The eleven best books about John F. Kennedy

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects.

At Town & Country she tagged eleven top books about John F. Kennedy, including:

An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963 by Robert Dallek

Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life uses new material (new as of 2003, we should clarify) to give a full portrait of JFK. As the publisher notes, "Dallek succeeds as no other biographer has done in striking a critical balance—never shying away from JFK's weaknesses, brilliantly exploring his strengths—as he offers up a vivid portrait of a bold, brave, complex, heroic, human Kennedy."

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine novels about grand estates that are filled with secrets

Chanel Cleeton is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick Next Year in Havana, When We Left Cuba, The Last Train to Key West, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, Our Last Days in Barcelona, and The Cuban Heiress.

Her latest novel is The House on Biscayne Bay.

At CrimeReads she tagged nine of her "favorite novels featuring grand estates that are filled with secrets." One title on the list:

The Missing Years by Lexie Elliott

When Alicia Calder inherits half of a manor house in the Scottish Highlands, she’s transported back in time to face her childhood secrets. Her father disappeared twenty-seven years ago, and alongside the half-sister who is practically a stranger to her, Alicia is forced to confront both the house’s past and her own. There’s something treacherous about the home and the surrounding grounds, and this atmospheric thriller will keep readers guessing until the end.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Missing Years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight magical libraries in literature

Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian who lives in Ohio and works at one of the largest libraries in the U.S. He has spent the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, which inspired him to write his own book.

His debut novel is A Short Walk Through a Wide World.

At Electric Lit Westerbeke tagged eight books "which are only the smallest sample of the breadth and variety of ideas writers have mined from libraries." One title on the list:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Much of this tale of two dueling magicians concerns the collection and curation of books. The library Mr. Norrell keeps is full of rare magic books, containing spells and incantations, a history of magic, and other rare and forbidden knowledge. Mr. Norrell is quite stingy about whom he shares his library with, which is one of the themes of the book, the attempt by these two magicians to control the magic around them. The climatic moment, when magic finally rebels, takes place in the library and it is a stunner.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is among Trip Galey's five books with devilishly dangerous fairy deals, Gita Trelease's five best intrusive fantasy books, Emily Temple's top ten contemporary Dickensian novels, April Genevieve Tucholke's top five books with elements that echo Norse myth, and D.D. Everest's top ten secret libraries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five inspirational and instructional gardening books

At The Amazon Book Review Seira Wilson tagged five inspirational, and instructional, gardening books, including:

Bird-Friendly Gardening: Guidance and Projects for Supporting Birds in Your Landscape by Jen McGuinness

One of my favorite things about a garden is watching the birds, bees, and butterflies enjoying it too—and these invaluable critters need us more than ever. This book is so easy to understand and use, with sections for small, medium, and large spaces, and covering pretty much any conditions you might need, including condo-friendly plantings and how to create a hummingbird haven on your balcony or patio. Easy-to-use charts of plants in full color outlining what each needs to grow and thrive, along with which birds and pollinators they will attract, made me want to grab my gloves and dig in right now!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top campus crime novels

Ali Lowe has been a journalist for 20 years. She has written for magazines, newspapers, and websites in London and then Australia, after she moved to Sydney sixteen years ago on a trip that was meant to last a year. She was Features Editor at OK! in London, where she memorably stalked celebrities in Elton John's garden at his annual White Tie and Tiara ball.

Lowe lives on the northern beaches of Sydney with her husband and three young children.

Her newest novel is The School Run.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six of her favorite campus crime novels. One title on the list:

What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), by Zoe Heller

Barbara Covett is a lonely and introverted school teacher who attaches herself to the new art teacher at St George’s School in north London, the whimsical and childlike Sheba Hart. When Sheba begins an illicit affair with a fifteen-year-old male pupil, Barbara uses the situation to her own advantage, claiming a sort of ‘ownership’ over Sheba. The crime in this story (nominated for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and later made in to a film starring Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench) is obviously Sheba’s sexual relationship with a minor, which makes for uncomfortable reading. But so does Barbara. A gritty psychological thriller that touches on obsession, victimhood and regret.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Notes on a Scandal is among Elizabeth Brooks's ten top novels with unreliable narrators and Charlotte Northedge's top ten novels about toxic friendships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books by writers who use horror as a way to understand themselves

Richard Scott Larson is a queer writer and critic. His debut memoir is The Long Hallway.

Born and raised in the outer suburbs of St. Louis, he studied literature and film criticism at Hunter College in Manhattan and earned his MFA from New York University in Paris. He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has also been supported by residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Paragraph Workspace for Writers, La Porte Peinte, and the Willa Cather Foundation.

At Electric Lit he tagged eight "books that helped [him] understand how writing about horror can be a way of writing about ourselves." One title on the list:

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

“The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection,” writes Machado in the opening pages of In the Dream House, an innovative account of her experience of domestic abuse that embeds her personal story within an extensive cultural history. The book is structured as a series of brief sections titled after various tropes—many of them from horror film iconography, such as “Dream House as Creature Feature,” “Dream House as Haunted Mansion,” “Dream House as Demonic Possession,” “Dream House as Apocalypse,” and “Dream House as Nightmare on Elm Street”—expressing elements of her time in a house in Indiana where her girlfriend lived during most of the duration of their relationship while Machado was a graduate student in Iowa. Her story is punctuated by harrowing moments of conflict that feel, because of their specificity, almost uncannily familiar. Readers come to inhabit her mind so wholly that the claustrophobia of her relationship with this other woman is made present first in the mind and then in the body, a cancer spreading quietly beneath the skin.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about siblings

Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize.

Ratcliffe's forthcoming book is Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books about siblings, including:

Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing

Rausing’s account of her brother Hans’s and sister-in-law Eva’s struggles with drug addiction is, in many ways, an ordinary story. The “individuality of addicts”, Rausing writes “is curiously erased by the predictable progress of the disease”. But in this case, the Rausing family’s Tetra Pak fortune, and the grim circumstances around her sister-in-law’s death, created something more seemingly sensational, and her family’s life swiftly became the stuff of tabloid headlines. This is a thoughtful and compelling memoir about guilt, boundaries and the fictions of memory – “the stories that hold a family together, and the acts that can split it apart”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top bad-neighbor thrillers

Seraphina Nova Glass is an Edgar Award-nominated author. Her fifth and latest book is The Vacancy in Room 10.

Named a New York Times Book Review Summer Read and an Amazon Editor’s Pick in Mystery & Thrillers, her last book, On A Quiet Street, earned her #1 bestselling status in the Thriller category on Amazon. It was also hailed by Bustle as one of “10 Must-Read Books” and one of “10 Top Thrillers To Read On Your Summer Vacation” in the Boston Globe.

[ Q&A with Seraphina Nova Glass]

At CrimeReads Glass tagged six "thrillers is guaranteed to give you the chills and keep you up all night." One title on the list:

Stranger In The Lake by Kimberly Belle

Charlotte has escaped her troubled past and impoverished childhood and now lives her dream life, in her dream house, with a loving husband and seemingly no problems…except that everyone talks. Did she get pregnant to trap him, did the trailer park girl marry him for his money?

That all seems like petty gossip when a body washes up by the dock behind their house and she’s faced with real, life altering problems. Does she really know the man she married? Can she trust his friends who are all suspect and seem to be hiding secrets themselves? Is she in danger?

This story was immediately gripping and atmospheric. Belle breathes fresh life into a familiar storyline and creates a truly page-turning and spellbinding mystery.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top titles about total solar eclipses

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged seven top books about solar eclipses, including:

American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World by David Baron

What better way to spend this eclipse than reading about a historic one? Scientists race against time to capture a total solar eclipse in its full magnitude and remind us that even though it’s been almost 150 years, we have always looked to the sky in wonder. (How do you think Thomas Edison would feel about our nifty eclipse glasses?)

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels set in refugee camps

Helen Benedict, a British-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of eight novels and six books of nonfiction, several of which feature refugees and war. Her latest nonfiction on refugees is Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, co-authored with Syrian writer, Eyad Awwadawnan.

[My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen; The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen; The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season]

Benedict's new novel is The Good Deed.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels set in refugee camps; in each novel "the overarching theme is not misery but love, whether for a romantic partner, a parent, sibling, friend, or child." One title on the list:

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

This novel, too, centers on African refugees, but in this case, their settlement is not a camp but first a shanty town on the streets of Berlin, which is set up as a protest, and then an anthill-like building in the city that was once an old people’s home. There, refugees from all over Africa—Niger, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and more—live in stark, dorm-like conditions while awaiting either asylum or deportation.

Erpenbeck, a German author of some acclaim, writes feelingly from the point of view of a retired and widowed professor named Richard, who is at a loss over what to do with himself until he falls into a fascination with the refugees in his city and begins to visit them in their anthill of a building to give lessons in German. The story weaves between Richard’s perspective and that of the refugees themselves, bringing out Erpenbeck’s compassion and respect for her characters. Soon enough, as Richard gets to know certain men in the building, they emerge from the word “refugee” into fully realized human beings, each with his own story, needs, and claim on Richard’s conscience.

In essence, this thoughtful and elegantly-written novel is about how the privileged can actually help after all, if only with their money, shelter and sympathy; almost the opposite message to the much more cynical one in The Wrong End of the Telescope. And yet, Go, Went, Gone remains a condemnation of how the Western world, Europe in particular, pushes refugees around like so many sacks of refuse. As Erpenbeck has a character say near the end of the novel, “Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six mysteries about translators

Molly Odintz is the managing editor for CrimeReads and the editor of Austin Noir. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller at BookPeople, and recently returned to Central Texas after five years in NYC. She likes cats, crime novels, and coffee.

At CrimeReads Odintz tagged "six recent stories in which translators and interpreters play a pivotal part," including:

Harriet Crawley, The Translator

Harriet Crawley was married to a Russian, lived and worked in Russia for decades, and is a fluent Russian speaker, so it’s no surprise that her 2017-set novel feels as authentic as a le Carre tale when it comes to underhanded deeds and doomed romance. Crawley’s narrator is a skilled translator called up by the British government to help negotiate an important trade deal. His mission soon goes off-course when he encounters another translator, his former lover, who needs his help: her surrogate son, a hacker who got on the wrong side of the FSB, has died suspiciously, with few interested in a thorough investigation.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten novels with rotating perspectives

Shilpi Somaya Gowda is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of four novels: Secret Daughter (2010), The Golden Son (2015), The Shape of Family (2020), and A Great Country (2024).

Her novels have been translated into over 30 languages, been #1 international bestsellers in several countries and sold more than two million copies worldwide.

At Lit Hub Gowda tagged ten "favorite novels, where the varied voices of family members together create richly layered stories." One title on the list:

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a master of creating authentically believable stories about celebrity figures who don’t exist. In her third novel, she takes a fictional 1950s crooner who was minor character in a previous novel (Evelyn Hugo), makes a cameo in another (Daisy Jones), and shows us his legacy in the form of his four children.

The Riva children, with varying levels of glamour, appear to have classic Southern California lifestyles, as professional surfers and swimsuit models. But they are far from caricatures; indeed, they’re fully drawn, complex and flawed human beings who give us insight into their lives, their relationships with one another, and how they’ve been impacted by their famous but absent father.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Malibu Rising is among Laura Griffin's seven suspense titles in which paradise is not what it seems and María Amparo Escandón's eight top books about living in Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue