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24 December 2018
From Brideshead to Bond: top 10 books on booze
1. A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin
2. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
3. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
4. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
5. A Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
6. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by AJ Liebling
7. I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine by Roger Scruton
8. The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto by Bernard DeVoto
9. Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis
10. Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch

19 December 2018
Top 10 Irish science fiction authors
1. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
2. Fitz-James O’Brien (1826-62)
3. Jane Barlow (1856-1917)
4. Charlotte McManus (1850–1941)
5. Flann O’Brien (1911-1966)
6. James White (1928-1999)
7. Bob Shaw (1931–1996)
8. Cathal Ó Sándair (1922-96)
9. Sarah Maria Griffin (1988-)
10. Jo Zebedee (1971-)

12 December 2018
Top 10 fictional booksellers
1. The Dumas Club by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
2. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
3. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair
4. The Small Hand by Susan Hill
5. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
6. Climbers by M John Harrison
7. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
8. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
9. Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
10. A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé


05 December 2018
Top 10 books about the seasons
Summer
1. Outline by Rachel Cusk
2. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
Autumn
3. The History of Bees by Maja Lunde
4. The Lives of Animals by JM Coetzee
Winter
5. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
6. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
Spring
7. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
8. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
9. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill by Mark Bittner
For all seasons
10. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer


28 November 2018
From Hound of the Baskervilles to the Essex Serpent: top 10 folk tales in fiction 
1. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
2. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
3. Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock 
4. The Changeling by Victor Lavalle 
5. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
6. The Owl Service by Alan Garner 
7. The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen
8. The Good People by Hannah Kent 
9. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
10. Fen by Daisy Johnson 

21 November 2018
Top 10 books about Japan
1. Legends of Tōno by Kunio Yanagita
2. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki
3. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
4. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
5. Kyoto: A Cultural and Literary History by John Dougill
6. Shogun by James Clavell and The Shogun’s Queen by Lesley Downer
7. Embracing Defeat by John Dower
8. A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma
9. Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr
10. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

14 November 2018
From Roth to Le Guin: top 10 novels about the first world war
1. The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
2. The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
3. Regeneration by Pat Barker
4. A Month in the Country by JL Carr
5. Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
6. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
7. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
8. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
9. Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
10. Orsinian Tales by Ursula K Le Guin
​
07 November 2018
Top 10 modern Victorian novels
1. Possession by AS Byatt (1990)
2. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (2014)
3. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
6. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
7. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)
8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
9. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998)
10. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)

31 October 2018
Top 10 deaths in fiction
1. Unn in The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
2. Niels Lyhne in Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen
3. WP Inman in Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
4. Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5. Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
6. Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
7. Lisa in The White Hotel by DM Thomas
8. Geoffrey Firmin in Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
9. Harry Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
10. William Stoner in Stoner by John Williams
​
24 October 2018
Top 10 books about steroids
1. Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding by Charles Gaines, with photographs by George Butler (1974)
2. The Hero’s Body by William Giraldi (2016)
3. The Men Are Weeping in the Gym, from Physical by Andrew McMillan (2015)
4. At the Gym from Source by Mark Doty (2002)
5. Against Exercise from Against Everything by Mark Greif (2016)
6. Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body by Kathy Acker (1997)
7. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B Preciado (2013)
8. Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds by Cordelia Fine (2017)
9. Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams (2006)
10. The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle (2012)

17 October 2018
Robin Ince's top 10 books about the human condition
1. What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
2. Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
3. Between the Monster and the Saint by Richard Holloway
4. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
5. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
6. The Calvin and Hobbes series by Bill Watterson
7. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
8. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
9. Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Chris Frith
10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
​
10 October 2018
Top 10 books about psychiatry
1. The White Hotel by DM Thomas
2. Regeneration by Pat Barker
3. Beyond the Glass by Antonia White
4. The Divided Self by RD Laing
5. The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson
6. Asylums by Erving Goffman
7. An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame
8. The Drama of Being a Child by Alice Miller
9. Equus by Peter Shaffer
10. Darkness Visible by William Styron
 
03 October 2018
Top 10 poetry anthologies
1. Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times edited by Neil Astley
2. Poems That Make Grown Men Cry edited by Anthony and Ben Holden
3. England: Poems from a School, edited by Kate Clanchy
4. A Poem for Every Day of the Year, edited by Allie Esiri
5. Poetry for a Change; A National Poetry Day Anthology, illustrated by Chie Hosaka
6. Bad Kid Catullus, edited by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving
7. Forward Book of Poetry 2019, foreword by Bidisha
8. The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them, by Stephen Burt
9. Poems on the Underground, edited by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert
10. Hook, Line and Singer, by Cerys Matthews
 
26 September 2018
Top 10 books about Old Shanghai
1. Man’s Fate by André Malraux (1933)
2. Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) (1979)
3. Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise by Lynn Pan (Pan Ling) (1984)
4. Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi (1931)
5. No Dogs and Not Many Chinese by Frances Wood (1998)
6. Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard (1984)
7. Midnight by Mao Dun (1933)
8. Miss Jill by Emily Hahn (1947)
9. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 by Leo Ou-fan Lee
10. Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (1999)
​

19 September 2018
Top 10 real-life monsters in fiction
1. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
2. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
3. The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden
4. Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn
5. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
6. The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb
7. Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
8. The Autobiography of Josef Stalin by Richard Lourie
9. HHhH by Laurent Binet
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
 
12 September 2018
From Orient Express to The Railway Children: top 10 trains in novels
1. The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by George Simenon, translated by Sian Reynolds
2. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
3. 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
4. The Railway Children by E Nesbit
5. The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
6. Dracula by Bram Stoker
7. 1222 by Anne Holt, translated by Marlaine Delargey
8. From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
9. Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
10. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
 
05 September 2018
Atwood? Shakespeare? Harry Potter? Top 10 false identities in fiction
1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
2. The Likeness by Tana French
3. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
4. The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
5. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
6. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
7. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
8. The Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
9. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
10. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
 
29 August 2018
Top 10 cliques in fiction
1. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
2. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
3. Deadkidsongs by Toby Litt
4. The Group by Mary McCarthy
5. The Clique: A Novel of the Sixties by Ferdinand Mount
6. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
7. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
8. The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier
9. The Girls by Emma Cline
10. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
 
22 August 2018
Top 10 books about strange towns
1. Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook
2. Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
3. Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
4. Blueprints for a Barbed Wire Canoe by Wayne Macauley
5. The Shadow Over Innsmouth by HP Lovecraft
6. Twisted Clay by Frank Walford and The Last Days of Ava Langdon by Mark O’Flynn
7. The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf
8. The Sinistra Zone by Ádám Bodor
9. Super-Cannes by JG Ballard
10. What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry
 
15 August 2018
Top 10 books about Americans abroad
1. Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop
2. Running by Cara Hoffman
3. Democracy by Joan Didion
4. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
5. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
6. Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
7. What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
8. The Return by Hisham Matar
9. Mating by Norman Rush
10. Look by Solmaz Sharif
 
08 August 2018
Top 10 novels about riots
1. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
2. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
3. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
4. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
5. High-Rise by JG Ballard
6. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
7. Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
8. The Warriors by Sol Yurick
9. Blindness by José Saramago
10. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
 
01 August 2018
Sjón's top 10 artificial humans in fiction
1. The Tale of Thorleif, the Earl’s Poet, translated by Judith Jesch
2. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, translated by Madeline G Levine One of the 20th century’s true masterpieces. Originally named The Cinnamon Shops, it is a string of stories taking place in the Jewish community of Drohobych in what was then Polish Galicia. It is a magical text where everything is infused with life. Things, creatures and natural phenomena constantly blend as they are used as metaphors for each other. At the book’s heart is the narrator’s father, Josef, slowly retreating into a world of his own within the large family house. He becomes the spokesman of tailors’ dummies and mounts a passionate defence of these silent, still beings. The book ends with a mysterious image of a giant homunculus merging with the universe and the index cards it is written on.
3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, translated by Ann Lawson Lucas
5. A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway
6. The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
7. On Dolls, edited by Kenneth Gross
8. He, She and It by Marge Piercy
9. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
10. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Mike Mitchell
 
25 July 2018
Top 10 tales from the frontier
1. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
2. The Son by Philipp Meyer
3. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
4. News of the World by Paulette Jiles
5. Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook
6. Into the Wild by John Krakauer
7. Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
8. The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton
9. The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
10. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
 
18 July 2018
From Catullus to Dylan Thomas: the top 10 elegies
1. Elegy for a child: A Part Song by Denise Riley (from Say Something Back)
2. Elegy for a mother: Freud’s Beautiful Things by Emily Berry (from Stranger Baby)
3. Elegy for a father: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas
4. Elegy for a wife: Orpheus and Eurydice by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by the author and Robert Hass (from Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004)
5. Elegy for a husband: Elegy for my husband by Toi Derricotte
6. Elegy for a brother: Poem 101 by Catullus, translated by Anne Carson
7. Elegy for an idealised girl: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth
8. Elegy for a fellow poet: In Memory of WB Yeats by WH Auden
9. Elegy for a friend: In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
10. Elegy for a group: Requiem by Anna Akhmatova translated by Judith Hemschemeyer (from Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova)
 
11 July 2018
Top 10 books about self-reinvention
1. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2014)
2. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
3. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
4. Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee (1989)
5. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (2003)
6. Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (2013)
7. Fifty Acres and a Poodle by Jeanne Marie Laskas (2000)
8. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (2012)
9. His Illegal Self by Peter Carey (2008)
10. Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood (1976)
 
04 July 2018
Top 10 books about gangsters
1. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
2. Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi
3. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
4. The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow
5. LA Confidential by James Ellroy
6. Muscle for the Wing by Daniel Woodrell
7. The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke
8. Live By Night by Dennis Lehane
9. The Rules of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake
10. After Hours by Edwin Torres
 
27 June 2018
From Dante to I Love Dick: top 10 books about unrequited love
1. The Canzoniere by Petrarch
2. The Divine Comedy by Dante
3. The Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot
5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
6. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
7. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
8. Kin by Eudora Welty
9. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
10. Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark
 
20 June 2018
Top 10 books about the afterlife
1. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (2006)
2. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)
3. What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson (1978)
4. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)
5. Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (2010)
6. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (circa 1320)
7. Chariot of Fire by EEY Hales (1976)
8. Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia (2015)
9. Hell by Robert Olen Butler (2009)
10. The Great Divorce by CS Lewis (1945)
 
13 June 2018
Top 10 lost women's classics
1. Kindred by Octavia Butler
2. Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin
3. Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain
4. Passing by Nella Larsen
5. Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King
6. One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens
7. Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom
8. Angel by Elizabeth Taylor
9. The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford
10. The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
 
06 June 2018
Top 10 working-class heroes in books
1. The Chimes by Charles Dickens
2. The Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell
3. William Cuffay: The Life and Times of a Chartist Leader by Martin Hoyles
4. The Journey of Martin Nadaud: A Life and Turbulent Times by Gillian Tindall
5. Michael Davitt by Carla King
6. The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel
7. Out of the Night by Jan Valtin
8. God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène
9. The Order of Industrial Heroism by WH Fevyer, JW Wilson and JE Cribb
10. Harry’s Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith
 
30 May 2018
Top 10 books to help you survive the digital age
1. Marshall McLuhan Unbound by Marshall McLuhan (2005)
2. Ubik by Philip K Dick (1969)
3. The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)
4. To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (2017)
5. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)
6. What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)
7. The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (1999)
8. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
9. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (2010)
10. All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (2000)
 
23 May 2018
Top 10 books about cricket
1. Days in the Sun by Neville Cardus
2. Australia 55 by Alan Ross
3. Beyond a Boundary by CLR James
4. The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley
5. Concerning Cricket by John Arlott
6. Beyond Bat and Ball by David Foot
7. The Cricket War by Gideon Haigh
8. One More Run by Stephen Chalke
9. A Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha
10. Cricket: The Game of Life by Scyld Berry
 
16 May 2018
Top 10 books to understand happiness
1. Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan
2. Cringeworthy by Melissa Dahl
3. Girl on the Net: How a Bad Girl Fell in Love
4. How Not to Grow Up by Richard Herring
5. How to Survive the End of the World (When It’s All in Your Head) by Aaron Gillies
6. Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
7. It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan
8. Mr Shaha’s Recipes for Wonder by Alom Shaha
9. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
10. 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed) by Nate Crowley
 
09 May 2018
Carys Davies’ top 10 wilderness books
1. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
2. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
3. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
4. The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge
5. South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton
6. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
7. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
9. Quarantine by Jim Crace
10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
 
02 May 2018
Top 10 books about North Korea
1. Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
2. North of the DMZ by Andrei Lankov
3. Long Road Home by Kim Yong
4. A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church
5. North Korea Confidential by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson
6. Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung
7. The Hidden People of North Korea by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh
8. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
9. The Invitation-Only Zone by Robert S Boynton
10. The Cleanest Race by BR Myers
 
25 April 2018
Top 10 books about council housing
1. Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses by Chris Matthews
2. Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment by Alison Ravetz
3. NW by Zadie Smith
4. Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (PDF) by Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius
5. Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? A New Future for the Cottage Estates by Martin Crookston
6. Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton
7. People of Providence: A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants by Tony Parker
8. Estates by Lynsey Hanley
9. Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie
10. Mackworth Estate Jubilee: A Social History compiled by Mackworth Townswomen’s Guild
 
18 April 2018
Amy Sackville on the top 10 novels about painters
1. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2. The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary
3. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
4. Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos
5. The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal
6. Contre-Jour: A Triptych After Pierre Bonnard by Gabriel Josipovici
7. Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet
8. How to Be Both by Ali Smith
9. Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue, translated Natasha Wimmer
10. The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith
 
11 April 2018
Top 10 books about miscarriages of justice
1. The Central Park Five by Sarah Burns
2. Atonement by Ian McEwan
3. Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton
4. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
5. Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer
6. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
7. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
9. Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Accused, edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S Klinger
10. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
 
04 April 2018
Top 10 books about horses – Jane Smiley picks her favourites
1. The Manual of Horsemanship by the British Horse Society and Pony Club
2. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
3. National Velvet by Enid Bagnold
4. The Kellys and the O’Kellys by Anthony Trollope
5. Carrot for a Chestnut by Dick Francis
6. Saratoga Fleshpot by Stephen Dobyns
7. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W Anthony
8. Slow Horses, Fast Women by Damon Runyon
9. Talking With Horses by Henry Blake
10. Deborah Butterfield by Robert Gordon
 
28 March 2018
Top 10 books based in Tangier
1. Street of Thieves by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell
2. Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale
3. A Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, recorded and translated by Paul Bowles
4. Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles
5. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
6. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
7. For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles
8. Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, translated by Jonathan Smolin
9. Si Yussef by Anouar Majid
10. The Lemon by Mohammed Mrabet, translated by Paul Bowles
 
21 March 2018
Top 10 runaway mothers in fiction
1. Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
2. Kinflicks by Lisa Alther
3. The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
4. Kramer vs Kramer by Avery Corman
5. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
6. Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
7. Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
8. A Mother and Two Daughters by Gail Godwin
9. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt
10. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
 
14 March 2018
Bank heists, political satire and Ngugi wa Thiong’o: top 10 books about Kenya
1. A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
2. Coming to Birth by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
3. Going Down River Road by Meja Mwangi
4. The Promised Land by Grace Ogot
5. Three Days on the Cross by Wahome Mutahi
6. Across the Bridge by Mwangi Gicheru
7. The Last Villains of Molo by Kinyanjui Kombani
8. Dust by Yvonne Owuor
9. Tale of Kasaya by Eva Kasaya
10. My Life in Crime by John Kiriamiti
 
07 March 2018
Top 10 parallel narratives
1. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (1967)
2. The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967)
3. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
4. The Counterlife by Philip Roth (1986)
5. Vertigo by WG Sebald (1990)
6. Yann Andréa Steiner by Marguerite Duras (1992)
7. Trieste by Daša Drndić (2007)
8. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (2009)
9. NW by Zadie Smith (2012)
10. To the Back of Beyond by Peter Stamm (2016)
 
28 February 2018
Top 10 spaceships in fiction
1. From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
2. Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss
3. Nova by Samuel Delany
4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
5. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
6. Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
7. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
8. The Martian by Andy Weir
9. Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey
10. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
 
21 February 2018
Top 10 books about cheating
1. Light Years by James Salter (1975)
2. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (1992)
3. What Is Remembered by Alice Munro (2001)
4. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2002)
5. We Don’t Live Here Anymore by André Dubus (1984)
6. The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam (2009)
7. Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (2012)
8. Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill (2014)
9. Euphoria by Lily King (2014)
10. The First Day by Phil Harrison (2017)
 
14 February 2018
Top 10 books about South Korea
1. Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin (2011), translated by Chi-Young Kim
2. The Guest by Hwang Sok-Yong (2005), translated by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya West
3. The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-Mi Hwang (2014), translated by Chi-Young Kim
4. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-Ha Kim (2007), translated by Chi-Young Kim
5. Songs for Tomorrow: A Collection of Poems 1960-2002 by Ko Un (2008), translated by Brother Anthony, Young-moo Kim and Gary Gach
6. No Flower Blooms Without Wavering by Jong-Hwan Do (2016), translated by Brother Anthony and Jina Park
7. The Great Soul of Siberia: In Search of the Elusive Siberian Tiger by SooYong Park (2015), translated by Jamie Chang
8. The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2015), translated by Deborah Smith
9. Lost Names by Richard E Kim (1971)
10. The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture by Euny Hong (2014)
 
07 February 2018
Top 10 books about the Scottish Highlands and Islands
1. The Crow Road by Iain Banks
2. The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
3. Corrag by Susan Fletcher
4. Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
5. A Last Wild Place by Mike Tomkies
6. Under the Skin by Michel Faber
7. Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey by Madeleine Bunting
8. An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales by Theresa Breslin and Kate Leiper
9. The Sopranos by Alan Warner
10. Natural History in the Highlands and Islands by F Fraser Darling
 
31 January 2018
Top 10 errant teenagers in fiction
1. Tetsuo in Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
2. Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
3. Ryan Cusack in The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney
4. Leo Colston in The Go-Between by LP Hartley
5. Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
6. Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
7. Adam/Eve in Apples by Richard Milward
8. Kelly Broad in Darkmans by Nicola Barker
9. Alex in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
10. JJ O’Malley in Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack
 
24 January 2018
Top 10 books about the body
1. Fanny Hill by John Cleland
2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
5. Indelible by Adelia Saunders
6. Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sarah Pascoe
7. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
8. Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
10. Left Neglected by Lisa Genova
 
17 January 2018
Top 10 conspiracy theories in fiction
1. The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
2. Libra by Don DeLillo (1988)
3. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)
4. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed (1972)
5. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)
6. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
7. The Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow (1971)
8. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004)
9. Vida by Marge Piercy (1980)
10. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (1988)
 
10 January 2018
Top 10 books about time
1. Confessions by St Augustine
2. The Time Machine by HG Wells
3. Time Travel by James Gleick
4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
5. Your Brain Is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano
6. A Tenth of a Second by Jimena Canales
7. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
8. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
9. The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel
10. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison
 
03 January 2018
Buy a cat, stay up late, don't drink: top 10 writers’ tips on writing
1. Hilary Mantel – a little arrogance can be a great help
“The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.”
2. Leo Tolstoy and HP Lovecraft – pick the hours that work best for you
Tolstoy believed in starting first thing: “I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau, too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one’s head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking while still in bed or during the walk.”
Or stay up late as HP Lovecraft did: “At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
3. William Faulkner – read to write
“Read, read, read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
4. Katherine Mansfield – writing anything is better than nothing
“Looking back I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”
5. Ernest Hemingway – stop while the going is good
“Always stop while you are going good and don’t worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry bout it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.”
6. John Steinbeck – take it a page at a time
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day. It helps.”
7. Miranda July – don’t worry about the bad drafts
“I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer … would come home every day from my office and say, ‘Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written.’ At that point, I didn’t realise I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part. From there, it was comparatively easy. It was like I had some Play-Doh to work with and could just keep working with it – doing a million drafts and things changing radically and characters appearing and disappearing and solving mysteries: Why is this thing here? Should I just take that away? And then realising, no, that is there, in fact, because that is the key to this. I love that sort of detective work, keeping the faith alive until all the questions have been sleuthed out.”
8. F Scott Fitzgerald – don’t write and drink
“It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organisation of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor. A short story can be written on the bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern inside your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows … I would give anything if I hadn’t written Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant.”
9. Zadie Smith – get offline
“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.”
10. Muriel Spark* – get a cat
“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially on some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle under the desk lamp. The light from a lamp … gives the cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impeded your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, and very mysterious.’
*(or rather, the character of Mrs Hawkins in A Far Cry from Kensington.)
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