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25 December 2019
Top 10 books about loneliness
1. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
3. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)
4. A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf (1953)
5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (first published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas)
6. Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (1973)
7. Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T Cacioppo and William Patrick (2009)
8. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing (2016)
9. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
10. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari (2018)
18 December 2019
Top 10 novels about adultery
1. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
4. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
6. Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
7. Deception by Philip Roth
8. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
10. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
11 December 2019
Top 10 dinner parties in fiction
1. The Symposium by Plato
2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
3. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
6. Animal Farm by George Orwell
7. Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
8. Atonement by Ian McEwan
9. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10. The Dinner by Herman Koch
04 December 2019
Top 10 books about comedy, from Eric and Ernie to Lee and Herring
1. The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book by Eric Idle (1976)
2. Buygones by Victor Lewis-Smith and Paul Sparks (1988)
3. Tony Hancock: Artiste by Roger Wilmut (1978)
4. You Can See the Angel’s Bum, Miss Worswick by Mike Harding (1985)
5. Crying With Laughter by Bob Monkhouse (1993)
6. Fist of Fun by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring (1995)
7. Eric and Ernie: the Autobiography of Morecambe and Wise by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise (1973)
8. The Late Shift by Bill Carter (1994)
9. A Card for the Clubs by Les Dawson (1974)
10. Now That’s Funny by David Bradbury and Joe McGrath (1998)
27 November 2019
Top 10 eyewitness accounts of 20th-century history
1 The Russian Revolution by Nikolai Sukhanov
2. Bureau of Military History, Ireland
3. The Diaries of Harry Kessler
4. The Diaries of Wasif Jawhariyyeh
5. Dateline: Toronto, 1920-1924 by Ernest Hemingway
6. The Devil in France by Lion Feuchtwanger
7. If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
8. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
9. The Inner Circle: A View of War at the Top by Joan Bright Astley
10. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
20 November 2019
Top 10 books about vegetarians
1. Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee
2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
3. Ethical Vegetarianism edited by Kerry S Walters and Lisa Portmess
4. Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
5. Charlotte’s Web by EB White
6. Animals: a Novel by Don LePan
7. A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
8. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
9. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer
10. The Time Machine by HG Wells
13 November 2019
Top 10 golden age detective novels
1. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
2. Green for Danger by Christianna Brand (1944)
3. To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey (1950)
4. An English Murder by Cyril Hare (1951)
5. The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham (1952)
6. The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham (1987)
7. Death in Holy Orders by PD James (2001)
8. The Act of Roger Murgatroyd by Gilbert Adair (2006)
9. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (2016)
10. The Truants by Kate Weinberg (2019)
06 November 2019
From Alice in Wonderland to the Hitchhiker's Guide: top 10 books about mathematics
1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
3. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
5. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
7. The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
8. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
9. The Ore Miner’s Wife by Karl Iagnemma
10. In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman
30 October 2019
Top 10 books about graveyards
1. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
2. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
3. A Fine and Private Place by Peter S Beagle
4. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
5. Death: A Graveside Companion by Joanna Ebenstein
6. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
7. Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
8. 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die by Loren Rhoads
9. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
10. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
23 October 2019
Top 10 books about the night
1. An Astronomer’s Tale: A Bricklayer’s Guide to the Galaxy by Gary Fildes
2. The Midnight Folk by John Masefield
3. Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark by Christopher Dewdney
4. Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
5. The Night is Darkening Round Me by Emily Brontë
6. The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Kate Mosse
7. Nightwalk by Chris Yates
8. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
9. At Night: A Journey Round Britain from Dusk Till Dawn by Dixe Wills
10. The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard
16 October 2019
Top 10 lighthouses in fiction
1. Pharos by Alice Thompson
2. The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
3. The Thing on the Shore by Tom Fletcher
4. The Lighthouse by Agnes Owens
5. In the Cut by Susanna Moore
6. The Wreck of the Aurora by Patrick McGrath
7. The Lighthouse by PD James
8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
9. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
10. The Lighthouse by Edgar Allan Poe
09 October 2019
Top 10 books about Europe
1. The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
2. The Sleepless World by Stefan Zweig
3. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
4. The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht
5. Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire
6. The Truce by Primo Levi
7. Letters to a German Friend (in Resistance, Rebellion and Death) by Albert Camus
8. In Europe by Geert Mak
9. Compass by Mathias Énard
10. The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina Nel Cuore by Rhea Galanaki
02 October 2019
Top 10 books about black radicalism
1. Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism by Kwame Ture (1971)
2. Garvey and Garveyism by Amy Jacques Garvey (1963)
3. Africa Must Unite by Kwame Nkrumah (1963)
4. Beyond Containment by Claudia Jones (2010)
5. Black Jacobins by CLR James (1938)
6. Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (1987)
7. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961)
8. The Revolution Has Come by Robyn Spencer (2016)
9. Revolution in Guinea by Amílcar Cabral (1979)
10. Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins (2000)
25 September 2019
Top 10 escapes in books
1. Persuasion by Jane Austen
2. The Peregrine by JA Baker
3. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
4. The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, translated by William Rodarmor
5. Tramp by Tomas Espedal, translated by James Anderson
6. How to Be Gay by David M Halperin
7. Hostage by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher
8. Papillon by Henri Charrière, translated by Patrick O’Brian
9. Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler
10. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
18 September 2019
Top 10 novels about burning issues for young adults
1. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
2. Fated by Teri Terry
3. The Casket of Time by Andri Snær Magnason
4. Meat Market by Juno Dawson
5. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
6. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
7. Crossfire by Malorie Blackman
8. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
9. Illegal by Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano
10. Oranges in No Man’s Land by Elizabeth Laird
11 September 2019
Top 10 culinary memoirs
1. The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman
2. The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher
3. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
4. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
5. Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher
6. My Life in France by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme
7. Cooking for Mr Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship With Recipes by Amanda Hesser
8. More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
9. Talking With My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater by Gail Simmons
10. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger by Nigel Slater
04 September 2019
Top 10 books about fake news
1. Propaganda by Edward Bernays (1928)
2. Propaganda in the Next War by Sidney Rogerson (1938)
3. Broadcast Hysteria by A Brad Schwartz (2015)
4. British Security Coordination by Roald Dahl, Gilbert Highet et al (1998)
5. Restless by William Boyd (2006)
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
7. Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch (2009)
8. Cyberwar by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018)
9. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)
10. Weaponized Lies by Daniel Levitin (2016)
28 August 2019
​Top 10 ghost stories
1. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
2. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
3. Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan (2015)
4. Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry (2017)
5. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)
6. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver (2010)
7. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)
8. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)
9. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
10. Hotel World by Ali Smith (2001)
21 August 2019
Out of sadness into empathy: the top 10 caregivers in fiction
1. Purple America by Rick Moody
2. The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro
3. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
4. Family Life by Akhil Sharma
5. The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
6. Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang
7. In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried by Amy Hempel
8. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
9. As We Are Now by May Sarton
10. The Times As It Knows Us by Allen Barnett
14 August 2019
From Kafka to Gogol via Pynchon: top 10 absurd quests in fiction
1. The Golden Ass, or The Metamorphoses of Apuleius by Lucius Apuleius (late second century AD)
2. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol (1842)
3. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
4. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940)
5. Goose of Hermogenes by Ithell Colquhoun (1961)
6. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)
7. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (1967)
8. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1976)
9. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (1998)
10. The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung (2009)
07 August 2019
Top 10 true crime books
1. A Sense of Freedom by Jimmy Boyle and Redeemable by Erwin James
2. The Profession of Violence by John Pearson
3. Gone Shopping by Lorraine Gamman
4. East End Underworld by Raphael Samuel
5. Good Cop, Bad War by Neil Woods, with JS Rafaeli
6. Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz
7. Gentleman Thief by Peter Scott
8. The Lost Girl by Caroline Roberts
9. Murder in Notting Hill by Mark Olden
10. A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun by Noel “Razor” Smith
31 July 2019
From Bag End to Babel: Top 10 libraries in fiction
1. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
2. The Catalogue of Rare Books Not for Sale by John Donne
3. Tik-Tok by John Sladek
4. The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
5. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
6. The Cemetery of Lost Books in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
7. The Citadel Library in A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin
8. Peter Kien’s books in Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti
9. Night Lamp by Jack Vance
10. The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger
24 July 2019
​Top 10 books about Baltimore
1. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (1985)
2. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)
3. The City of Anger by William Manchester (1953)
4. Shock Value by John Waters (1981)
5. Red Baker by Robert Ward (1985)
6. Ten Indians by Madison Smartt Bell (1996)
7. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2008)
8. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)
9. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (1965-2010)
10. The Corner by David Simon (1997)
17 July 2019
Top 10 queer rural books
1. Maurice by EM Forster
2. Conundrum by Jan Morris
3. Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham
4. Stripping Penguins Bare by Michael Carson
5. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
6. On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
7. Modern Nature by Derek Jarman
8. A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale
9. Blossom at the Mention of Your Name by Fiona Cooper
10. Sacred Country by Rose Tremain​
10 July 2019
Top 10 books about Burma
1. Burmese Days by George Orwell
2. From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe
3. Golden Earth: Travels in Burma by Norman Lewis
4. Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma by Wendy Law-Yone
5. Into Hidden Burma by Maurice Collis
6. Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig
7. Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma by George MacDonald Fraser
8. The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong by W Somerset Maugham
9. The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U
10. Under the Dragon by Rory MacLean
03 July 2019
Top 10 books about walking in Britain
1. Journey Through Britain by John Hillaby
2. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
3. A Coast to Coast Walk by Alfred Wainwright
4. The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
5. The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
6. London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
7. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
8. Nightwalk by Chris Yates
9. The January Man by Christopher Somerville
10. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
26 June 2019
Top 10 books about the River Thames
1. Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd
2. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
3. The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner
4. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
5. The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall
6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
7. Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames by Caitlin Davies
8. The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad
9. News from Nowhere by William Morris
10. Wide Open by Nicola Barker
19 June 2019
Top 10 books about cults
1. In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott
2. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The First Book of Calamity Leek by Paula Lichtarowicz
4. Educated by Tara Westover
5. The Girls by Emma Cline
6. The Followers by Rebecca Wait
7. The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn
8. Underground by Haruki Murakami
9. The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer
10. The World in Flames by Jerald Walker
12 June 2019
Top 10 houseguests in fiction
1. King Lear by William Shakespeare
2. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
3. Howards End by EM Forster
4. According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. There but for the by Ali Smith
7. The Spare Room by Helen Garner
8. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
9. Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky
10. For Friends Only by WH Auden
05 June 2019
From Dickens to Roth: top 10 novels about pariahs
1. Sirius by Olaf Stapledon
2. I Married a Communist by Philip Roth
3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
4. The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
7. Light in August by William Faulkner
8. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
9. Lazarillo de Tormes by Anonymous
10. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
29 May 2019
Top 10 teenage friendships in fiction – from Dickens to Ferrante
1. The Girls by Emma Cline
2. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
3. Dare Me by Megan Abbott
4. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
5. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
8. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
9. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
10. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
22 May 2019
Top 10 books about angry women
1. Carrie by Stephen King
2. Medea by Euripides
3. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
4. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
5. Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
6. Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper
7. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
8. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
9. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
10. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
15 May 2019
Top 10 books about Sudan
1. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
2. Prison Notebooks by Ibrahim al-Salahi
3. The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction edited by Ralph Cormack and Max Schmookler
4. The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elsir
5. The Sudan Handbook edited by John Ryle
6. Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Alex de Waal and Julie Flint
7. Bakhita by Veronique Olmi
8. Khartoum at Night; Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan by Marie Grace Brown
9. Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun
10. Modern Sudanese Poetry: An Anthology edited by Adil Babikir
08 May 2019
Top 10 end-of-the-world novels – from Ballard to Pratchett
1. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
2. Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
3. Moonseed by Stephen Baxter
4. Earth by David Brin
5. Quantum Night by Robert J Sawyer
6. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
7. The Drowned World by JG Ballard
8. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
9. The Year When Stardust Fell by Raymond F Jones
10. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
01 May 2019
Top 10 books about psychotherapy
1. Playing and Reality by Donald Winnicott
2. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
3. Understanding Trauma – A Psychoanalytic Approach, edited by Caroline Garland
4. The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
5. The Unconscious at Work, edited by Anton Obholzer and Vega Roberts
6. Regeneration by Pat Barker
7. Couch Fiction by Philippa Perry and Junko Graat
8. Aphrodite’s Hat by Salley Vickers
9. In Therapy by Susie Orbach
10. Mad, Bad and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi
24 April 2019
Top 10 thrillers about siblings
1. The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
2. What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
3. The Favourite Sister by Jessica Knoll
4. Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews
5. The Wych Elm by Tana French
6. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
7. Sister by Rosamund Lupton
8. Atonement by Ian McEwan
9. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
10. If She Wakes by Michael Koryta
17 April 2019
Top 10 bilingual books
1. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
2. We That Are Young by Preti Taneja
3. Hold by Michael Donkor
4. The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins (translated by Julia Sanches)
5. If Not, Winter by Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)
6. Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldúa
7. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
8. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
9. In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
10. Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Brasch
10 April 2019
Top 10 books set in the American midwest
1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2. The Road Home by Jim Harrison
3. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
4. The Round House by Louise Erdrich
5. In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien
6. Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang
7. The Driftless Area by Tom Drury
8. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
9. Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
10. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
03 April 2019
Top 10 fictional takes on real lives
1. Swann’s Way (Vol One of In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust
2. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
3. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
4. If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists: A transposition of temperament by Woody Allen
5. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
6. You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] by Andrew Hankinson
7. Dotter of her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot
8. Artemisia by Anna Banti
9. Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon
10. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber​
27 March 2019
Top 10 evil narrators
1. Alex in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
2. Odilo Unverdorben in Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis
3. Frederick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles
4. Meursault in The Outsider by Albert Camus
5. Humbert Humbert in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
7. The twins in The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf
8. Unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
9. Harry Flashman in Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
10. Satan in Paradise Lost by John Milton
20 March 2019
Top 10 toxic families in fiction
1. The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn
2. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
3. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
4. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
5. Matilda by Roald Dahl
6. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
7. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
8. My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt


13 March 2019
Top 10 books about building cities
1. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
2. Pompeii by Robert Harris
3. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon
4. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
5. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
6. London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
7. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
8. Smart Citizens, Smarter State by Beth Simone Noveck
9. New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
10. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino


06 March 2019
Top 10 books about Hollywood
1. Blue Movie by Terry Southern (1970)
2. Flicker by Theodore Roszak (1991)
3. Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams by Donald Bogle (2006)
4. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? by Rachel Abramowitz (2000)
5. You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips (1991)
6. Final Cut by Stephen Bach (1985)
7. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)
8. LA Quartet by James Ellroy (1987-1992)
9. Making the White Man’s Indian by Angela Aleiss (2005)
10. Hollywood Notebook by Wendy Ortiz (2015)
​

27 February 2019
Top 10 books about women and the sea
1. Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne Stark
2. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
3. The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
4. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
5. The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
6. Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea by Joan Druett
7. Sea Journal by Lisa Woollett
8. The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan
9. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
10. Katie Morag’s Island Stories by Mairi Hedderwick

20 February 2019
From Tales of the City to Tipping the Velvet: top 10 books about coming out 
1. The Times I Knew I Was Gay by Eleanor Crewes
2. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
3. Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry
4. Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
5. More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
6. Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques
7. When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri
8. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
9. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
10. Death in the Spotlight by Robin Stevens

13 February 2019
Top 10 genre-twisting novels
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
3. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
4. VALIS by Philip K Dick
5. Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
6. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
7. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
8. If on a winter’s night a traveller … by Italo Calvino
9. Bluets by Maggie Nelson
10. Blind Man with a Pistol and Plan B by Chester Himes

06 February 2019
Top 10 books about idleness
1. Rameau’s Nephew by Denis Diderot
2. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
3. The Portable Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau
4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud
5. The Decay of Lying and Other Essays by Oscar Wilde
6. The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot
7. A Short History of Decay by EM Cioran
8. A Man Asleep by Georges Perec
9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
10. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

30 January 2019
Top 10 books about the Troubles
1. Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee
2. Nor Meekly Serve My Time: The H Block Struggle 1976-1981 edited by Brian Campbell, Laurence McKeown and Felim O’Hagan
3. Milkman by Anna Burns
4. Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul by Kevin Toolis
5. Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh by Toby Harnden
6. Stone Cold by Martin Dillon
7. Country by Michael Hughes
8. Where They Were Missed by Lucy Caldwell
9. Killing Rage by Eamon Collins
10. Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine
 
23 January 2019
Top 10 musical novels
1. Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
2. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
3. The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
4. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
5. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
6. Swing Time by Zadie Smith
7. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
8. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
9. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
10. Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

16 January 2019
Top 10 books about Trinidad and Tobago
1. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
2. Letters from London: Seven Essays by CLR James, edited by Nicholas Laughlin
3. A Naturalist’s Year by Richard ffrench
4. Crick Crack, Monkey by Merle Hodge
5. Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo
6. A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul
7. The Whale House by Sharon Millar
8. The Wine of Astonishment by Earl Lovelace
9. History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago by Eric Williams
10. De Rightest Place by Barbara Jenkins

09 January 2019
Top 10 Quakers in fiction
1. Honor Bright in The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
2. Ruth Wilcox in Howards End by EM Forster
3. The Middleton siblings in Notes from An Exhibition by Patrick Gale
4. The people of the Dusty Miller in The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss
5. Sarah Grimké in The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
6. Captain Bildad in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
7. The Paxmore family in Chesapeake by James A Michener
8. May Thornton in Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls
9. Andrew Raynes in The Charioteer by Mary Renault
10. Susanna Thorn in No Shame, No Fear by Ann Turnbull

02 January 2019
Top 10 books about insomnia
1. Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed by Lawrence Wright
2. At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime by A Roger Ekirch
3. The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation 1933-1939 by Charlotte Beradt
4. Compass by Mathias Énard
5. Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
6. The Fall of Sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy
7. Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems, edited by Lisa Russ Spaar
8. Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film by Elisabeth Bronfen
9. The Poetics of Sleep, from Aristotle to Nancy by Simon Morgan Wortham
10. Why We Dream by Alice Robb