Five of the best books about math

Matt Parker is a stand-up comedian and a YouTuber with over one hundred million views. He is the author of the international bestseller Humble Pi and Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension. Parker is also frequently seen, heard, and read on the Science Channel, on BBC radio, and in The Guardian, in that order. He has previously held world records for both the Rubik’s Cube and Space Invaders. In the pursuit of math, Parker has: flipped a coin 10,000 times, traveled to Antarctica, memorized π to hundreds of digits, and been bitten by a bullet ant in the Amazon rainforest. He has given math lectures at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Harvard University, and Lake Monger Primary School.

Parker's new book is Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World.

At the Guardian he tagged five of the best books about maths (or math, as Americans call it). One title on the list:

Hello World by Hannah Fry

It may seem obvious in hindsight that AI would become a big aspect of modern life, but Hannah Fry was ahead of the curve when she wrote about the potential impact algorithms were going to have on us. As relevant now as it was when published six years ago, Hello World is an excellent explanation of how algorithms are not some otherworldly intelligence but rather manifestations of our own beliefs and biases.

Read about another book on Parker's list.

Also see: Ian Stewart's top ten popular mathematics books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Don H. Doyle's "The Age of Reconstruction"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom Remade the World by Don H. Doyle.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the Americas

The Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic reforms in Europe.

In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.

At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of

a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

Learn more about The Age of Reconstruction at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Cause of All Nations.

Writers Read: Don H. Doyle (January 2015).

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Reconstruction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rachel Howzell Hall's "What Fire Brings"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: What Fire Brings: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall.

About the book, from the publisher:

A writer’s search for her missing friend becomes a real-life thriller in a twisting novel of suspense by the New York Times bestselling author of These Toxic Things.

Bailey Meadows has just moved into the remote Topanga Canyon home of thriller author Jack Beckham. As his writer-in-residence, she’s supposed to help him once again reach the bestseller list. But she’s not there to write a thriller―she’s there to find Sam Morris, a community leader dedicated to finding missing people, who has disappeared in the canyon surrounding Beckham’s property.

The missing woman was last seen in the drought-stricken forest known for wildfires and mountain lions. Each new day, Bailey learns just how dangerous these canyons are―for the other women who have also gone missing here…and for her. Could these missing women be linked to strange events that occurred decades ago at the Beckham estate?

As fire season in the canyons approaches, Bailey must race to unravel the truth from fiction before she becomes the next woman lost in the forest.

Visit Rachel Howzell Hall's website.

The Page 69 Test: They All Fall Down.

The Page 69 Test: What Fire Brings.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Kathleen Bryant

From my Q&A with Kathleen Bryant, author of Over the Edge:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I chose Over the Edge as my working title because it reflected the story’s trigger incident and emotional theme.

The book opens with Jeep guide Del Cooper’s discovery of a body lying on a canyon ledge, someone who’s literally fallen over the edge. Or so it seems.

As for Del, she’s been figuratively over the edge. Three years earlier, she was a crime reporter who made an error in judgment that killed a cop. She started drinking, lost her job, and even now, after pulling herself back from the abyss, she struggles to hold it together. She has unexplained visions that might be clues to the murder… or signals she’s still poised at the knife edge of normalcy.

What's in a name?

Sedona--the name is sibilant, mysterious, even seductive. People fascinated by...[read on]

Visit Kathleen Bryant's website.

My Book, The Movie: Over the Edge.

Q&A with Kathleen Bryant.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Aziz Rana's "The Constitutional Bind"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them by Aziz Rana.

About the book, from the publisher:

An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world.

Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life.

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.

Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights.

Visit Aziz Rana's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Constitutional Bind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine experimental books that break narrative norms

Alana Saab is a literary writer and screenwriter. She holds a master of fine arts in fiction from The New School, a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University, and her bachelor’s from New York University in the phenomenology of storytelling. She lives in New York with her partner.

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Saab tagged "nine literary works [that] show how talented writers break narrative norms in service to something greater." One title on the list:

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

A non-daunting book that gives you room to breathe around the anguish of loss, while simultaneously not taking its hands off your neck.

Words are containers, but what happens when traditional narrative cannot properly hold the amount of grief one feels? In this novel, an unnamed narrator famous for saying something ridiculous on “the portal,” a placeholder for any social media platform you want to imagine, narrates her day-to-day influencer life. Half-way through the book, her sister gives birth to a daughter with Proteus syndrome. The narrator spends time with the baby who cannot see or hear and who will, they all know, die soon.

This story knocks you off your feet by placing a mirror up to our society, juxtaposing our most shallow aspects with the deepest grief one can imagine, watching someone completely innocent be dealt the worst hand in the game. But Patricia Lockwood does this without lecturing us on how “bad” we are. Lockwood leaves ample white space on the page which allows for real-time reflection and processing: of grief, of unspeakable pain, and of our own shame.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Meg Gardiner's "Shadowheart"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Shadowheart by Meg Gardiner.

About the book, from the publisher:

What happens when two serial killers begin to compete with each other?

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Gardiner comes a new high-octane thriller in the acclaimed UNSUB series.

FBI Special Agent Caitlin Hendrix faces a case from nightmares.

In a Tennessee prison, Efrem Judah Goode draws haunting portraits of women he claims he has killed. Around the country, desperate families of the missing seek answers in his eerie drawings. And on darkened back roads and New York City streets, a new killer poses duct-taped bodies at the sites of Goode’s murders.

Two serial killers are locked in a twisted rivalry. To stop the brutal slayings, FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix must unravel the connection between Goode and the Broken Heart Killer. Their warped competition destroys anyone in their path. Caught between a manipulative psychopath and a ruthless UNSUB, Caitlin has to dive into not one, but two dark and twisted minds. She will risk everything, plunging into the depths of their depraved clash to hunt down an unstoppable killer.

Visit Meg Gardiner's website and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirty Secrets Club.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Collector.

My Book, The Movie: Meg Gardiner's Evan Delaney series.

The Page 69 Test: The Liar's Lullaby.

My Book, The Movie: Meg Gardiner's Jo Beckett series.

The Page 69 Test: The Nightmare Thief.

The Page 69 Test: Ransom River.

The Page 69 Test: The Shadow Tracer.

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Instinct.

The Page 69 Test: UNSUB.

The Page 69 Test: Into the Black Nowhere.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Corners of the Night.

The Page 69 Test: Shadowheart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patrick Moser's "Waikīkī Dreams"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Waikīkī Dreams: How California Appropriated Hawaiian Beach Culture by Patrick Moser.

About the book, from the publisher:

Despite a genuine admiration for Native Hawaiian culture, white Californians of the 1930s ignored authentic relationships with Native Hawaiians. Surfing became a central part of what emerged instead: a beach culture of dressing, dancing, and acting like an Indigenous people whites idealized.

Patrick Moser uses surfing to open a door on the cultural appropriation practiced by Depression-era Californians against a backdrop of settler colonialism and white nationalism. Recreating the imagined leisure and romance of life in Waikīkī attracted people buffeted by economic crisis and dislocation. California-manufactured objects like surfboards became a physical manifestation of a dream that, for all its charms, emerged from a white impulse to both remove and replace Indigenous peoples. Moser traces the rise of beach culture through the lives of trendsetters Tom Blake, John “Doc” Ball, Preston “Pete” Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison while also delving into California’s control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry.

Compelling and innovative, Waikīkī Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.

Learn more about Waikīkī Dreams at the University of Illinois Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waikīkī Dreams.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best books to better understand and enjoy sport history

Gerald Gems is professor emeritus at North Central College and past president of the North American Society for Sport History.

His new book is Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport. It argues that in the latter nineteenth century

Sports such as baseball, boxing, cycling, and football offered psychological relief from the stresses of a rapidly changing economic and social order. Cycling, in particular, provided women with the means to challenge the prescribed gender order of female domesticity, male hegemony, and the dictates of physically restrictive fashion. In the process, sport became a key component in the rise of feminism and a prescription for the epidemics that followed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

At Shepherd Gems tagged five top books to better understand and enjoy sport history, including:

The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America by Elliott J. Gorn

My next pick is a masterful account of astute analysis written in vibrant prose that recounts the working class version of pugilism during the Antebellum period and the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century. In the frontier communities, males issued public challenges to other individuals or, in general, appealed to any challengers to test one's masculinity.

Lacking rules, such contests allowed for brutal tactics, including eye gouging and even castration, unless or until an opponent admitted defeat. Rather than the middle and upper-class virtues of piety, sobriety, and social mobility, such altercations provided a compensatory value system that rewarded physical prowess.

With the gradual introduction of the Marquis of Queensberry rules after the Civil War, boxing gradually assumed a somewhat more genteel appearance and limited acceptance as a professional sport, producing working-class, racial, and ethnic heroes. By the end of the nineteenth century, it gained the stature of a commercialized business in which national champions vied with international opponents in regulated weight classes on a world stage.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Deborah Batterman

From my Q&A with Deborah Batterman, author of Just Like February:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

When I read a novel with an intriguing title — and I think that can be said about Just Like February — I always look to that aha! moment when its meaning is revealed. Jake is a Leap Year baby, which gives him a unique perspective in terms of the passage of time, not to mention what becomes the central metaphor of the novel, revealed maybe halfway into it. There’s a fascinating history to how the calendar evolved. Politics and religion played their part in determining the length of months and marking important days in a way that might still be in sync with astronomy. All of which got me thinking that for all the scientific accuracy we have, randomness plays its part in our lives. Just like February.

What's in a name?

More often than not the names of characters...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Deborah Batterman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Just Like February.

Q&A with Deborah Batterman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elsa Devienne's "Sand Rush"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles by Elsa Devienne.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first history of the formidable campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world's greatest coastal metropolises, revealing how the city's man-made shores became the site for the reinvention of seaside leisure and the triumph of modern bodies.

The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city's crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public.

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA's engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. They cleaned up and enlarged the beaches--up to three times their original size--and destroyed old piers and barracks to make room for brand-new accommodations, parking lots, and freeways. The members of this powerful "beach lobby" reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared "white flight" from the coast. In doing so, they established Southern California as the national reference point for shoreline planning and coastal access. As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Despite their artificial origins, LA's beaches have proved remarkably resilient. The drastic human interventions into nature brought social and economic benefits to the region without long-term detrimental consequences on the environment. Yet the ongoing climate crisis and rapid sea level rise will eventually force the city to reckon with its past building.

Sand Rush not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California. Featuring a foreword by Jenny Price, it recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world's greatest coastal metropolises.

Learn more about Sand Rush at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sand Rush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six stunning tales of folk horror

Lucy Foley studied English literature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry. She is the author of five novels including The Paris Apartment and The Guest List. She lives in London.

Foley's newest novel is The Midnight Feast.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite stories of folk horror, including:

The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

A fascinating, shapeshifting, exquisitely written novel which is by turns enchanting and horrifying. After his wife commits an unspeakable act of violence and vanishes, the protagonist, Apollo, is left to go on an odyssey through a folkloric otherworld of weird creatures, mysterious islands and haunted forests, all occupying the same space as the five boroughs of New York City. Witches and trolls appear alongside discussions of race, immigration, cyberstalking and parenthood in this dark fairy-tale with some mind-blowing twists and more than a touch of folk horror along the way.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Changeling is among Brittany Bunzey's twenty-five "must-read, truly bone-chilling" horror books, Nat Cassidy's eight top unconventional coming-of-age horror novels, Benjamin Percy's top five novels about dangerous plants, James Han Mattson's five top dark and disturbing reads, A.K. Larkwood's five tense books that blend sci-fi and horror, Leah Schnelbach's ten sci-fi and fantasy must-reads from the 2010s, T. Marie Vandelly's top ten suspenseful horror novels featuring domestic terrors and C.J. Tudor's six thrillers featuring missing, mistaken, or "changed" children.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Katharine Schellman's "The Last Note of Warning"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Last Note of Warning: A Mystery (The Nightingale Mysteries, Volume 3) by Katharine Schellman.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Last Note of Warning is the third in the luscious, mysterious, and queer Nightingale mystery series by Katharine Schellman, set in 1920s New York.

Prohibition is a dangerous time to be a working-class woman in New York City, but Vivian Kelly has finally found some measure of stability and freedom. By day, she’s a respectable shop assistant, delivering luxurious dresses to the city’s wealthy and elite. At night, she joins the madcap revelry of New York’s underworld, serving illegal drinks and dancing into the morning at a secretive, back-alley speakeasy known as the Nightingale. She's found, if not love, then something like it with her bootlegger sweetheart, Leo, even if she can't quite forget the allure of the Nightingale's sultry owner, Honor Huxley.

Then the husband of a wealthy client is discovered dead in his study, and Vivian was the last known person to see him alive. With the police and the press both eager to name a culprit in the high-profile case, she finds herself the primary murder suspect.

She can’t flee town without endangering the people she loves, but Vivian isn’t the sort of girl to go down without a fight. She'll cash in every favor she has from the criminals she calls friends to prove she had no connection to the dead man. But she can't prove what isn't true.

The more Vivian digs into the man’s life, and as the police close in on her, the harder it is to avoid the truth: someone she knows wanted him dead. And the best way to get away with murder is to set up a girl like Vivian to take the fall.

Visit Katharine Schellman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Note of Warning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sara E. Davies & Jacqui True's "Hidden Wars"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Hidden Wars: Gendered Political Violence in Asia's Civil Conflicts by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) has always been a part of warfare. In Asia, testimonies of egregious rape and sexual violence extend back to the Rape of Nanjing, to the experience of the Korean comfort women in World War II, and to forced marriages and sexual slavery during the Cambodian genocide. The past two decades have yielded crucial new insights about SGBV, but scholars and researchers still struggle to explain why and when this violence occurs. A major problem is that incidences of SGBV are vastly underreported; reliable data is especially scarce in Asia, where demographic and health surveys are infrequent and national reporting systems are underdeveloped relative to other parts of the globe. Asia also has some of the most protracted conflicts in the world but the complexity of subnational conflicts in Asia often masks the gendered dimensions of violence.

In Hidden Wars, Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True examine the relationship between reports of SGBV and structural gender inequality in three conflict-affected societies in Asia--Burma, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Based on extensive field research and an original dataset on conflict-related SGBV, Davies and True show how reporting is significantly constrained by a variety of factors, including normalized gendered violence as well as political dynamics affecting local civil society, humanitarian, and international organizations. They address the real-world limitations of data collection and argue that these constraints reinforce a culture of silence and impunity that perpetuates SGBV and permits governments to abrogate their responsibility for this violence. Hidden Wars breaks new methodological ground in showing that what we know about SGBV can be understood fully only if the politicized context of reporting SGBV and data collection is taken into consideration.

Learn more about Hidden Wars at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hidden Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top hitman novels

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged eight hitman stories you don’t want to miss, including:

Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart

Feared and revered, this hitman has legendary kills under his belt, but now he’s determined to call it quits. After joining a 12-step program designed for those in his particular profession, Mark is reformed — but just because you decide to leave the job doesn’t mean it lets you go easily…

Read about another book on the list.

Q&A with Rob Hart.

The Page 69 Test: Assassins Anonymous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Alyssa Palombo

From my Q&A with Alyssa Palombo, author of The Assassin of Venice:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The Assassin of Venice definitely lets readers know what to expect and what sort of story this is going to be. I think it communicates that the book is going to be a high-stakes thriller in a beautiful and interesting setting. Or that is certainly my hope!

What's in a name?

I don't always have a choice, as sometimes I write about real historical figures, and so in that case I already have their names. But when I do get to choose, my main characters' names have to...[read on]

Visit Alyssa Palombo's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Violinist of Venice.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence.

My Book, The Movie: The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel.

My Book, The Movie: The Borgia Confessions.

Writers Read: Alyssa Palombo (February 2020).

Q&A with Alyssa Palombo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight adventure-filled books set on trains

Sarah Brooks is the author of The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands. She won the Lucy Cavendish Prize in 2019 and a Northern Debut Award from New Writing North in 2021. She works in East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, where she helps run the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She is coeditor of Samovar, a bilingual online magazine for translated speculative fiction. She lives in Leeds, England.

At Electric Lit Brooks tagged eight books that have "a sense of adventure, and an exploration of the sometimes contradictory promises of escape and of connection that the railway offers." One title on the list:

Iron Council by China Miéville

Outlandish creatures and gigantic structures have always been a key element in Miéville’s novels, and Iron Council — ‘the perpetual train’ — is no exception. The story is set in the imagined world of Bas-lag, and moves back and forth through time, from the beginnings of train as it sets out to map the land and wipe out its inhabitants to make way for the rails, to the rebellion of the rail workers, and the attempts by a corrupt parliament and militia to destroy such a dangerous symbol of revolution. The ever moving, ever growing train provides great opportunities not only to explore the weird and wonderful landscapes of Bas-Lag, but also the febrile onboard world, with its renegades and ‘Remade’.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Arang Keshavarzian's "Making Space for the Gulf"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East by Arang Keshavarzian.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space—an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests. Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as ruptures—the discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American power—and crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of people—migrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star architects, striking taxi drivers and dethroned rulers, protectors of British India and stewards of globalized American universities. Tacking across geographic scales, Keshavarzian reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along national divisions and social inequalities. When understood as a process, not an object, the Persian Gulf reveals much about how regions and the world have been made in modern times. Making Space for the Gulf offers a fresh understanding of this globally consequential place.

Learn more about Making Space for the Gulf at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Making Space for the Gulf.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Yoon Ha Lee reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee, author of Moonstorm.

The entry begins:

The last book I read was an ARC of James S. A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods. I knew I was going to like this, as I enjoyed The Expanse, but I did not expect to be snarling carnivorously at everyone who came in between me and my reading experience! Besides, my catten is better at carnivorous snarling anyway. (Kidding. She is a giant round marshmallow.)

I’m betraying my age, but The Mercy of Gods is like the best parts of William Sleator’s supremely creepy psychology experiment children’s horror novel House of Stairs if you mashed it up with the far-flung alien empires in C. J. Cherryh books like Hunter of Worlds and The Faded Sun, and added heavy doses of microbiology, ineffable mystery, and body horror. We start with a planet settled by humans, but to which humans are not native; the humans themselves have no idea how they got there. On the eve of a triumph in microbiology research, that world becomes the latest conquest by aliens who rate other species as (a) useful (b) extinct.

This book absolutely grabbed me because the authors take the opening gambit of telling us, from the viewpoint of an alien, that the humans...[read on]

About Moonstorm, from the publisher:

In a society where conformity is valued above all else, a teen girl training to become an Imperial pilot is forced to return to her rebel roots to save her world in this adrenaline-fueled sci-fi adventure—perfect for fans of Iron Widow and Skyward!

Hwa Young was just ten years old when imperial forces destroyed her rebel moon home. Now, six years later, she is a citizen of the very empire that made her an orphan.

Desperate to shake her rebel past, Hwa Young dreams of one day becoming a lancer pilot, an elite group of warriors who fly into battle using the empire’s most advanced tech—giant martial robots. Lancers are powerful, and Hwa Young would do anything to be the strong one for once in her life.

When an attack on their boarding school leaves Hwa Young and her classmates stranded on an imperial space fleet, her dreams quickly become a reality. As it turns out, the fleet is in dire need of pilot candidates, and Hwa Young—along with her brainy best friend Geum, rival Bae, and class clown Seong Su—are quick to volunteer.

But training is nothing like what they expected, and secrets—like the fate of the fleet’s previous lancer squad and hidden truths about the rebellion itself—are stacking up. And when Hwa Young uncovers a conspiracy that puts their entire world at risk, she’s forced to make a choice between her rebel past and an empire she’s no longer sure she can trust.

Visit Yoon Ha Lee's website.

The Page 69 Test: Revenant Gun.

Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee (June 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.

Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee.

The Page 69 Test: Fox Snare.

Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee (October 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Moonstorm.

The Page 69 Test: Moonstorm.

Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top jailhouse confessional novels

Carol LaHines’s debut novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, was a finalist for the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel and an American Fiction Award. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals including Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Literary Review, The Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Sycamore Review, Permafrost, redivider, Literary Orphans, and Literal Latte.

LaHines’s new novel is The Vixen Amber Halloway.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five jailhouse confessional novels, including:

Cracks, by Sheila Kohler

Cracks, by Sheila Kohler, is a marvelous example of an apologia for crimes earlier committed. The novel opens as former students of a girls’ boarding school in South Africa are returning for a reunion. We learn that there is a classmate who is no longer there; that there is a teacher who left under hazy circumstances. We realize that something is amiss, that something occurred that the women are trying to cover up. The effect is magnified in Cracks because there are multiple voices—the chorus of schoolgirls, each with her own perspective on the ancient crime. Like Nabokov, her protagonists lure us in; we want to believe them, to absolve them. The two-storyline setup allows Kohler to prolong the suspense, to reach a feverish crescendo, before we learn the truth—if there is such a thing—of what actually transpired.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew D. Morrison's "Blacksound"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States by Matthew D. Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.

Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Learn more about Blacksound at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Blacksound.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rob Hart's "Assassins Anonymous"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this clever, surprising, page-turner, the world’s most lethal assassin gives up the violent life only to find himself under siege by mysterious assailants. It’s a kill-or-be-killed situation, but the first option is off the table. What’s a reformed hit man to do?

Mark was the most dangerous killer-for-hire in the world. But after learning the hard way that his life’s work made him more monster than man, he left all of that behind, and joined a twelve-step group for reformed killers.

When Mark is viciously attacked by an unknown assailant, he is forced on the run. From New York to Singapore to London, he chases after clues while dodging attacks and trying to solve the puzzle of who’s after him. All without killing anyone. Or getting killed himself. For an assassin, Mark learns, nonviolence is a real hassle.

Visit Rob Hart's website.

My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: The Warehouse.

Writers Read: Rob Hart (January 2021).

The Page 69 Test: The Paradox Hotel.

Q&A with Rob Hart.

The Page 69 Test: Assassins Anonymous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Bryant's "Over the Edge," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Over the Edge: A Novel by Kathleen Bryant.

The entry begins:

As I wrote Over the Edge, a mystery-thriller set in Sedona’s red rock canyons, I definitely pictured the book as a movie. Not because I dared hope my story would end up on screen (though wouldn’t that be cool?) but because Sedona is already a cinematic icon. Dozens of movies were filmed here, most of them during the heyday of Hollywood Westerns.

Besides, imagining a book on film is a useful tool for writers. Visualizing scenes with the eye of a location scout or cinematographer helps add local color and authenticity. The right setting can create mood—the unsettling isolation of a narrow canyon, the menace of an approaching storm. Setting can even become character—the Navajoland of Tony Hillerman’s books, for example. Most important, movies (like book editors!) are all about showing versus telling.

Here's a surprising fact: Though many Westerns were filmed in Sedona, the town was usually a stand-in for somewhere else. In my dream movie, Sedona gets the star treatment. I’d choose Robert Redford as executive producer with Graham Roland heading up the production. I’m a huge fan of their work on Dark Winds, the electrifying television series based on Hillerman’s Leaphorn/Chee mysteries. The show weaves setting, character, and story into a tapestry as bold and beautiful as a Two Grey Hills rug.

The events in Over the Edge unfold through the eyes of Del Cooper, a Jeep guide struggling with PTSD. During a tour, she discovers a body in a remote canyon. Suspecting the murder has something to do with a proposed forest service land trade, she starts digging for the truth. When her witnesses disappear, she realizes the killer is watching her every move.

Thinking about casting, Glen Powell (Hit Man, 2024) has the edgy charm of forest service cop Ryan Driscoll. For Jeep guide Del Cooper—broken but driven to find the truth—I’d choose Rebecca...[read on]

Visit Kathleen Bryant's website.

My Book, The Movie: Over the Edge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stephen Schryer's "National Review's Literary Network"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: National Review's Literary Network: Conservative Circuits by Stephen Schryer.

About the book, from the publisher:

National Review's Literary Network traces the careers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics who wrote for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review. In the 1950s, the magazine sought to establish itself as a conservative alternative to liberal journals like Partisan Review. To do so, it needed a robust book review section, featuring nationally recognized writers. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Whittaker Chambers, John Dos Passos, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, Joan Didion, Garry Wills, and D. Keith Mano wrote for the magazine. The magazine boosted their careers and they, in turn, helped make Buckley's version of conservatism respectable. In the pages of National Review and elsewhere, these writers fashioned a body of literary work that takes up and refracts right-wing concerns about tradition, religion, and personal liberty.

Uncovering a neglected part of post-World War II American literary history, Stephen Schryer highlights these writers' enduring impact on movement conservatism. Believing in the power of intellectuals, Buckley and his fellow editors argued that the academy, the media, and other institutions had been taken over by a liberal establishment that sought to impose its ideas on the nation. They wanted to establish a network of institutional counter-circuits staffed by conservatives. The magazine's literary intellectuals contributed to this effort, helping conservatives present themselves as a counter-elite sheltering traditional, humanities-based knowledge within a technocratic welfare state. In so doing, they facilitated the magazine's assault on the very possibility of expertise, ushering in the fragmented epistemological landscape that has characterized the United States since the late 1960s.

Learn more about National Review's Literary Network at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: National Review's Literary Network.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best fashion memoirs

Chloe Mac Donnell is the Guardian's deputy fashion and lifestyle editor.

She tagged five of the most memorable memoirs from the world of fashion, including:

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 by Tina Brown

Fashion loves to gossip and Tina Brown’s memoir of her dazzling career is packed full of sizzling muckraking, spanning everyone from Clint Eastwood (“hard work: long, taciturn silences”) to Boris Johnson (“an epic shit”). Based on the diaries she kept as the editor of Vanity Fair, the book covers an era of excess, and Brown, fresh to New York City from the UK, takes it all in with a sharp eye for detail. Stories of power plays at black-tie dinners are interspersed with office politics as Brown turns around the flagging magazine with her “high-low journalism” approach. She convinced Ronald and Nancy Reagan to kiss for one cover, and a naked seven months pregnant Demi Moore for another – leading to the publication being banned by Walmart in the US.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Hermann Hesse's "Demian"

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released (July 2024) is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Hermann Hesse's Demian. It begins:

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse both won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Both were born in Germany, and both became citizens of other countries. There was something else these two remarkable writers had in common: their greatest works would not have been possible had Friedrich Nietzsche never lived.

In the introduction to Hesse’s novel, Demian, Thomas Mann wrote:

The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian…is unforgettable.” Unforgettable because, “With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth a grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpretation of their innermost life had risen from their own midst - whereas it was a man already forty-two years old who gave them what they sought.”

Hesse had written Demian over a few months in l917, the third year of the war. It was published just after the war, in l919, the same year he wrote an essay entitled “Zarathustra’s Return” in which he acknowledged “his enormous debt to and reverence for” Nietzsche. The debt could not have been greater. In Steppenwolf, Hesse’s most famous novel, Harry Haller turns his back on what the l9th Century has produced - the bourgeois, Nietzsche’s “last man,” - with as much disgust as Flaubert expressed in Madame Bovary. Through the French Revolution and the forces of industrialization, the world had been turned upside down. Money, comfort, work - everything looked down upon by the aristocracy - was now looked up to as man’s greatest achievements. The noble sense of a scale of rank and values had been replaced by the demand for equality and the right of everyone to their own, uninstructed, opinion. The sense of reverence for the customary, the established way - the morning prayer, as Nietzsche had put it - had been replaced by the morning paper - the daily report of whatever was new. Everyone had become an actor, showing others what they thought others wanted to see, and then, believing what others thought about them, thought that was who they were.

The bourgeois, according to Steppenwolf, which is the name Harry Haller has given himself, is incapable of giving himself entirely either to God or to the flesh. The “absolute is his abhorrence.” He will never follow one path or the other; he always seeks....[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.

Third Reading: Hermann Hesse's Demian.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that explore female friendship & adolescence

Maggie Nye is the author of The Curators. She is a writer and teacher whose work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans Writer in Residence program.

The short story from which The Curators grew was published in Pleiades.

At Lit Hub Nye tagged five books

that center on women, too, on bodies that share the intimacy of aging, of heat and change, of infirmity. What is common to all of them is a propulsive and generous knowing and loving so strong and terrible that it transcends the individual and absorbs the girls and women in its orbit into shared rapture.

One title on the list:

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

In this mystery novel, a team of aimless cheerleaders in small-town America finds focus and drive under the leadership of young new coach, Colette French. Her arrival, however, disrupts the existing power structures within the team, which are as elaborate and precarious as the human pyramids the squad drills at practice.

If you’re thinking to yourself cheerleaders? I’m simply too spooky for cheerleaders, then reader, I once thought as you do now, but trust me, you’re dead wrong. Abbott writes a world where twinning synchronicity, body purging, blood-pacting teenhood is not so much a spectacle but an underpinning of life.

Like [Mónica Ojeda's] Jawbone, this is a novel obsessed with the changing bodies of its central characters, and the limits of those bodies. The book probes the uncomfortably porous boundaries of desire between childhood and adulthood; plus, there’s a juicy murder!

Read about another book on the list.

Dare Me is among Amelia Kahaney's six books featuring characters growing up against the wall, Frederick Weisel's six crime novels set in public school classrooms, Rachel Kapelke-Dale's eleven unexpected thrillers about female rage, Debbie Babitt's eight top coming-of-age thrillers, Avery Bishop's top five novels that explore "mean girl" culture, Kelly Simmons's six books to buddy-read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Katie Lowe's top eight crime novels for angry women in an angry world, Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction, S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Kadane's "The Enlightenment and Original Sin"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Enlightenment and Original Sin by Matthew Kadane.

About the book, from the publisher:

An eloquent microhistory that argues for the centrality of the doctrine of original sin to the Enlightenment.

What was the Enlightenment? This question has been endlessly debated. In The Enlightenment and Original Sin, historian Matthew Kadane advances the bold claim that the Enlightenment is best defined through what it set out to accomplish, which was nothing short of rethinking the meaning of human nature.

Kadane argues that this project centered around the doctrine of original sin and, ultimately, its rejection, signaling the radical notion that an inherently flawed nature can be overcome by human means. Kadane explores this and other wide-ranging themes through the story of a previously unknown figure, Pentecost Barker, an eighteenth-century purser and wine merchant. By examining Barker’s personal diary and extensive correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Kadane tracks the transformation of Barker’s consciousness from a Puritan to an Enlightenment outlook, revealing through one man’s journey the large-scale shifts in self-understanding whose philosophical reverberations have shaped debates on human nature for centuries.

Learn more about The Enlightenment and Original Sin at the University of Chicago Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Watchful Clothier.

The Page 99 Test: The Enlightenment and Original Sin.

--Marshal Zeringue