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21 December 2009
Tim Key's top 10 bite-size books
1. Incidences by Daniil Kharms
2. Anthropology by Dan Rhodes
3. 100 Facts About Pandas by David O'Doherty, Claudia O'Doherty and Mike Ahern
4. Elephant by Raymond Carver
5. Schott's Miscellany by Ben Schott
6. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
7. This Book Will Change Your Life by Benrik
8. Facts and Fancies by Armando Iannucci
9. The Timewaster Letters by Robin Cooper
10. The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd
 
02 December 2009
CJ Box's top 10 US crime novelists who 'own' their territory
1. Washington DC / George Pelecanos - Suggested titles: The Night Gardener, Right As Rain, Hell to Pay.
2. Montana / James Crumley - Suggested titles: The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck, The Wrong Case.
3. Los Angeles / Michael Connelly - Suggested titles: The Harry Bosch novels, starting with The Black Echo.
4. New York and New Jersey / Richard Price - Suggested titles: Lush Life, Clockers, The Wanderers
5. Louisiana / James Lee Burke - Suggested titles: Purple Cane Road, Tin Roof Blowdown.
6. Baltimore / Laura Lippman - Suggested titles: Baltimore Blues, What the Dead Know, To the Power of Three
7. New Mexico / Tony Hillerman - Suggested titles: Skinwalkers, The Thief of Time.
8. Boston / Dennis Lehane - Suggested titles: Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone.
9. Florida / Carl Hiaasen - Suggested titles: Double Whammy, Stormy Weather, Sick Puppy
10. Chicago / Sara Paretsky - Suggested titles: Toxic Shock, Blacklist
 
25 November 2009
David Charters's top 10 books about bankers
1. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
2. Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
3. Free to Trade by Michael Ridpath
4. Black Cabs by John McLaren
5. Freud in the City by David Freud
6. The Great Crash, 1929, by JK Galbraith
7. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
8. Simple But Not Easy: An Autobiographical and Biased Book About Investing by Richard Oldfield
9. The Long and the Short Of It: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren't in the Industry by John Kay
10. Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics by David Smith
 
18 November 2009
Simon Armitage and Tim Dee's top 10 bird poems
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Heron by Paul Farley
The Wren by Norman Nicholson
Sing a Song of Sixpence
The Yellowhammer's Nest by John Clare
The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire
Leda and the Swan by WB Yeats
Cock-Crows by Ted Hughes
The Exposed Nest by Robert Frost
Curlew by Gillian Clarke
 
04 November 2009
Howard Jacobson's top 10 novels of sexual jealousy
1. Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
3. Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Pierre Klossowski
6. Persuasion by Jane Austen
7. Herzog by Saul Bellow
8. The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
10. Othello by Shakespeare
 
30 October 2009
Kevin Jackson's top 10 vampire novels
1. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
2. Fevre Dream by George RR Martin
3. Doctors Wear Scarlet by Simon Raven
4. Fangland by John Marks
5. Salem's Lot by Stephen King
6. Suckers by Anne Billson
7. Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
8. The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein
9. Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
10. Dracula by Bram Stoker
 
28 October 2009
Sandi Toksvig's top 10 unsung heroines
1. Hilda Matheson (1888-1940)
2. Catherine Littlefield Greene (1755-1814)
3. Princess Khutulun (c1251- ?)
4. Queen Vishpla (somewhere between 3500 and 1800 BC)
5. Jerrie Cobb (1931-)
6. Agnodike (Fourth century BC)
7. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
8. Angelika Kauffmann and Mary Moser
9. Enheduanna (c2285-2250BC)
10. Edmonia Lewis (1843–c1900)
 
21 October 2009
Francesca Simon's top 10 antiheroes
1. The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
2. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
3. Just William by Richmal Crompton
4. Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
5. Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans
6. Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
7. Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman
8. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
9. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
10. Paradise Lost by John Milton
 
14 October 2009
Pauline Melville's top 10 revolutionary tales
1. Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
2. Granny Made Me an Anarchist by Stuart Christie
3. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
4. Fight Club by Chuck Palahnuik
5. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
6. The Bacchae by Euripides
7. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
8. Cocaine Nights by JG Ballard
9. Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet
10. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
 
30 September 2009
Susheila Nasta's top 10 cultural journeys
1.The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
2.The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
3. Baumgartner's Bombay by Anita Desai,
4. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
5. Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
6. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
7. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
8. Mr Potter by Jamaica Kincaid
9. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
10. The Emperor's Babe by Bernardine Evaristo
 
16 September 2009
The top 10 Agatha Christie mysteries
1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
2. Peril at End House (1932)
3. Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
4. The ABC Murders (1935)
5. And Then There Were None (1939)
6. Five Little Pigs (1943)
7. Crooked House (1949)
8. A Murder is Announced (1950)
9. Endless Night (1967)
10. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975, but written during the second world war)
 
09 September 2009
Margaret Drabble's top 10 literary landscapes
1. Stonehenge
2. Burslem
3. Goredale Scar
4. Tintern Abbey
5. Tintagel
6. Aldeburgh
7. Godrevy Lighthouse
8. The Quantocks
9. The Lake District
10. Haworth
 
02 September 2009
Helen Rappaport's top 10 books on Lenin
1. Encounters with Lenin by Nikolay Valentinov
2. Lenin: Life and Legacy by Dmitri Volkogonov
3. Memories of Lenin by Nadezhda Krupskaya
4. Days With Lenin by Maxim Gorky
5. On Lenin: Notes Towards a Biography by Leon Trotsky
6. Lenin by Marc Landau-Aldanov
7. Impressions of Lenin by Angelica Balabanoff
8. Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service
9. Three Who Made a Revolution by Bertram D Wolfe
10. The Life of Lenin by Louis Fischer
 
26 August 2009
Selçuk Altun's top 10 Turkish books
1. Mrs Valley's War: The Shelter Stories by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar
2. The Poems of Oktay Rifat by Oktay Rifat
3. Memed, My Hawk by Yaşar Kemal
4 Yaşar Kemal: On his Life and Art by Yaşar Kemal
5. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
6. Istanbul, Memories of a City by Orhan Pamuk
7. Sleeping In the Forest by Sait Faik
8. Night by Bilge Karasu
9. A Mind at Peace by Ahmet H Tanpınar
10. Beyond the Walls, Selected Poems by Nazım Hikmet
 
19 August 2009
Malorie Blackman's top 10 graphic novels for teenagers
1. V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
2. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
3. Sin City: Hell and Back by Frank Miller
4. Chronicles of Wormwood by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows
5. Hellblazer (John Constantine)
6. Black Hole by Charles Burns
7. Troubled Souls by Garth Ennis and John McCrea
8. Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds
9. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
10. Maus by Art Spiegelman
 
12 August 2009
Will Davis's top 10 literary teenagers
1. Deirdre in Round the Bend by Mitzi Dale
2. Gilly Freeborn in Letters of a Lovestruck Teenager by Claire Robertson
3. Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
4. Cherry Vanilla in Sarah by JT LeRoy
5. Orla, Kylah, Chell, Amanda and Fionnula in The Sopranos by Alan Warner
6. Paul Porterfield in The Page Turner by David Leavitt
7. Mark in New Boy by William Sutcliffe
8. Ann Burden in Z for Zachariah by Robert C O'Brien
9. Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
10. Mary in Witch Child by Celia Rees
 
05 August 2009
Linda Buckley-Archer's top 10 time-travelling stories
1. The Time Machine by HG Wells
2. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
3. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
4. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
5. The House on the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier
6. Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
7. Van Loon's Lives by Hendrik Willem van Loon
8. Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson
9. Making History by Stephen Fry
10. How To Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies
 
29 July 2009
Brian Schofield's top 10 books to make your blood boil
1. Strangely Like War by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan
2. Danziger's Britain by Nick Danziger
3. Tourist Season by Carl Hiassen
4. The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
5. The State of Africa by Martin Meredith
6. The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
7. The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennett
8. Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk
9. Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
10. The Earth Shall Weep by James Wilson
11. Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar
 
22 July 2009
Marcus Sedgwick's top 10 tales from cold climes
1 The People's Act of Love by James Meek
2 White Fang by Jack London
3 The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell
4 Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
5 Explorers of the New Century by Magnus Mills
6 The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean
7 Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg
8 On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
9 The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
10 South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton
 
15 July 2009
Jeffery Deaver's top 10 computer novels
1. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
2.The Venus Fix by MJ Rose
3. Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow
4. Home Before Dark by Charles Maclean
5. Death Match by Lincoln Child
6. Thinks by David Lodge
7. Enigma by Robert Harris
8. A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick
9. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
10. The Machine Stops by EM Forster
 
08 July 2009
Chris Hannan's top 10 tales of the American frontier
1. Roughing It by Mark Twain
2. My Antonia by Willa Cather
3. The Plains Across by John D Unruh
4. Close Range by Annie Proulx
5. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
6. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
7. Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
8. Mollie: the Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford 1857-66
9. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
 
01 July 2009
Edward Hogan's top 10 out-of-town tales
1. Close Range by Annie Proulx
2. Union Street by Pat Barker
3. A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
4. Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village by Ronald Blythe
5. Walker Brothers Cowboy by Alice Munro
6. Norma Dolby's Diary: An Account of the Great Miners' Strike by Norma Dolby
7. The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
8. The Collected Stories by William Trevor
9. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody
10. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
 
24 June 2009
Top 10 literary ménages à trois
1. Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
2. Jules et Jim by Henri Pierre Roche
3. Politics by Adam Thirlwell
4. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
5. Three in Love: Ménages à Trois from Ancient to Modern Times by Barbara Foster, Michael Foster and Letha Hadady
6. Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg by Carolyn Cassady
7. The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag
8. Henry and June from the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin
9. Design for Living by Noel Coward
10. The Book of Genesis
 
18 June 2009
Liz Jensen's top 10 environmental disaster stories
1. After London or Wild England by Richard Jefferies
2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
3. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
4. The Lorax by Dr Seuss
5. The Drowned World by JG Ballard
6. The Ice People by Maggie Gee
7. State of Fear by Michael Crichton
8. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
9. The Swarm by Frank Schatzing
10. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
 
10 June 2009
Elise Valmorbida's top 10 books on the migrant experience
1. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
2. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
3. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
4. The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag
5. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
6. Voss by Patrick White
7. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
8. Postcards by Annie Proulx
9. The Credit Draper by J David Simons
10. From There to Here – Sixteen True Tales of Immigration to Britain
 
02 June 2009
Ian MacKenzie's top 10 artworks in novels
1. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
2. Museums and Women by John Updike (from The Early Stories: 1953-1975)
3. The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul
4. Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom
5. A Heart So White by Javier Marías
6. Rome, Naples and Florence by Stendhal
7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
8. See the Other Side by Tatyana Tolstaya (from White Walls)
9. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
10. The Use of Reason by Colm Tóibín (from Mothers and Sons)
 
20 May 2009
Adam Leith Gollner's top 10 fruit scenes
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Book of Genesis
3. The Moon By Whale Light by Diane Ackerman
4. The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
5. The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare
6. The Unveiling of Timbuctoo by Galbraith Welch
7. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics by Edward H Schafer
8. Introduction to Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
9. Saturn by Jakob Lorber
10. The Duchess of Malfi's Apricots and Other Literary Fruits by Robert Palter
 
12 May 2009
Stephen Smith's top 10 subterranean books
1. Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner
2. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
3. The Underground Man by Mick Jackson
4. The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar
5. The Lore of the Land by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson
6. Haweswater by Sarah Hall
7. The Dig by John Preston
8. Selected Caves of Britain and Ireland by Des Marshall & Donald Rust
9. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe
10. The Time Machine by HG Wells
 
06 May 2009
Malcolm Pryce's top 10 expatriate tales
1. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
2. A Woman of Bangkok by Jack Reynolds
3. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
4. The Discovery of Tahiti; a journal of the second voyage of HMS Dolphin round the world under the command of Captain Wallis, RN, in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768, written by her master George Robertson
5. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
6. The Gentleman in the Parlour by Somerset Maugham
7. Thomas Cook European Railway Timetable
8. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
10. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
 
22 April 2009
Brian McGilloway's top 10 modern Irish crime novels
1. The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes
2. The Guards by Ken Bruen
3. Mystery Man by Bateman
4. Darkhouse by Alex Barclay
5. The Midnight Choir by Gene Kerrigan
6. The Big O by Declan Burke
7. Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty
8. Undertow by Arlene Hunt
9. The Anglo-Irish Murders by Ruth Dudley Edwards
10. In The Woods by Tana French
 
14 April 2009
James Runcie's top 10 books about brothers
1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
3. The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson
4. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
5. Goodbye My Brother by John Cheever
6. The Tale of Three Brothers by JK Rowling
7. Four Clever Brothers by The Brothers Grimm
8. Blood Brothers by Willy Russell
9. Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant
10. Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux by Alice Munro
 
08 April 2009
Owen Davies's top 10 grimoires
1. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses
2. The Clavicule of Solomon
3. Petit Albert
4. The Book of St Cyprian
5. Dragon rouge
6. The Book of Honorius
7. The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy
8. The Magus
9. The Necronomicon
10. Book of Shadows
 
01 April 2009
Douglas Kennedy's top 10 books about grief
1. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
2. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis
3. The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
4. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
5. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
6. Stasiland by Anna Funder
7. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
8. First Love by Ivan Turgenev
9. On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
10. The Dead by James Joyce
 
25 March 2009
Benjamin Obler's top 10 fictional coffee scenes
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
2. The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
3. Running Dog by Don DeLillo
4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
5. Good Evening, Mrs And Mr America and All the Ships at Sea by Richard Bausch
6. Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
7. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
8. The Comforters by Muriel Spark
9. George Saunders's short story The Barber's Unhappiness from his collection Pastoralia
10. John Cheever's short story O City of Broken Dreams from The Stories of John Cheever
 
18 March 2009
Laura Lippman's top 10 memorable memoirs
1. Love Story by Ruth McKenney
2. Comfort by Ann Hood
3. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
4. Shock Value by John Waters
5. Leap Days by Katherine Lanpher
6. Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
7. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
8. Great With Child by Beth Ann Fennelly
9. About Alice byCalvin Trillin
10. One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
 
12 March 2009
Camilla Läckberg's top 10 Swedish crime novels
1. The Mind's Eye by Håkan Nesser
2. Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman
3. Missing by Karin Alvtegen
4. Sun Storm by Åsa Larsson
5. The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell
6. Unseen by Mari Jungstedt
7. Shame by Karin Alvtegen
8. Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin
9. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
10. Midvinterblod by Mons Kallentoft (not yet translated)
 
04 March 2009
Leonardo Padura's top 10 Cuban novels
1. Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier (1962, trans. John Sturrock)
2. Cecilia Valdés Or El Angel Hill (Cecilia Valdés) by Cirilo Villaverde (1882, trans. Helen Lane)
3. Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1967, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Donald Gardner)
4. Paradiso by José Lezama Lima (1974, trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) by Alejo Carpentier (1953, trans. Harriet de Onís)
6. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
7. Temporada de ángeles (1983), Lisandro Otero; A Season For Angels, not translated.
8. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Óscar Hijuelos
9. Antes que anochezca (1990), Reinaldo Arenas; Before Night Falls, trans. Dolores M. Koch (1993)
10. El negrero (1933), Lino Novás Calvo; The Slave-trader, not translated
 
25 February 2009
Patrick Tyler's top 10 'eccentric' Middle East books
1 Jerusalem by Amos Elon
2 Ropes of Sand by Wilbur Crane Eveland
3 Secret Soldier by Muki Betser
4 The Chariot of Israel by Harold Wilson
5 A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
6 Living With the Bible by Moshe Dayan
7 A People That Dwells Alone by Yaacov Herzog
8 My Home, My Land by Abu Iyad
9 Warrior by Ariel Sharon
10 The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim
 
18 February 2009
Lindsey Davis's top 10 Roman books
1 Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jérôme Carcopino
2 Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins
3 Rome and Her Empire by Barry Cunliffe
4 Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide by Amanda Claridge
5 The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
6 Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe
7 The Lost World of Pompeii by Colin Amery and Brian Curran Jr
8 Roman Britain by Keith Branigan
9 The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
10 I, Claudius by Robert Graves
 
12 February 2009
Hugh Thomson's top 10 South American journeys
1. The Motorcycle Diaries, A Journey Around South America by Ernesto Che Guevara
2. Mad White Giant by Benedict Allen
3. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss
4. Travels with a Circus by Katie Hickman
5. Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson by Evelyn Waugh
6. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
7. Mornings in Mexico by DH Lawrence
8. In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
9. The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene
10. Keep the River on Your Right by Tobias Schneebaum
 
10 February 2009
John Reader's top 10 potato books
1. History and Social Influence of the Potato by Redcliffe Salaman
2. The Flounder by Gunter Grass
3. Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor
4. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith
5. Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920, by LA Clarkson and E Margaret Crawford
6. The Potato by WG Burton
7. The Potato: Evolution, Biodiversity and Genetic Resources by JG Hawkes
8. Hunting the Wild Potato in the South American Andes by JG Hawkes
9. England's Happiness Increased, or, A sure and easy remedy against all succeeding dear years; by a plantation of the roots called POTATOES by John Forster
10. Cookbooks
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