properties even when removed from the islands) to power flying boats. Moon, a Raksura (a race of shapeshifting humanoids) without familial ties, is ostracized by his adopted tribe, and his quest for a place to call home sets him off on a series of grand adventures.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six YA books with a not-so-conventional approach to family ties

At the B&N Teen blog Alyssa Sheinmel tagged six YA books that explore an unconventional approach to family ties, including:

Love Letters to the Dead, by Ava Dellaira

Laurel’s sister May died young, so when the new assignment in Laurel’s English class is to write a letter to a dead person, Laurel chooses someone else who died young: Kurt Cobain, May’s favorite musician. The entire novel is a series of letters from Laurel to people who died too soon, people like Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, and even Amelia Earhart. In her letters, Laurel reveals what it’s like to navigate life without her beloved sister. She writes about high school and friends, about her fragile family life and falling in love for the first time. But all along, you know the person she’s really talking to, the person she’s really trying to understand, the person for whom she has a million unanswered questions, is her sister, May. It’s only when Laurel confronts the truth about what happened when May wasn’t looking out for her that Laurel can begin to come to terms with her sister’s death, and accept her sister as the amazing but imperfect person she was.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue