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A Good Read: Book Suggestions & Recommendations

The Book With No Name by Anonymous.

The blurb says it's Quentin Tarantino meets The da Vinci Code - and you know what? It really is. Really, genuinely and truthfully, is.

Good fun read. And to think I got it from Amazon for about £2 just to get an order to qualify for free P&P.

I didn't see the ending coming, and I really should have done. And I can't remember the last time I didn't know what was going to happen in a book.
 
Books for children?

Hi there, just wondering if anyone could recommend a general Fortean book or two that are geared toward a beginning reader. I'd like to get the young feller learning a bit about the more common subjects like Big Foot, Nessie, general UFO subject matter, ghosts, etc. Thanks in advance :D

Scott
 
Re: Books for children?

scottcloster said:
Hi there, just wondering if anyone could recommend a general Fortean book or two that are geared toward a beginning reader. I'd like to get the young feller learning a bit about the more common subjects like Big Foot, Nessie, general UFO subject matter, ghosts, etc. Thanks in advance :D

Scott
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Those books of strange stories by Janet and Colin Bord are a great place to start, with lots of well known and weird cases written in a clear and interesting style.
 
It's not an easy reader, but the number of people who have taught themselves to read from comics is huge. Leave The Big Book of the Unexplained lying around (and be ready to deal with it if he finds something past his maturity level in it) and it will probably suck him in. An oldie, but still claims to be available from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Unexplai ... y_b_text_b

Searching in "children's books" for keywords like "unexplained" will get you a lot more hits for upper elementary and middle grades (often from familiar names) than for actual beginning readers. However, remember yourself at that age, and make sure that he has free access to books with attractive pictures, tough bindings, and intriguing content, and he'll be reading above his grade level before you know it. Don't worry if he spends all his time looking at the pictures first, and don't push, but if he starts asking questions like "Is this word pronounced choopacabraz or chupycabras?" and "What does 'conspiracy' mean?," answer straightforwardly and grin to yourself.

Also, read-aloud is a great way to give access to material beyond his reading level and will also get you in tune with his tastes and the parameters of scariness he can accommodate.
 
Re: Books for children?

gncxx said:
scottcloster said:
Hi there, just wondering if anyone could recommend a general Fortean book or two that are geared toward a beginning reader. I'd like to get the young feller learning a bit about the more common subjects like Big Foot, Nessie, general UFO subject matter, ghosts, etc. Thanks in advance :D

Scott
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Those books of strange stories by Janet and Colin Bord are a great place to start, with lots of well known and weird cases written in a clear and interesting style.
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Thanks gncxx, I'll check these out. :D

Scott
 
PeniG said:
It's not an easy reader, but the number of people who have taught themselves to read from comics is huge. Leave The Big Book of the Unexplained lying around.



Searching in "children's books" for keywords like "unexplained" will get you a lot more hits for upper elementary and middle grades (often from familiar names) than for actual beginning readers. However, remember yourself at that age, and make sure that he has free access to books with attractive pictures, tough bindings, and intriguing content, and he'll be reading above his grade level before you know it. Don't worry if he spends all his time looking at the pictures first, and don't push, but if he starts asking questions like "Is this word pronounced choopacabraz or chupycabras?" and "What does 'conspiracy' mean?," answer straightforwardly and grin to yourself.

Also, read-aloud is a great way to give access to material beyond his reading level and will also get you in tune with his tastes and the parameters of scariness he can accommodate.
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Actually, that's a great idea. I have all the Paradox Press "Big Books" in a box downstairs (having recently moved). I'm reading with him naturally, so something like this, though the reading level may be a bit above him, should still get him interested in both the content, and just reading in general as you've stated.

I'm going to take your advice here. Right now we're at a state where I'm doing most of the reading, though he's coming along quite nicely. I think I'll try and source a few sturdy, well-illustrated books and see where that takes us. I live in a VERY small town and the one local bookstore and library don't have much in the way for browsing, but I'll be heading out of town shortly. There's nothing like being able to hold the books in your hands and give them a good going through before buying them.

Thanks for the advice PeniG.

Scott
 
You're welcome. I hope it works out for you. I don't write for this age group, but you can't hang around this business without picking up basic realities about the reading process. People can fight about educational theory all they want, but time and again it's shown - if you want a kid to learn something, provide him with high-interest material and freedom to explore and have his own kind of fun with it. Once he's hooked you can get into goal-setting and standards.

If it doesn't take the way you want it to, remember - if he doesn't share this interest with you, there will be other things to bond over.
 
"To Dream of the Dead" the latest Phil Rickman book is well worth a read.

The blurb is (via amazon)

December, and the river is rising. The village of Ledwardine has never been flooded in living memory. Within days it will be an island. There's no electricity. The church is serving as a temporary mortuary for two people who drowned. Only one man feels safer. An aggressively-atheist author has been moved, for his own safety, Rushdie-style, into a secluded house just outside the village. Fundamentalist Christians have hated him for years. Now he's offended the Muslims. Bad move. Meanwhile, archaeologists, assisted by Merrily's teenage daughter, Jane, are at work in Coleman's Meadow, unearthing an ancient row of standing stones which some people would rather stay buried. The atheist's temporary home is close to the site. And his young wife is becoming conspicuously agitated. Is it the fear of discovery - or the kind of fear that she, of all people, could never disclose? One thing is clear: the last person who's going to be welcome in that house is an exorcist. With the flood water washing up Church Lane towards the vicarage and the shop running out of cigarettes it looks like a cold and complex Christmas for Merrily Watkins in an ancient community forced
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to untangle its own history against the swirling uncertainty of the future.
 
I think kids automatically like spooky things really. I didn't need any pushing from my folks to start reading about ghosts and monsters or anything. Not that I needed pushing to read at all anyway.

But a good book to start reading to him with would be the Usborne books. I had one on UFOs and one about "ghosts and the paranormal" and I read and reread them religiously. They have a lot of pictures, so good for kids, and it's done like a tabloid magazine (with small articles, headlines, lots of pictures, things like that) so if you only want t o read small sections at a time, you're totally able to do that. Plus they were real stories, not ones the author had made up.

On an adult note, I just finished reading People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, the woman who wrote Year of Wonders (about the village that isolated itself during the plague). This one is about the Sarejevo Haggadah and the people who owned it throughout its history. A very very good, thank god because I was really starting to lose hope in the books I had selected lately.

I've also gotten into the Armageddon's Children series by Terry Brooks. Elves, demons and guerilla warriors in an almost post-apocolyptic world. I fulfills my need for fantasy and war :D
 
Re: Books for children?

gncxx said:
scottcloster said:
Hi there, just wondering if anyone could recommend a general Fortean book or two that are geared toward a beginning reader. I'd like to get the young feller learning a bit about the more common subjects like Big Foot, Nessie, general UFO subject matter, ghosts, etc. Thanks in advance :D

Scott
Click to expand...

Those books of strange stories by Janet and Colin Bord are a great place to start, with lots of well known and weird cases written in a clear and interesting style.
Click to expand...

Agreed. And they're always turning up on sale for mere pennies. Check Ebay and charity shops. There's always that doorstep Reader's Digest book of mysteries (similarly cheap) which has loads of the staples.
 
Please help.

Have been trying to find the details (title and author) of a short story i read a few years ago. Whilst i'm not sure i'd say it was Fortean, it was certainly in the horror genre. Problem: i recall little solid about it, but do your best!

a) It was probably in an anthology of short stories. The title was something like 'Classic Short Stories' or 'English short stories' and the cover featured a colourful 1930s(?) style merry-go-round with Hitler and i think stalin as two of the riders. The only reason the cover sticks in my mind is that it was also the cover to a paperback edition of Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley.
b) It was 20th century. Almost certainly the latter half. Probably 60s to 80s judging by the fact that the paperback was a few years old.
c) I have the word or idea 'heart' stuck in my mind. Title?
d) I think it features the ghosts of children who had probably been killed.
e) I seem to recall dead animals and a climax that has the protagonist walking fearfully to a bathroom to discover... whatever it was all about.
f) I kinda recall it being bloody, if not gruesome.
g) Could be a red herring, but i have dim thoughts of a big stately home or an institution of some kind.
h) Probably an English author; certainly British.

If you get it, you're officially a legend. Am preety certain i'll recognise it as soon as i read the title.
 
theyithian said:
Please help.

Have been trying to find the details (title and author) of a short story i read a few years ago. Whilst i'm not sure i'd say it was Fortean, it was certainly in the horror genre. Problem: i recall little solid about it, but do your best!

...
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Almost definitely, MR James. Lost Hearts, from 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' (1904).

One of his most chilling tales.

It's been out of copyright for a while and it turns up in several compilations.

I first read it in my early teens. It has some of the qualities of a real nightmare. :shock:
 
You're right, which is impressive considering how much flase information i managed to supply!

In fact i've completely conflated two collection of short stories: one is the anthology i mentioned - which featured a James story (Whistle and i'll come to you) and the other was a collection of M R James' ghost stories. To further confuse myself, i was also dipping in and out of In a glass darkly by Le Fanu. To come back on thread: all of these things are worth your bedtime :)

Thank you.
More when i re-read it!
 
John O'Farrell - An Utterly Impartial History of Britain

Slightly smug comedic retelling of 2000 years of British history. If you like history and have a reasonably high tolerance for self-satisfied smug humour then this is the book for you.

Learned some incredibly interesting facts about Harald Bluetooth, tanks and Captain Boycott, was reminded of some terms and characters I hadn't heard of since A Level history like the Zinoviev letter and Andrew Bonar Law.

The kind of book that you will either love or loathe.
 
This is packed and ready as part of my 'going away' reading list, along with Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and Gravity's Rainbow, along with a few old favourites I hope to convert people to on the traveller trail - RAW's Schroedingers Cat, V for Vendetta and Slaughterhouse 5.
 
I bet you can read 'Lost Hearts' online. ;)

I saw a TV play based on it about 40 years ago, terrifying. :shock:
 
theyithian said:
Thank you.
More when i re-read it!
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Cracking little tale.

Have read half of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday and it's a ripping read. If you like Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin Mysteries, Sherlock Holmes, or Robert Louis Stevenson, you have that with flashes of Conrad and a tale that twists and turns. Dense plot for 184 pages...
 
I wouldn't have thought this was a Fortean title, but reading it I found a number of interesting snippets. Did you know that one of the many predicted dates for Armageddon was 1533 (1500 years after the death of Christ)? That the first Caribbean pirates were French Lutherans? (There's a Prairie Home Companion sketch or three in that one, you betcha.) That the earliest extant European painting of the natives of Florida portrays them as blond?

The book is Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America, by Miles Harvey. The subject is a French artist, Jacque Le Moyne des Morgues, sent with an attempted settlement in Florida to draw the world's first deliberate ethnographic pictures. The author found it nearly impossible to document the man's life outside of German and Latin translations of his memoirs of the colony published with engravings from - not of - his work; the only reasonable candidate for an original painting of his is in dispute because of the aforementioned blond Floridians. It is possible (since he escaped from a Spanish massacre and many "necromantic" and "heretical" drawings were afterward burned by the Spanish) that none of his original works survived at all and that he had to make new pictures from memory for the engravings; which, moreover, were published after his death and contain numerous obvious errors, such as a Brazilian club and an alligator with many dragonlike features - it is even being killed with a lance down its throat.

LeMoyne's surviving, accepted, work consists of numerous botanical studies and a book of embroidery patterns. During the Wars of Religion in France, he relocated to Blackfriars, London; where he became a mentor of John White, governor and artist of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. His ancestry is lost to history, though the author uncovered circumstantial evidence of a probability of a connection with a certain LeMoyne who was an intimate of Mary, Queen of Scots. As if all this weren't enough, the French colony he participated in is one of the mysteries of Florida archeology. Though the location is described well and consistently by both French and Spanish accounts, the foundations of the fort cannot be found, and two drawings showing its construction and architecture contradict each other on a number of points, like the basic shape, that don't seem much open to dispute.

In short, meticulously researched ambiguity leaps from practically every page of this book, and what more could you want?
 
A Drowned Maiden's Hair, by Laura Amy Schlitz. Though subtitled "A Melodrama" the heroine - first seen singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the orphanage outhouse where she's been locked as a punishment - is so three-dimensional that the plot, for all its gothic trappings, becomes convincing just because she's in it. Maud Flynn is adopted by three desperate Spiritualist sisters, who need her assistance in pulling off the scam that will save their home and make their fortunes; but only if nobody knows about her. Maud is both desperate to be wanted and happy to work for bribes of pretty clothes and ice cream - but there's a limit to how long an active girl can hide in the attic, within sound of the ocean and the carousel, and not sneak out at night. And then the dead girl she's supposed to impersonate starts visiting her dreams...

A three-hour read, even with interruptions. You won't regret it.
 
WooHoo~ said:
Just read Whisky Galore by Compton MacKenzie for the first time.
It's recently been re-packaged and re-released I think.
Lovely gentle humour, the kind that doesn't seem to be written anymore.
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Bottle from Whisky Galore! wreck fetches £2,200

A bottle of whisky recovered from the wreck of a ship that inspired the film Whisky Galore! was sold at auction for £2,200 to a teenager fascinated by its story. The bottle of Ballantine Scotch was one of about 240,000 that sank with the SS Politician in the Outer Hebrides in 1941. For weeks the islanders celebrated on the spirits they had looted from the wreck, hiding the bottles from government officials. The incident inspired a novel by Compton Mackenzie and the 1949 Ealing comedy film. The bottle was sold at Gorringes auctioneers in Lewes, East Sussex, to the family of Tam Burt, an 18-year-old student, from Dollar, Clackmannanshire. He said: “I like to drink whisky but this one will stay untouched.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_a ... 282444.ece
 
I've read two consecutive mystery novels recently in which the ancient past impinges on the present. Both are set in England, one in the south and one in the north, and both involve strong Viking influences, as well as an Australian visitor.

But the one I want to recommend is "The Stranger House" by Reginald Hill. RH is best-known as the author of the Dalziel and Pascoe books, but this is not a conventional detective whodunnit (the police are only peripheral to the story).

The tale involves a young female Australian mathematician and an Anglo-Spanish historian who'd pulled out of his original ambition to be a RC priest: both are searching in Cumbria for clues to their family histories, which it seems may well be linked...

Loads of Fortean interest in the book - stigmata, folklore, awareness of ghosts, and much more... Enjoy!
 
Okay, so you used to like fantasy but you've sworn off trilogies because they're all Tolkien ripoffs that miss the core of Tolkien and add in bland modern assumptions so that all you get is a giant exterior evil that is defeated by The Forces of Good and The Lovers survive and get together and all's right with the world and if you see one more elf you're head's going to explode.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy; The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, and Ptolemy's Gate. Good guys and bad guys don't apply as concepts, the happy ending involves less victory over evil and more Well, this is at least different maybe it won't fail as badly, and that last-minute save you're expecting - well, let's not spoil the story. Plus, no elves, only summoned enslaved spirits battling on the seven planes because they've got no choice, and the magicians who enslave them don't see that they have much choice, either.
 
Is anyone else a fan of Rosamond Lehmann? I finished the echoing grove recently. It's just about the most beautifully written book i've ever read - the descriptions of '30s and '40s London are like a shimmering, hallucinogenic painting, it's like reading Walter Sickert - but the emotions were incredibly overwrought and I sometimes wished the characters would get over themselves. Pretty heartbreaking, though.
 
I've just finished "The Stranger House" by Reginald Hill, and it certainly lived up to its promise. I'll go further, and say it is one of the best books I've ever read.

Considering that it deals mainly with the odd characters in a remote Cumbrian village, it would have been easy for this story to have slipped away into a pseudo-"League of Gentlemen" farce, with stereotyped gothic characters out of a cheap B-movie, but somehow Hill avoids that trap, and all the cast remain human and believable, with some wonderful dialogue.

The plot too is wonderfully woven, with a rich historical background. Even after all the family mysteries seem to have been sorted out, fresh revelations arise and lead to a dramatic climax. In fact, the revelations continue, right to the last few words of the story.


(One of my few quibbles is that Hill uses the word 'zenith' when he should have used 'culmination'.... but nothing's perfect! ;) )
 
And if techybloke has nowt to read then I would recommend Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" for an exploration into a dystopian near future.
 
I have just ordered Biohell by Andy Remic as it received a good review in SFX this month. I haven't read War Machine though so I'm unsure of Andy Remic as a writer.

Does anyone have any opinions? It was only £5.99 so I'm not overly fussed by the price.
 
Has anyone read Dan Simmons' The Terror? It's wicked.

Great fun twist on the story of the Franklin Expedition ... although I did feel very much like I'd been stuck in the arctic for as long as the crew by the time I'd finished it. Was a great relief to go onto Twilight for frivolous fun!
 
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay is vgood. Superior to the tv series and darker as well. At times its just dark, other times the dark humour kicks in. The story continues in Dearly Devoted DExter which is also spot on. I've just started Dexter In The dark.
 
Just finished Iain Sinclair's edited volume "London: City of Disappearances" which is a damn fine read. As a former Londoner there was a nostalgic buzz about some of the early 70s stuff, and Forteans will enjoy the account of Steve Moore's life see through the eyes of Alan Moore. and much else besides.

just started Will Self's The Book of Dave".
 
I'm currently reading "The Year of Living Biblically" by A.J. Jacobs.
The title is pretty self-explanatory.
It's pretty good. The guy's wry sense of humour gets a little old sometimes, but then my own probably does to other people as well, so I don't hold that against him.
I'm only half way through so far, and I've never done any kind of research into the Bible or biblical times, so I don't know how accurate people familiar with the subject will find it, but I'm learning, and enjoying the reading, so I thought you guys might like to hear about it.
 
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