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A Good Read: Book Suggestions & Recommendations

Coastaljames said:
Starting this tonight -

A_History_of_Warfare.jpg
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I like it a lot but there's a few people that disagree with him.
 
ramonmercado said:
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. Three short novels and a 30 page story. Dark indeed. Two, 1922 and A Good Marriage have been filmed. Big Driver would make a great film and Fair Extension an interesting short.
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Big Driver was turned into a TV movie a four years ago, starring Maria Bello.
 
This very lunchtime I read a very interesting sci-fi short story.

It featured an alien planet being investigated for colonisation, when contact is lost with the away team. A rescue mission finds carnage with most of the team missing or dead. Investigations and piecing together of the journals reveals hideous, stinking, soft, egg-shaped creatures, jumping things that latch onto your face and have concentrated acid for blood. Infection causes a ravenous hunger and something deadly to burst out of the victims.

Sound a bit familiar?

Without "The Girl Had Guts" by Theodore Sturgeon, I wonder if the Alien / Aliens movies would ever have been made?

It was written in 1957.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
This very lunchtime I read a very interesting sci-fi short story.

It featured an alien planet being investigated for colonisation, when contact is lost with the away team. A rescue mission finds carnage with most of the team missing ordead. Investigations and piecing together of the journals reveals hideous, stinking, soft, egg-shaped creatures, jumping things that latch onto your face and have concentrated acid for blood. Infection causes a ravenous hunger and something deadly to burst out of the victims.

Sound a bit familiar?

Without "The Girl Had Guts" by Theodore Sturgeon, I wonder if the Alien / Aliens movies would ever have been made?

It was written in 1957.
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Looks like the full PDF is available free:

https://epdf.tips/the-girl-had-guts451b0f53814929148d3a4e0a9de80a0597375.html
 
Wonder if he tried to sue them?
 
Currently half way though Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine, unheimlich short stories which he preferred to refer to as "strange stories" rather than "ghost" or "horror" ones. Very odd and understated and ambiguous, you never truly know what's going on even when he appears to be writing about zombies or vampires. I can see his reluctance to be labelled Horror though the affect of his stories is much like Lovecraft's, even if the style and content is completely different. He's much closer to James but even more understated.

I think he'd appeal to most Forteans.
 
Ogdred_Weary said:
Currently half way though Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine, unheimlich short stories which he preferred to refer to as "strange stories" rather than "ghost" or "horror" ones. Very odd and understated and ambiguous, you never truly know what's going on even when he appears to be writing about zombies or vampires. I can see his reluctance to be labelled Horror though the affect of his stories is much like Lovecraft's, even if the style and content is completely different. He's much closer to James but even more understated.

I think he'd appeal to most Forteans.
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Yes, I've mentioned the four anthologies previously on this thread. Excellent stuff.
 
I posted on the SF forum but didn't get a reply. My audible credit is a couple of days away and I'm thinking of David Mitchell, (not the guy from WILTY), as I've not read him.

Anyone read/listened to Cloud Atlas or The Bone Clocks? Are they any good?
 
Mythopoeika said:
Wonder if he tried to sue them?
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Dan O"Bannon was very open and honest about stealing ideas from others. Everyone did. He'd usually say it was Forbidden Planet and It Terror from beyond space rather than this story but it wouldn't surprise me if O"Bannon, or Walter Hill had read The Girl Had Guts.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
I posted on the SF forum but didn't get a reply. My audible credit is a couple of days away and I'm thinking of David Mitchell, (not the guy from WILTY), as I've not read him.

Anyone read/listened to Cloud Atlas or The Bone Clocks? Are they any good?
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Read Cloud Atlas a few years ago. Several intertwined stories, ranging from historical travelogue to farcical comedy to sci-fi, all exploring a central theme of servitude and personal redemption/fulfilment. You need to pay close attention to appreciate the links between the tales. The sort of book that gives you a sudden flash of realisation hours after reading a section. Clever stuff and well worth a read.
 
dr wu said:
Just starting 'White Corridor' by Fowler...a Bryant and May novel...I have recently become a fan...
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It's a good one! No spoilers from me, but I hope you liked the denouement?

I can thoroughly recommend the Bryant & May series, I listen in audiobook format and the narrator Tim Goodman is perfect for the characters.
 
AnonyJoolz said:
It's a good one! No spoilers from me, but I hope you liked the denouement?

I can thoroughly recommend the Bryant & May series, I listen in audiobook format and the narrator Tim Goodman is perfect for the characters.
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I did enjoy White Corridor.......and I just finished The Victoria Vanishes and now just starting On The Loose....I intend to read them all in a row. Then I will go back to read the first 3 since I started with the 4th one called Second Staircase.
:)
 
Recent/current reads & re-reads:

In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793–1815, by Jenny Uglow. A superbly entertaining and informative work about life on the Home Front during the Napoleonic Wars.

Secret Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG, by John Plaster. Riveting: an account from a MACV-SOG veteran of US Commandos' virtually suicidal missions behind enemy lines, in a war that no-one knew about.

Whatever Happened to Margo?, by Margo Durrell. Sister of the far more famous Gerald, she returned to England, divorced with two children, and opened a boarding house in 1940s Bournemouth. Her account makes the best of her stories, but she has neither the captivating style, nor the depth & breadth of anecdote of her sibling. Engaging rather than unmissable.

Rotating to the top of the teetering "to read" pile:

Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England, by Thomas Penn.

maximus otter
 
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Any body heard of Gordon White (Australian)? I've been listening to his podcast Rune Soup throughout the year and so much of what he says resonates massively with me. I just bought Star.Ships. Any body recall any discussion of this author on this thread? ... or on any other thread for that matter?

Gordon White is a chaos magick practitioner with deep tendrils in areas such as technology, historical revision and permaculture practice.
 
^ So what exactly is 'chaos magick'...? Sounds like something Crowley would have concocted.
And what exactly is 'permaculture' practice?
 
No not in any sense crowleyesque. I completely misrepresented Mr White with that dumb spelling error. I'm just starting to learn about this stuff myself. Moving on. Here's what Gordon says about it. He seems pretty angry at his practice being misrepresented by numbskulls like me. Anyway:

"The last time I was on Nick's podcast he mentioned that someone had told him that "chaos magic is a form of magic where you are always in control." This is not only wrong, it's really dumb... and it is the inevitable extension of the idea that magic is reasonable, that you can serve the two masters of monoculture and the Wyrd. You can't. Both will reject you. Hoist the colours or fuck off back to the couch to watch a singing programme.
So let me be completely clear about this: Chaos magic does not hold as a core principle that the gods and spirits are part of the human mind so much as it rejects the a priori assumption that they aren't. The psychological explanation of magic is a premise, it is not a finding. There is a huge difference."

AND


"Chaos magic is fundamentally extractive. It is opportunistic rather than constructive. For the chaos magician, all of Creation is her Roswell crash site. I make no apologies for this. Chaos magic fracks the grounds of religion, magic, science, archaeology, medicine and spirit to extract useful, delicious natural gas. If you somehow got the impression this is either the quick or the easy option then you could not be more wrong. Results are painfully, starkly objective: either you have achieved them or you haven't. There is no recourse back into some worldview where your god or your karma or whatever can be used to explain away your lack of results. You failed. This is probably the hardest of all paths of practical enchantment because, however deceptive it may appear from the outside with all its comic invocations and such, the opportunities for escapism are alarmingly low. Did you get results or not?
It is also quite a lonely path because, once the locals realise they can set alight the water coming from their taps, they will chase you out of town and you'll have to find a new site to frack. (Consider how many faucets just caught fire after the last two paragraphs.)
With the extraction complete, some new premises are called for... and I think the time has come to unilaterally declare that any magical premise you wish to hold for all but the shortest of time periods must have consciousness as an ontological primitive. Here's a brief presentation from Dr Kastrup that heads in the right direction. (I veer between panpsychism and idealism. Kastrup is an idealist but it's still good stuff.)

Extraction, done. Premise, posed. The question that naturally follows is what one does with a repositioned cosmology. Get results, harvest more data, iterate your cosmology. If you are after a more specific answer than that then I think you know what you need to do.
Is that the oven? Pizza's ready."
2015 https://runesoup.com/2015/04/chaos-magic-fracking-the-spirit-world/

Gordon also has explanations for you in many of his podcast conversations with other weird kids and magic practitioners. Check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/gordonnz/videos

Here's an excellent if somewhat breathless lecture on dragons through the ages which I enjoyed this afternoon. Nary a mention of Carl Sagan, which surprised me a bit. But it's very good.
 
No sweat. Understood. I'm still learning the vocabulary myself. Anyway, I'll read the book and report back with a brief review.
 
David Plankton said:
Yes, I've mentioned the four anthologies previously on this thread. Excellent stuff.
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Finished this a few days ago, as much as I liked it, I felt a bit fatigued by the end, a little too much of more-or-less the same thing. I felt the same way when I read another collection of his last year. Will definitely read more Aickman but will probably read it piecemeal with other stuff in between.
 
Just finished:
Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film - By Alexandra Zapruder, granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder who filmed the most famous footage of the Kennedy assassination.
It's a great read not only for an interesting and untold aspect of the JFK shooting, but also how the famous footage affected her grandfather and subsequently changed his life and that of his family's forever.
Sometimes being in the right place at the right time ends up being truly being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
Ogdred Weary said:
Currently half way though Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine, unheimlich short stories which he preferred to refer to as "strange stories" rather than "ghost" or "horror" ones. Very odd and understated and ambiguous, you never truly know what's going on even when he appears to be writing about zombies or vampires. I can see his reluctance to be labelled Horror though the affect of his stories is much like Lovecraft's, even if the style and content is completely different. He's much closer to James but even more understated.

I think he'd appeal to most Forteans.
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A few years back I recorded Jeremy Dyson's Radio 4 documentary, The Unsettled Dust - The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman. I've had a rummage around the internet to see if I can find a link to it somewhere. No joy, but I did stumble across this, which is very interesting too:


(By coincidence, I walked past his house yesterday.)
 
Eponastill said:
I just found my childhood favourite, the Reader's Digest 'Strange Stories, Amazing Facts' on the internet archive
https://archive.org/details/strangestoriesamalwa00alwa
So many of the pictures are thoroughly familiar to me X decades later, which is rather strange in itself :)
And so many things of Fortean interest, things that I've been interested in ever since. Screaming skulls, fire walking, giant octopuses, those freaky faces on the floor in Spain (shiver), the Money Pit, Springheeled Jack etc. etc. etc.
Thanks, Dad, for buying that. It was on the shelf and in my consciousness from as long back as I can remember.
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I have a copy in my library as I type this. What a great book. Covered so much, and yes, the Spanish floor faces (Faces of Belmez?) spooked me senseless when I was younger.
 
A little mystery. What's happening here?
I tried this book because Nassim Taleb wrote a very positive review:
https://www.blackswanreport.com/blog/2016/04/the-secret-of-fatima/

It's from a list of books, many of which are really good (4 - 11 - 17 - 26 - 37 - 60 are very, very good!):
https://medium.com/the-mission/61-b...mmends-you-read-in-his-own-words-fc2e17a7f3c1

But I tried this book and I have to agree with the first review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29468576-the-secret-of-fatima?ac=1&from_search=true

The worst book I have ever read. I selected this book because of a positive review by Nicholas Taleb an excellent statistician, risk analyst and nonfiction author. I can think of three possibilities for my sharp disagreement with Taleb, all equally likely; the book was over my head, Taleb is a poor judge of fiction or Taleb is a personal friend of the author and provided a good review as a favor.
 
The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend by Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III (2003-07-01)

After long consideration I bought this. For a Kindle book it's very expensive at 18 euro's. But I'm not disappointed.
It has well researched sections on Lovecraft's biography, his conception of the Necronomicon, histories of all the fake Necronomicons with detailed provenance, and now I'm reading a long history of the Necronomicon in chaos magic. As a practicing Catholic I can't really endorse Necronomicon-based chaos magic ("Don't call up what you can't put down!") but as a Fortean I'm highly entertained.

https://www.amazon.de/Necronomicon-...=8-1&keywords=necronomicon+files+daniel+harms
 
Might I recommend, if not previously suggested: 'Diary of a Drug Fiend', Aleister Crowley, 1922.

I'm finding it to be an, unexpectedly, challenging read - need a thesaurus to hand. Was the, IMHO startling, intellectual content the produce of that title...
 
Just finished 'Being a Beast' by Charles Foster. In the book, the writer describes his attempts to understand the world as it might be perceived by various non-human animals by mimicking their lifestyles as closely as possible. For example, as a Badger he lives in a hole in the ground and eats earthworms. In doing so, he tries to get closer to the truth of these animals' experience and also too questions of what being human is.

Objection: the author is rather too fond of his image as a 'great British eccentric' and if that type of thing gets on your nerves, it will get on your nerves. I imagine him having the voice and manner of Brian Blessed when he booms out another anecdote about being bitten on the bloody bollocks by an eel.

Otherwise, the book comes highly recommended. It is really about philosophy I guess: despite the ultimately doomed nature of the experiment I admire Foster for giving it a bloody good go, and going far beyond the usual human comfort zone in an attempt to find out things about life.

It even gets rather Fortean in the final chapter, with a series of observations echoed from Rupert Sheldrake.
 
James_H said:
Just finished 'Being a Beast' by Charles Foster.
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A fascinating book. Also funny. And tragic (the terrible energy balance of the otter).
The last chapter felt extremely Heideggerian.
 
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