"The 10 best new books to read"--from BBC

The following webpage listed 10 best news books to read picked by BBC, with a brief description of each.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140227-the-10-best-new-books-to-read

The 10 best new books to read

Jane Ciabattari

27 Feb. 2014

Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned

Bailey is a superb biographer whose specialty is the troubled lives of alcoholic writers: John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Lost Weekend author Charles Jackson. In this bittersweet memoir, he turns the spotlight on his own life.

Bailey is the second son of a lawyer from small-town Oklahoma and a playfully intellectual German mother who met in New York’s Greenwich Village. His older brother Scott is a serious, handsome child who becomes a rebellious teen, drinks beer, smokes weed and crashes his dad’s Porsche multiple times. In a matter of years he turns into a man awash with addictions (alcohol, heroin, crack). He goes from entertaining to hopeless to dangerous. Bailey teases out the subtlest aspects of sibling rivalry and owns up to his own youthful misadventures. Despite all the efforts −psychiatrists, rehab, religion, prison and hospital care, even a stint in the marines − Scott, it seems, is doomed. (Ecco)

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The list:

1. Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned

2. Kai Bird, The Good Spy

3. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

4. Stacey D’Erasmo, Wonderland

5. Roxane Gay, An Untamed State

6. Justin Go, The Steady Running of the Hour

7. Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You

8. Mona Simpson, The Casebook

9. Muriel Spark, The Informed Air: Essays

10. Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War