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30 December 2010
John Sutherland's top 10 books about books
1. Aristotle, The Poetics (Ingram Bywater translation)
2. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966)
3. Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? (1980)
4. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1978)
5. Roland Barthes, S/Z (1977: Richard Miller translation)
6. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (revised edition, 2000)
7. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)
8. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)
9. Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (1963)
10. Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey (1988)
 
22 December 2010
Nikesh Shukla's top 10 Anglo-Asian books
1. Hanif Kureishi - The Black Album (Faber)
2. Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions (Penguin)
3. Sarfraz Manzoor - Greetings from Bury Park (Bloomsbury)
4. Sathnam Sanghera - The Boy with the Topknot (Penguin)
5. Helen Walsh - Once Upon a Time In England (Canongate)
6. Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul (Canongate)
7. Anjali Joseph - Saraswati Park (Fourth Estate)
8. Gautam Malkani - Londonstani (Fourth Estate)
9. Rajeev Balasubramanyam - In Beautiful Disguises (Bloomsbury)
10. William Sutcliffe - Are You Experienced? (Penguin)
 
15 December 2010
Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction
10. Platform by Michel Houellebecq (2003)
9. The Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
8. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982)
7. Thongs by Alexander Trocchi (1955)
6. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence (1928)
4. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)
3. The Story of the Eye by George Bataille (1928)
2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
 
08 December 2010
Anne Holt's top 10 female detectives
1. Barbara Havers
2. Modesty Blaise
3. Bertha Cool
4. Miss Marple
5. Lisbeth Salander
6. Annika Bengtzon
7. Nancy Drew
8. Mrs Adela Brady
9. Anne-kin Halvorsen
10. Merrily Watkins
 
17 November 2010
Maxim Jakubowski's top 10 crime locations
1. Los Angeles in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939)
2. London in Derek Raymond's I was Dora Suarez (1990)
3. New Orleans in James Lee Burke's The Neon Rain (1987)
4. Paris in Fred Vargas's Have Mercy On Us All (2001)
5. Bologna in Barbara Baraldi's The Girl With the Crystal Eyes (2008)
6. Brighton in Peter James's Dead Simple (2005)
7. Miami in Charles Willeford's Miami Blues (1984)
8. San Francisco in Joe Gores's Spade and Archer (2009)
9. Oxford in Colin Dexter's The Dead Of Jericho (1981)
10. New York in Lawrence Block's Small Town (2003)
 
10 November 2010
Anna Shevchenko's top 10 novels set in Moscow
1. Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin (Moscow in 1598)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Moscow from 1810-1813)
3. Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (Moscow in 1900)
4. The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov (Moscow in 1927)
5. Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Moscow in 1933)
6. The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Moscow in 1949)
7. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Moscow in 1981)
8. Generation 'П' (published as Babylon in the UK) by Victor Pelevin (Moscow in the early 1990s
9. The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (Moscow in the late 1990s)
10. Icon by Frederick Forsyth (Moscow in 1999)
 
04 November 2010
Jennifer Lynn Barnes's top 10 supernatural families
1. The Weasleys (the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling)
2. Nick and Alan Ryves (The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan)
3. Paige, Lucas, and Savannah (Women of the Otherworld series by Kelley Armstrong)
4. The Sharpe family (White Cat by Holly Black)
5. The Pevensies (the Narnia series by CS Lewis)
6. The Cullens (Twilight by Stephenie Meyer)
7. Stefan and Damon Salvatore (The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith)
8. The Stackhouses (The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris)
9. The Murry family (A Wrinkle in Time quartet by Madeleine L'Engle)
10. The Peltiers (the Dark Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon)
 
27 October 2010
Kate Mosse's top 10 ghost stories
1. "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)
2. "The Signalman" by Charles Dickens (1866)
3. "At Chrighton Abbey" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1871)
4. "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" by MR James (1894)
5. "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James (1898)
6. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood (1912)
7. "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare (1912)
8. "Bewitched" by Edith Wharton (1925)
9. "The Ghosts" by Antonia Barber (1969)
10. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1982)
 
20 October 2010
Charles Yu's top 10 time travel books
1. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
2. "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges
3. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
4. The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
5. The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
7. "—All You Zombies—" by Robert Heinlein
8. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco
9. "An example of a new type of cosmological solution of Einstein's field equations of gravitation" by Kurt Gödel (Rev. Mod. Phys. 21: 447–450.)
10. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
 
14 October 2010
William Fotheringham's top 10 cycling novels
1. The Wheels of Chance by HG Wells
2. Cat by Freya North
3. Bad to the Bone by James Waddington
4. The Rider by Tim Krabbé
5. The Yellow Jersey by Ralph Hurne
6. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
7. Serse e la Bestia by Mauro Gorrino
8. The Big Loop by Claire Huchet Bishop
9. Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome
10. The Adventure of the Priory School by Arthur Conan Doyle
 
06 October 2010
Nicholas Royle's top 10 writers on the telephone
1. Mark Twain (1835-1910)
2. Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
3. Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
4. Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)
5. Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
6. Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
7. JD Salinger (1919-2010)
8. Frank O'Hara (1926-66)
9. Raymond Carver (1939-88)
10. Hélène Cixous (1937-)
 
29 September 2010
Annabel Lyon's top 10 books on the ancient world
1. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf (1978)
2. Dragonflies by Grant Buday (2008)
3. Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault (1969)
4. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
5. The Moon in the Cloud by Rosemary Harris (1968)
6. Plato's Symposium (385-380BC)
7. Aeschylus's Oresteia, translated by Ted Hughes (1998)
8. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson (2002)
9. The Gathering Night by Margaret Elphinstone (2009)
10. The Centaur by John Updike (1963)
 
24 September 2010
Val McDermid's top 10 Oxford novels
1. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
2. The Way Through the Woods by Colin Dexter
3. The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
4. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears
5. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
6. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
7. Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman
8. Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin
9. The Lessons by Naomi Alderman
10. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
 
22 September 2010
Cathy Cassidy's top 10 stories about sisters
1. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
2. The Twelve Dancing Princesses by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Jane Ray
3. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
6. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
7. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
8. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
10. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
 
13 September 2010
Philip Ardagh's top 10 children's books by Roald Dahl
1. The Twits
2. Matilda
3. The Witches
4. James and the Giant Peach
5. George's Marvellous Medicine
6. Fantastic Mr Fox
7. The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me
8. Esio Trot
9. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
10. The BFG
 
08 September 2010
Charlie Higson's top 10 horror books
1. The Watcher by Charles Maclean (out of print but Amazon and Abebooks have copies)
2. The Shining by Stephen King
3. The Drive-In by Joe R Lansdale
4. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
5. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
6. Pan Books Of Horror
7. Uncle Montague's Tales Of Terror by Chris Priestley
8. The Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris
9. Ghost stories by MR James
10. Don't Look Now/The Birds by Daphne du Maurier
 
01 September 2010
Mark Pilkington's top 10 books about UFOs
1. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J Ruppelt
2. Flying Saucer Pilgrimage by Bryant and Helen Reeve
3. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky by Carl Jung
4. The UFO Experience By J Allen Hynek
5. The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel
6. Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallée
7. Report on Communion by Ed Conroy
8. Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature by William Corliss
9. The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen
10. Out of the Shadows by David Clarke and Andy Roberts
 
18 August 2010
Stuart Clark's top 10 approachable astronomy books
1. The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy
2. Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel
3. The Book Nobody Read by Owen Gingerich
4. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos by Dennis Overbye
5. Project Orion by George Dyson
6. Dragonfly by Bryan Burrough
7. The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler
8. Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife
9. The Very First Light by John C Mather and John Boslough
10. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip S Thorne
 
11 August 2010
Karl Marlantes's top 10 war stories
1. The Iliad by Homer
2. The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane
3. Egil's Saga
4. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
5. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
6. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
7. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
8. In Parenthesis by David Jones
9. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
10. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
 
04 August 2010
Patrick Cramsie's top 10 graphic design books
1. Notes on Book Design by Derek Birdsall
2. The Printed Picture by Richard Benson
3. The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces by Jaspert, Berry and Johnson
4. Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography by Christopher Burke
5. Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago by Hans Wingler
6. Design without Boundaries: Visual Communication in Transition by Rick Poynor
7. Paul Rand: A Designer's Art by Paul Rand
8. The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art by Ernst Gombrich
9. The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher
10. The Passport by Saul Steinberg
 
29 July 2010
Ali Shaw's top 10 transformation stories
1. The Violoncello by Dan Rhodes, from Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love
2. Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes
3. The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen, from Fairy Tales
4. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
6. The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino, from Our Ancestors
7. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
8. Royal Jelly by Roald Dahl, from Tales of the Unexpected
9. Hans-My-Hedgehog by the Brothers Grimm, from The Complete Fairy Tales
10. The Tiger's Bride by Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber
 
21 July 2010
Greg Baxter's top 10 memento mori
Death of Death: "Asthma" by Seneca
Death of Style: The Confessions by St Augustine
Death of Wisdom: Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Death of Embarrassment: Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
Death of Forgiveness: "Death" by Lu Xun
Death of Power: "Street Haunting: A London Adventure" by Virginia Woolf
Death of Literature: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Death of an Elephant: "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
Death of the Epigone: "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter" by EM Cioran
Death of Manipulation: "Equal in Paris" by James Baldwin
 
08 July 2010
Richard Francis's top 10 pubs in literature
1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (late 14th century)
2. Henry lV, Parts One and Two, by William Shakespeare (late 1590s)
3. Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens (1864-5)
4. Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy (1874)
5. The History of Mr Polly, by HG Wells (1910)
6. The Waste Land by TS Eliot (1922)
7. The Mulliner Stories of PG Wodehouse (from 1927 onwards)
8. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton (1929, 1932, 1934)
9. Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier (1936)
10. Last Orders by Graham Swift (1996)
 
05 July 2010
Robin Ince's top 10 truly bad books
1. Sign of the Speculum by Jessica Russell Gaver
2. Temptation in a Private Zoo by Anthony Dekker
3. Major Major by Terry Major-Ball
4. The Twentieth Plane: A Psychic Revelation by Albert Durrant Watson
5. Crabs on the Rampage (and the other five) by Guy N Smith
6. The Book of the Netherland Dwarf by Denise Cumpsty
7. Elvis: His Life and Times in Poetry and Lines by Joan B West
8. Godless by Ann Coulter
9. The Secrets of Picking up Sexy Girls by ??
10. How to Marry the Man of your Choice by Margaret Kent
 
30 June 2010
Michael Stanley's top 10 African crime novels
1. Murder at Government House by Elspeth Huxley
2. Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
3. Song Dog by James McClure
4. Instruments of Darkness by Robert Wilson
5. The Screaming of the Innocent by Unity Dow
6. The Mission Song by John Le Carré
7. Devils Peak by Deon Meyer
8. Blood Rose by Margie Orford
9. Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey
10. Zulu by Caryl Férey
 
23 June 2010
Jennie Rooney's top 10 women travellers in fiction
1. Aunt Augusta in Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
2. Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
3. Miss Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View by EM Forster
4. The Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
5. Hortense in Small Island by Andrea Levy
6. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
7. The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
8. Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
9. Orleanna Price and her daughters in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
10. Wendy Darling in Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie
 
17 June 2010
Melvin Burgess's top 10 books written for teenagers
1. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Robert Cormier
2. Postcards from No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers
3. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
4. Junk by Melvin Burgess
5. Skellig by David Almond
6. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
7. Martyn Pig by Kevin Brooks
8. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
9. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
 
09 June 2010
Mihir Bose's top 10 football books
1. The Football Man: People and Passions in Soccer by Arthur Hopcraft
2. Soccer Syndrome: From the Primaeval Forties by John Moynihan
3. The Glory Game by Hunter Davies
4. All Played Out: The full story of Italia '90 by Pete Davies
5. Among The Thugs by Bill Buford
6. Only a Game?: The Diary of a Professional Footballer by Eamon Dunphy
7. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
8. Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football by Tom Bower
9. The Last Game: Love, Death and Football by Jason Cowley
10. The Ball is Round by David Goldblatt
 
02 June 2010
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's top 10 20th-century gothic novels
1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
2. Mysteries of Winterthurn by Joyce Carol Oates
3. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
4.  Double Indemnity by James M Cain
5. Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg
6. The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
7. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
8. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter
9. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
10. Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
 
26 May 2010
Tony Parsons' top 10 troubled males in fiction
1. Peter Pan in Peter Pan and Wendy by JM Barrie
2. Magwitch in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
3. Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in The Rye by JD Salinger
4. Dean Moriarty in On The Road by Jack Kerouac
5. Jake in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
6. James Bond in You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
7. Jim in Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard
8. The Man in The Road by Cormac McCarthy
9. "You" in Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
10. Frank Delsa in Mr Paradise by Elmore Leonard
 
19 May 2010
Rachel Trezise's top 10 Welsh underground novels
1. Luggage from Elsewhere by Aneurin Gareth Thomas
2. One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard
3. Gold by Dan Rhodes
4. Submarine by Joe Dunthorne
5. Random Deaths and Custard by Catrin Dafydd
6. The Suicide Club by Rhys Thomas
7. So Long Hector Bebb by Ron Berry
8. Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub by John Williams
9. Grits by Niall Griffiths
10. Freshers by Joanna Davies
 
13 May 2010
Lesley Glaister's top 10 books about incarceration
1. Rumpelstiltskin (originally collected by the Brothers Grimm)
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
3. I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
4. Misery by Stephen King
5. The Collector by John Fowles
6. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
7. Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
8. Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
9. The Railway Man by Eric Lomax
10. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 
11 May 2010
Hilary Spurling's top 10 unputdownable Chinese books
1. Chinese Children at Play written and illustrated by Yui Shufang (Methuen, 1939)
2. The Chinese Children Next Door by Pearl Buck (Methuen, 1944)
3. Chinese Painting by James Cahill (Skira, 1960)
4. Madly Singing in the Mountains by Arthur Waley, edited by Ivan Morris (Allen & Unwin, 1970)
5. The Warrior Woman: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (Picador, 1981, originally published US 1975)
6. River Town by Peter Hessler (John Murray, 2002)
7. The Fighting Angel by Pearl Buck (John Day, 1936)
8. Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah (Michael Joseph, 1997)
9. The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xinran (Vintage, 2003)
10. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Vintage, 2002)
 
05 May 2010
Jim Bob's top 10 illustrated books for adults
1. Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
3. The Giro Playboy by Michael Smith
4. Motel Life by Willy Vlautin
5. Life After God by Douglas Coupland
6. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
7. The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
8. Shorty Loves Wing Wong by Michael Smith & Jim Medway
9. The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern with illustrations by Scott McKowen
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
 
28 April 2010
Esther Freud's top 10 love stories
1. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
3. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
6. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
7. The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann
8. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
9. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
10. One Day by David Nicholls
 
21 April 2010
Michael Foley's top 10 absurd classics
1. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
3. The Magic Christian by Terry Southern
4. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
5. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
6. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
7. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
8. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain
9. Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
10. Ecclesiastes
 
14 April 2010
Carsten Jensen's top 10 seafaring tales
1. The Odyssey by Homer
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3. The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
4. The Shadowline by Joseph Conrad
5. A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson
6. The South Sea Tales by Jack London
7. The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
8. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
9. August by Knut Hamsun
10. The Fishermen by Hans Kirk
 
31 March 2010
Jonathan Kellerman's top 10 LA noir novels
1. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
2. Any novel by Ross MacDonald
3. Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer
4. and 5. The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
6. The Lady In The Lake by Raymond Chandler
7. The Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm
8. The Kinsey Milhone books by Sue Grafton
9. Frederick Brown, Horace McCoy, Charles Bukowski
10. The Resnick novels by John Harvey
 
24 March 2010
Theresa Breslin's top 10 books about the Spanish inquisition
1. Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition by Rafael Sabatini
2. The Rise, The Growth and The End of the Spanish Inquisition by Jean Plaidy
3. The Inquisition of the Middle Ages: Its Organisation and Operation, and A History of the Inquisition of Spain by Henry Charles Lea
4. Torquemada by Howard Fast
5.The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory
6. Castile for Isabella and 7. Spain for the Sovereigns by Jean Plaidy
8. The Last Queen: a Novel of Juana La Loca by Christopher Gortner
9. The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus edited and translated by JM Cohen
10. The Mysterious Lost Book
 
17 March 2010
Paul Murray's top 10 wicked clerics
1. Archbishop Roger degli Ubaldini in Dante's Inferno
2. Friar Hubert in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
3. Tartuffe in Tartuffe by Molière
4. Abbot Ambrosio in The Monk by Matthew Lewis
5. William Collins in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. Reverend Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch by George Eliot
7. The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. The preacher in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. The Bad Priest in V by Thomas Pynchon
10. Brother Leon in The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
 
10 March 2010
Frederic Raphael's top 10 talkative novels
1. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
2. The Satyrica by Petronius Arbiter
3. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
4. A God and His Gifts by Ivy Compton-Burnett
5. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
6. Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
8. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
9. The Golden Fruits by Natalie Sarraute
10. A Roman Marriage by Brian Glanville
 
03 March 2010
Shirley Hughes's top 10 picture book characters
1. Fungus the Bogeyman – Raymond Briggs
2. The Bear with Sticky Paws – Clara Vulliamy
3. Ginger – Charlotte Voake
4. The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle
5. Olivia – Ian Falconer
6. Katie Morag – Mairi Hedderwick
7. Captain Haddock – Hergé
8. Little Tim – Edward Ardizzone
9. Babar the Elephant – Jean de Brunhoff
10. Moomin – Tove Jansson
 
24 February 2010
Aifric Campbell's top 10 jobs in fiction
Estate agent - The Sportswriter / Independence Day / The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
Cowboy - The Border trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Interpreter - In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami (translated by Ralph McCarthy)
Ballet Dancer - Dancer by Colum McCann
Furrier - Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
Cop - The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
Car Salesman - The Rabbit novels by John Updike
Writer - The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (translated by Anne McLean)
Entrepreneur - The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Spy - The Untouchable by John Banville
 
17 February 2010
Henry Sutton's top 10 unreliable narrators
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
2. The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James (1898)
3. The Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
4. Money by Martin Amis (1984)
5. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
6. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)
7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
8. The End Of Alice by AM Homes (1996)
9. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)
10. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
 
10 February 2010
Markus Zusak's top 10 boxing books
1. Rope Burns by FX Toole
2. The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen
3. The Greatest Boxing Stories Ever Told by Jeff Silverman
4. The Professional by WC Heinz
5. Fat City by Leonard Gardner
6. Boxing – the Complete Illustrated Guide by Harry Mullan
7. On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates
8. The Fight by Norman Mailer
9. The Sweet Science by AJ Liebling
10. The Greatest by Walter Dean Myers
 
03 February 2010
Sam Baker's top 10 literary stepmothers
1. The Wicked Queen in Snow White by the Brothers Grimm
2. Mrs Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
3. Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
4. Edith Grainger in Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
5. Topaz in I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
6. Sydelle in In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner
7. Elsa and Anne in Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
8. Yelena in Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov
9. Emelia in Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman
10. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
 
27 January 2010
Tiffany Murray's top 10 rock'n'roll novels
1. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
2. The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
3. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
4. Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
6. Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes
7. Popular Music by Mikael Niemi
8. Owen Noone and Marauder by Douglas Cowie
9. The Ossians by Doug Johnstone
10. Groupie by Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne
 
13 January 2010
Matt Rees's top 10 novels set in the Arab world
1. Wolf Dreams by Yasmina Khadra
2. Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles
3. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali
4. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
5. Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif
6. The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany
7. The Secret Life of Saeed (The Pessoptimist) by Emile Habiby
8. Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell
9. Prairies of Fever by Ibrahim Nasrallah
10. The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem by Kanaan Makiya
 
06 January 2010
James McCreet's top 10 Victorian detective stories
1. On Murder by Thomas de Quincey
2. The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe
3. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
4. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale
5. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
6. Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by Henry Goddard
7. London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew
8. Fingerprints by Douglas G Browne
9. A Dictionary of Victorian London by Lee Jackson
10. Victorian London by Liza Picard
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