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​28 December 2016
Top 10 slangy crime novels
1. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
2. Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers (1933)
3. The Gilt Kid by James Curtis (1936)
4. If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes (1945)
5. The Crust on Its Uppers by Robin Cook (1962)
6. Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim (1967)
7. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940)
8. American Tabloid by James Ellroy (1995)
9. Sir, You Bastard by GF Newman (1970)
10. Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth (2012)
 
21 December 2016
Top 10 escapes in literature
1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1845)
2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)
3. The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien (1955)
4. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (1963)
5. Papillon by Henri Charrière (1969)
6. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (1982)
7. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington (1992)
8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)
9. Room by Emma Donoghue (2010)
10. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)
 
14 December 2016
Top 10 dictionaries
1. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604)
2. BE’s New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699)
3. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
4. Oxford English Dictionary (1884-)
5. Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson (1886)
6. James Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909)
7. Frank Gelett Burgess’s Burgess Unabridged (1914)
8. The Hacker’s Dictionary (1971)
9. Robert Allen’s Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981)
10. The Urban Dictionary (1999–)
 
07 December 2016
Top 10 cats in literature
1. Tobermory by Saki (HH Munro)
Talking cat
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Superior cat
3. Edward the Conqueror by Roald Dahl
Reincarnated genius cat
4. The Silent Miaow translated from the feline by Paul Gallico
Guru cat
5. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by TS Eliot
Criminal mastermind cat
6. Thomasina, the Cat Who Thought She Was God by Paul Gallico
Mystical cat
7. A Case of Murder by Vernon Scannell
Avenging cat
8. Felidae by Akif Pirinçci
Sleuthing cat
9. The Cats’ Protection League by Roger McGough
Dangerous cat
10. Why Cats Paint by Heather Busch and Burton Silver
Aesthetic cat
 
07 December 2016
Top 10 travel books for Christmas
Inspired Journeys: Travel Writers in Search of the Muse
Depart: A Photographic Travel and Adventure Guide by Sizoo Brothers
Running Beyond: Epic Ultra, Trail and Skyrunning Races by Ian Corless Foreword by Kilian Jornet Published by Aurum Press
Cuba: A Personal Journey 1989-2016 by Manuello Paganelli.
South by Merlin Coverley
The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore
Epic Bike Rides of the World
Explorers’ Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery and Adventure by Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
Revolutionary Ride by Lois Pryce
 
30 November 2016
Top 10 books about postwar Britain
1. Age of Austerity 1945-51 by David Kynaston
2. Small Island by Andrea Levy
3. The Rack by AE Ellis
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 
5. The Third Man by Graham Greene
6. The Virgin in the Garden by AS Byatt
7. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
8. Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman
9. A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
10. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
 
23 November 2016
Top 10 books about women in the British empire
1. Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay
2. Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan by Florentia Sale
3. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley
4. Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley
5. White Mughals by William Dalrymple
6. Domestic Manners of the Americans by Fanny Trollope
7. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
8. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
9. The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing
10. The Empire Triptych by Jan Morris
 
16 November 2016
Cynan Jones's top 10 books about the hostile ocean
1. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
2. Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez
3. Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn
4. The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
5. Close to the Wind by Pete Goss 
6. A Mile Down by David Vann
7. Pincher Martin by William Golding
8. The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau
9. Orkney by Amy Sackville
10. Harpoon at a Venture by Gavin Maxwell
 
09 November 2016
Top 10 books about the Himalayas
1. Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
2. Tales of the Dervishes by Idries Shah
3. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
4. Lost Horizon by James Hilton
5. Everest: Kangshung Face by Stephen Venables
6. Lost in the Himalayas by James Scott
7. Nanda Devi by Hugh Thompson
8. Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World by F Kingdon-Ward
9. Red Shambhala by Andrei Znamenski
10. Himalaya by Michael Palin
03 November 2016
Top 10 books about exile 
1. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2. Selected Writings by Mai Ghoussoub
3. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
5. Snow by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely)
6. I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (translated by Ahdaf Soueif)
7. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
8. Arab in America by Toufic El Rassi
9. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
10. The Wanderer by Christopher Brennan
26 October 2016
Top 10 books of radical history
1. The Black Jacobins by CLR James (1938)
2. Primitive Rebels by Eric Hobsbawm (1959)
3. The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
4. The Women Incendiaries by Edith Thomas (1963)
5. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon (1974). 
6. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century by Barbara Taylor (1983)
7. We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle by Stree Shakti Sanghatana (1989)
8. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-century America by Lillian Faderman (1991)
9. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume One (2003) and Volume Two (2005)
10. Strikers, Hobblers, Conchies and Reds: A Radical History of Bristol 1880-1939 (2014) 
 
19 October 2016
Top 10 books about borders
1. On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
2. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
3. Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
4. The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
5. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
6. Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future by Charles Bowden
7. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
8. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara
9. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
10. Coasting by Jonathan Raban
 
12 October 2016
Top 10 books about intelligent animals
1. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
2. The Mentality of Apes by Wolfgang Köhler (1924)
3. The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (1967)
4. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour by Robert Richards (1987)
5. Passions Within Reason by Robert Frank (1988)
6. Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich (1989)
7. Naturalist by EO Wilson (1994)
8. A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky (2001)
9. Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2009)
10. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (2013)
 
05 October 2016
Top 10 books about old men
1. The Knot of Vipers (Le Nœud de vipères) by François Mauriac (1932)
2. Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler (1997)
3. Inferno, Canto 26 by Dante (circa 1314)
4. On Old Age by Cicero (44 BCE)
5. Lettres à une Amie, 1923-29 by Georges Clémenceau (1960)
6. King Lear by William Shakespeare (circa 1606)
7. Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
8. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
9. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
10. Old Filth by Jane Gardam (2004)
 
28 September 2016
Top 10 stories of hubris
1 Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
2. The Possibility of An Island by Michel Houellebecq
3. My Book Against Death by Elias Canetti
4. Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
5. Burning the Days by James Salter
6. Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery
7. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
8. You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett
9. Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
10. All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir
 
21 September 2016
John Sweeney's top 10 books on corruption
1. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
2. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
3. Chinatown by Robert Towne
4. Boys in Zinc (Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghan War) by Svetlana Alexievich
5. Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller
6. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
7. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
8. Maxwell: The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell and His Empire by Roy Greenslade
9. The War Diaries of Count Galeano Ciano
10. The Unravelling by Emma Sky
 
14 September 2016
Top 10 mothers, 'bad' and otherwise, in books
1. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
2. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. Motherhood and Creativity: The Divided Heart by Rachel Power
4. Gilgamesh by Joan London
5. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson
6. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
7. The Mint Lawn by Gillian Mears
8. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk
9. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
10. Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
 
07 September 2016
Top 10 dodgy lawyers in literature
1. Dr Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
2. Herr Huld in The Trial by Franz Kafka
3. Captain Vere in Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
4. Emma Zunz in Emma Zunz by Jorges Luis Borges 
5. Tulkinghorn in Bleak House by Charles Dickens
6. Quinn in Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
7. Guillaumin in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
8. Sandor Himmelstein in Herzog by Saul Bellow
9. Casi in A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava
10. Don Sebastiano in The Day of Judgment by Salvatore Satta
 
31 August 2016
Top 10 books featuring parks
1. The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100BC)
2. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen (1814)
3. Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847-48)
4. The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene (1951)
5. The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
6. The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith (1956)
7. The Wombles, by Elizabeth Beresford (1968)
8. Small Holdings, by Nicola Barker (1995)
9. Lights Out for the Territory, by Iain Sinclair (1997)
10. The White Family, by Maggie Gee (2002)
 
24 August 2016
Top 10 seaside novels
1. The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)
2. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912, English translation 1925)
3. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938)
4. Holiday by Stanley Middleton (1974)
5. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (1978)
6. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)
7. Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi (2001, English translation 2010)
8. The Sea by John Banville (2005)
9. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007)
10. The Many by Wyl Menmuir (2016)
 
17 August 2016
Top 10 books about long marriages
1. The Tree of Man by Patrick White (1956)
2. The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
3. Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
5. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (2015)
6. Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi (2013)
7. The Children Act by Ian McEwan (2014)
8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
9. Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison (2002)
10. East Coker from Four Quartets by TS Eliot (1943)
 
10 August 2016
Top 10 books writers should read
1. To generate early inspiration and feel part of a club:
Daily Rituals by Mason Currey
2. To know how many rules we’re about to break:
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and EB White
3. To grasp the difference between one character and another:
Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu
4. To worship at a shrine:
The Chambers Dictionary
5. To skip the degree in psychology:
Instant Analysis by David J Lieberman
6. To discover what villains are born knowing:
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
7. To get over the feeling that modernity is new:
Satyricon by Petronius Arbiter
8. In case Brexit didn’t show why pure democracy should be sparingly used:
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
9. For a smell of literary gasoline igniting:
The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell
10. To see what can happen when it all comes together:
Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
 
03 August 2016
Top 10 philosophers' fictions
1. The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin 
2. Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3. Scorpion and Félix: A Humouristic Novel by Karl Marx
4. Traces by Ernst Bloch
5. Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer
6. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
7. The Treasure of Indian Joe by Theodor Adorno
8. Sketch for a Novel on Neville Chamberlain by Max Horkheimer
9. All the King’s Horses by Michèle Bernstein
10. Dudley Zoo: An Elephant Story by Alfred Sohn-Rethel
 
27 July 2016
Top 10 books about the Australian bush
1. The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories by Henry Lawson
2. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
3. The Bush by Don Watson
4. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
5. The Secret River by Kate Grenville
6. The Greatest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage
7. Letters from Victorian Pioneers, edited by Thomas Bride
8. Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
9. Tracks by Robyn Davidson
10. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
 
20 July 2016
Top 10 books about gardens
1. Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris
2. The Gardener of Versailles: My Life in the World’s Grandest Garden by Alain Baraton
3. Sunlight on the Lawn by Beverley Nichols
4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
7. Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi
8. Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd
9. The Potting-Shed Papers by Charles Elliott
10. The New Sylva: A Discourse of Forest and Orchard Trees for the 21st Century by Gabriel Hemery, illustrated by Sarah Simblet
 
13 July 2016
Top 10 books about the Iraq war
1. The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon (2010)
2. The Iraq Study Group Report (2006)
3. Fobbit by David Abrams (2012)
4. Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays, Adda B Bozeman (1992)
5. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (2012)
6. Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend (2005)
7. Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006)
8. Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq by Rory McCarthy (2006)
9. The Chilcot report
10. The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel (2009, 2013)
 
06 July 2016
Top 10 novels about deranged killers
1. Psycho by Robert Bloch (1959)
2. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
3. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
4. The Nightrunners by Joe R Lansdale (1987)
5. Paris Trout by Pete Dexter (1988)
6. Cabal by Clive Barker (1988)
7. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988)
8. Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie (1996)
9. From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (1999)
10. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004)
 
29 June 2016
Top 10 New York novels
1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921)
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
4. Guys and Dolls and Other Stories by Damon Runyon (2005)
5. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (1956)
6. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (2013)
7. The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud (2006)
8. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (2003)
9. Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack (1993)
10. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
 
22 June 2016
Top 10 books about the Beatles
1. Love Me Do: The Beatles’ Progress by Michael Braun
2. Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles
3. Daddy Come Home by Pauline Lennon
4. The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello
5. Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With the Beatles by Tony Bramwell
6. Lennon Remembers by Jann S Wenner
7. The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away by Allan Williams
8. All You Need Is Ears by George Martin
9. As Time Goes By by Derek Taylor
10. The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman
 
15 June 2016
Top 10 books about middle age
1. In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age by Patricia Cohen (2012)
2. Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas (1846)
3. Break of Day by Colette (1928)
4. Force of Circumstance by Simone de Beauvoir (1963)
5. Brown Sisters: Forty Years by Nicholas Nixon (2014)
6. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
7. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
8. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing by Lynne Segal (2013)
9. In Midlife by Murray Stein (1983)
10. Maximising Manhood, beating the Male Menopause by Dr Malcolm Carruthers (1996)
08 June 2016
Top 10 books about guilt
1. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
4. The Twelve by Stuart Neville
5. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
6. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
7. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
8. Guilt About the Past by Bernhard Schlink
9. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
10. Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith
 
01 June 2016
Greg Jackson's top 10 books to make you a better person
1. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
2. Memoirs of An Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori
3. Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño
4. Collected Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
5. The Boat by Nam Le
6. Essays by Wallace Shawn
7. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
8. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
9. War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff
10. The Emigrants by WG Sebald
 
25 May 2016
Top 10 chases in literature
1. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
3. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
4. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
5. The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb
6. Deliverance by James Dickey
7. Twilight by William Gay
8. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
9. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
10. Jaws by Peter Benchley
 
18 May 2016
Top 10 refugees' stories
1. Virgil’s Aeneid
2. The Gospel of Matthew
3. Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance by Giles Milton
4. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
5. Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel
6. Goodbye Sarajevo by Atka Reid and Hana Schofield
7. The Uninvited by Jeremy Harding
8. What is the What by Dave Eggers
9. City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence
10. Home by Warsan Shire
 
11 May 2016
Top 10 novels about women's political awakening
1. The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)
2. Ella Price’s Journal by Dorothy Bryant (1972)
3. Shedding by Verena Stefan (1975)
4. Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi (1975)
5. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976)
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
7. Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983)
8. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (1985)
9. Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (1990)
10. Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi (1991)
 
04 May 2016
Top 10 landmarks in gay and lesbian literature
1. The diaries of Anne Lister (1791-1841)
2. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855-1892)
3. Poems by Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)
4. Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann (1927)
5. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
7. The Pure and the Impure by Colette (1932)
8. Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson (1952)
9. Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
10. The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White (1979)
 
27 April 2016
KJ Orr's top 10 stories of crossing boundaries
1. Axolotl by Julio Cortázar
2. Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff
3. Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice by Nam Le
4. Bezhin Lea by Ivan Turgenev
5. An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah
6. In a Bamboo Grove by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
7. Wenlock Edge by Alice Munro
8. Last Night by James Salter
9. The Enormous Radio by John Cheever
10. Forgotten Journey by Silvina Ocampo 
 
20 April 2016
Top 10 books on Vladimir Putin's Russia
1. First Person by Vladimir Putin
2. One Soldier’s War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko
3. Babylon by Victor Pelevin
4. The Man without a Face by Masha Gessen
5. Mafia State by Luke Harding
6. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev
7. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin
8. Fragile Empire by Ben Judah
9. Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha
10. The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
 
13 April 2016
Top 10 books about freedom
1. Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
3. Joseph Knight by James Robertson
4. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
5. How to Be Both by Ali Smith
6. The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink
7. Germinal by Émile Zola
8. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
9. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
10. The Poor Had No Lawyers by Andy Wightman
 
06 April 2016
Top 10 depictions of British rain
1. Westron Wynde
2. After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry
3. King Lear by William Shakespeare
4. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
5. The Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes
6. If It Keeps on Raining by Jon McGregor
7. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
9. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Notebooks: October 21st 1803
10. The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
 
30 March 2016
Top 10 books on 1960s America
1. Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides (Doubleday)
2. The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey (Knopf)
3. Dispatches by Michael Herr (Knopf)
4. Where Did Our Love Go – the Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George (Omnibus)
5. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
6. Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party by John Sinclair (Process)
7. The Medium Is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (Ginko Press)
8. Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon (Bloomsbury)
9. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser (Pavilion)
10. Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of America by Suzanne Smith (Harvard University Press) 
 
23 March 2016
Alexei Sayle's top 10 books about revolutionaries
1. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
2. The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton
3. The Sleeper Awakes by HG Wells
4. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
6. Animal Farm by George Orwell
7. The Road to Tolerance and Many Other Books by Albert Ellis
8. The Big Book. Alcoholics Anonymous. By Bill W and Dr Bob 
9. The Gun by CJ Chivers
10. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
 
16 March 2016
Top 10 books about the dangers of the web
1. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
2. The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett
3. Cybersexism by Laurie Penny
4. The Intrusions by Stav Sharez
5. Follow Me by Angela Clarke
6. In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behaviour by Patrick J Carnes, David L Demonico, Elizabeth Griffin and Joseph M Moriarty
7. Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust, Security and the Internet by Edward Lucas
8. Butter, by Erin Lange
9. Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, by David Leigh and Luke Harding
10. Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age, by Nev Schulman
 
09 March 2016
Top 10 books about breasts
1. Bare Reality by Laura Dodsworth (photography and short stories)
2. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (novel)
3. Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman (novel)
4. Femen by Femen (non-fiction)
5. The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts Are Bad for Business by Gabrielle Palmer (non-fiction)
6. The Clean Collection by Sabrina Mahfouz (theatre and poetry)
7. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence (novel)
8. The Outsider by Albert Camus (novel)
9. Breasts by Maxine Chernoff (poem)
10. Sex in History by Reay Tannahill (non-fiction)
 
02 March 2016
Top 10 hateful characters you love in literature
1. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
2. The Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
4. Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas by Arno Schmidt
5. Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg
6. End Zone by Don DeLillo
7. Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
8. Lethargy by Wojciech Kuczok
9. The Enterprise by Matthias Nawrat
10. The Bone Fire by György Dragomán
 
24 February 2016
The top 10 books of war reportage
1. The Histories by Herodotus
2. Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
3. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
4. Hiroshima by John Hersey 
5. The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn
6. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
7. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
8. The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan by Artyom Borovik
9. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
10. The Last Time I Saw Paris by Elliot Paul
 
17 February 2016
Top 10 Arctic novels
1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 
2. The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris
3. The Rifles by William T Vollmann
4. House of Meetings by Martin Amis
5. Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
6. The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett
7. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
8. The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny
9. Unformed Landscape by Peter Stamm
10. Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson
 
10 February 2016
Top 10 books for the broken-hearted
1. Instead of a Letter: A Memoir by Diana Athill
2. Solitude by Anthony Storr
3. After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell
4. Two Cures for Love by Wendy Cope
5. To Travel Hopefully by Christopher Rush
6. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
7. Unless by Carol Shields
8. Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse
9. Villette by Charlotte Brontë
10. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank
 
03 February 2016
Top 10 books about cancer
1. The Immortal Tale of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
2. Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
3. Memoir by John McGahern
4. Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5. The Newton Letter by John Banville
6. A Scattering by Christopher Reid
7. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
8. The Biology of Cancer by Robert Weinberg
9. It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
 
27 January 2016
Top 10 clerics in fiction
1. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
2. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
3. The Summoner’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer
4. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
7. A History of Loneliness by John Boyne
8. The Three by Sarah Lotz
9. The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
20 January 2016
Top 10 books about the cold war
1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
2. The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis
3. HMSO Civil Defence Handbook No 10 (1963): Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack
4. When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs
5. The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 by Peter Hennessy
6. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
7. The Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow
8. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
9. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
10. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
 
13 January 2016
Top 10 failed romances in fiction
1. I Am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy
2. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
3. Women in Love by DH Lawrence
4. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
5. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaétan Soucy
6. The First Bad Man by Miranda July
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
8. Lucinella by Lore Segal
9. After Claude by Iris Owens
10. Bad Sex by Clancy Martin