Lit Hub Daily: December 3, 2019

• Some of our favorite writers pick the books from the last decade they wish more people would read. | Lit Hub
• David James Duncan remembers Brian Doyle, the late, great writer who tried to “stare God in the eye.” | Lit Hub
• “Herzog’s best films reclaimed the act of seeing for us.” Nick Fraser on Werner Herzog’s uncomfortable relationship with the truth. | Lit Hub Film
• True tales of a literary bartender: Nick Petrulakis builds cocktails from books. | Lit Hub
• Naja Marie Aidt talks to John Freeman about creating meaning from the meaninglessness of grief. | Lit Hub
• “In the premodern world, scripture was always a work in progress.” Karen Armstrong on early Aryans and the Rig Veda. | Lit Hub History
• 10 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Must-Reads From the 2010s: feat. N. K. Jemisin, Ted Chiang, Victor LaValle, Ursula K. Le Guin, and more. | Book Marks
• Liesl Schillinger recommends 5 novels in translation about political transformations, from Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. | Book Marks
• Upon publishing the 50th book in the “Murder, She Wrote” series, Jon Land reflects on the eternal appeal of Cabot Cove. | CrimeReads
• Why are romance novels still dismissed by many as “guilty pleasures” when they consistently dominate the fiction market? | Glamour
• “Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws”: This year’s Bad Sex Award, given for the worst sex scene in a book, goes to not one, but two men: Prix Goncourt winner Didier Decoin and British author John Harvey. | The Guardian
• “I just don’t think of writing as a career,” Lutz says. “If I had chosen that as a career, I would have failed at it, obviously. A trip across Pittsburgh with Gary Lutz. | 3:AM
• Stop buying books from President Trump’s former staffers—we already know what they’ll say, Dahleen Glanton writes. | Chicago Tribune
• “We know these programs make jails safer and reduce rates of recidivism when people reenter society.” On starting a book club in a Texas jail. | Texas Observer
• “His correspondence charts the turning away from socialism and social realism that would produce his novel’s potent surreality.” Kevin Young on Ralph Ellison’s selected letters. | The New Yorker
• Feigned surprise: a study finds that children who own books are much more likely to be good readers. | The Independent

Also on Lit Hub: Wisdom and vision from Toni Morrison: selected quotations from an American icon • On the eve of WWII: three days before the bombing of Paris • On The Literary Life, Eve Ensler on the power of The Apology • Mitch Albom reads from his new book on Storybound, a new radio theater podcast • Read from Jeffrey Colvin’s debut novel Africaville.