This week’s Five and Ten list has a nice synergy to it, from authors to house fires to favorite works. Funny how the universe sometimes folds over on itself.

Our first list is from Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson. Claudia is a fellow native Virginian and LSU Press poet, and I was reading her collection Pharoh, Pharoh when I discovered our house was on fire three Christmases ago. I have since finished that beautiful collection, since I had it in my hand when I went out the door. Her Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection Late Wife is not only one of my favorite books of poetry, it is also on our second list today. For more about Claudia and her most recent collection, Figure Studies, visit her website: http://claudiaemerson.org. Here’s Claudia’s list:

1) For Love of Common Words, Steve Scafidi

2) Dismal Rock, Davis McCombs3) I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman, Jude Nutter

4) The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, Erin McGraw

5) Home, Marilynne Robinson
Maria Browning is a journalist and blogger. Visit her wonderful blogs: http://bittergracenotes.blogspot.com and http://turnoutward.blogspot.com. Maria wrote an article in The Nashville Scene about my books, William’s birds, and our house fire. The profile was published in the back of the paperback edition of Sufficient Grace.  Maria aThese days, Maria is writing regularly for Tennesses’s new virtual center for the book, Chapter 16.  This is also a terrific  place to get good read recommendations, articles, essays, and reviews by and about writers with a Tennessee connection, writers coming through Tennessee, and about books Tennessee’s reading communities want to know about. Check out this great site: www.chapter16.org.

Maria, calls this beautifully annotated list, “’Five Books I Lucked Into,’ because I didn’t particularly expect to like any of them going in, and wound up loving them. Most of them arrived in my life as review assignments. Except for the Bell novel, all were published in the past decade.”

1) Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell—Published in 1991, this book predates Bell’s acclaimed novels on Haiti. It’s a smart thriller and an account of a spiritual quest. One of the most beautifully crafted novels I have ever read.

2) Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir by Karl Fleming—Fleming is a journalist who made his name covering the civil rights movement. About a third of this book is devoted to a fascinating account of his childhood in a North Carolina orphanage, the rest to his years as a reporter.

3) The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell—A fun book about the Puritans, ergo a work of genius.

4) Late Wife by Claudia Emerson—This collection of very personal poems about marriage has haunted me since I first encountered it. Poignant and beautiful.

5) The Dancer from Khiva by Bibish—This memoir recounts the life of a rural Uzbek woman who winds up struggling to survive in post-Soviet Russia. Bibish’s story is extremely grim, but she is an irresistible character with a genius for living.