• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

A Good Read: Book Suggestions & Recommendations

Did the guy end all of, or many of, the novels, with a -- one could see as irrelevant and unconnected -- glum and angry "we're all doomed, and we richly deserve it", "postscript"? -- or was I just unlucky?
 
Just finished reading and reviewing a historical novel titled 'The Smallest Man' by Frances Quinn, which came out earlier this year. The lead character is fictional, but heavily based on the life of Jeffrey Hudson. Hudson was a dwarf originally 'given' as a present to Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. A friendship developed between them, and Henrietta Maria took Hudson with her into exile to France as one of her closest companions, when the Royalists began to lose the Civil War. Just as in the actual life of Hudson, the lead character kills a bully in a duel, and has to flee France.
https://aburntship.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-smallest-man-by-frances-quinn.html
 
I bought a home brewing book from the shop at Wealden & Downland Museum at the weekend - 100 beer recipes to try to that should keep me busy for a while.

As an aside, I saw the actual Repair Shop off the telly while I was there, they were filming and everything.
 
Spudrick68 said:
If you have a Kindle and haven't read the most excellent Chaos The Truth Behind The Manson Murders by Tom o Neill you can now get it from Amazon for 99p.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07KH1RFZG?_bbid=18802139&tag=bookbubemail-21I
Click to expand...

Just finished reading this book. Certainly has made me a lot more sceptical of the official 'Helter Skelter' /Vincent Bugliosi view of the Manson Murders. Not sure if agree with all the author's conclusions. Worth emphasising that Tom o Neill does not try to defend Charles Manson or The Family, even highlighting one particular death from that era, recorded as a suicide, that he suspects was another killing by Manson's 'Family'.
 
Baron Scarpia said:
Just finished reading this book. Certainly has made me a lot more sceptical of the official 'Helter Skelter' /Vincent Bugliosi view of the Manson Murders. Not sure if agree with all the author's conclusions.
Click to expand...
I'm waiting for Nikolas Schreck's latest version of his The Manson File - he agrees that the Tate murders were not orchestrated by Manson, but strongly disagrees with O'Neill's MK Ultra link theories. Should be out this year sometime.

https://www.nikolasschreck.world/bibliography/the-manson-file/

1784605948.jpg
 
sherbetbizarre said:
I'm waiting for Nikolas Schreck's latest version of his The Manson File - he agrees that the Tate murders were not orchestrated by Manson, but strongly disagrees with O'Neill's MK Ultra link theories. Should be out this year sometime.

https://www.nikolasschreck.world/bibliography/the-manson-file/

1784605948.jpg
Click to expand...

I also have this pre-ordered. It was supposed to have been printed and shipped before last Christmas but Covid threw a spanner in the works so we're all still waiting. Last I read, printing was supposed to have begun a week or two back so hopefully we'll have it shortly. At over 1000 pages, it'll take some time to finish.
 
The Kindle book I suggested above, Necropolis - London and It's Dead by Catharine Arnold is proving to be a most excellent Fortean read. It is chock full of little snippets of fascinating information on random topics and I've ended up stopping reading to go online to find out more about something that she wrote on many occasions.

The book listed below is one small example. Written before 1858 it is set in 2126 and allegedly features prototypes for espesso coffe machines, air conditioning and 'a communication system that permitted instant world dissemination or world news."

Volume 1 of 3 volumes is available free on Project Gutenberg:

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/56426
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Box_(novel)

Audible version.
The narrator was Cassandra Campbell. It took me a little while to get used to her but she was excellent.

The book has moments of great horror and the complexities of living in this world are just not captured at all in the film.

I am stunned at how little of the source material went into the film.

5 out of 5 - A great post-apocalypse novel.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Box_(novel)

Audible version.
The narrator was Cassandra Campbell. It took me a little while to get used to her but she was excellent.

The book has moments of great horror and the complexities of living in this world are just not captured at all in the film.

I am stunned at how little of the source material went into the film.

5 out of 5 - A great post-apocalypse novel.
Click to expand...

On my list then!

The Future Of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. A time travel adventure with unique TT machines as two groups battle each other to change. The 1893 Chicago World Fair features as do Punk and Riot Grrl music. Oh, there's a serial killer as well.

Great stuff with some original twists.

Warning! Here be spoilers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Another_Timeline
 
ramonmercado said:
On my list then!

The Future Of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. A time travel adventure with unique TT machines as two groups battle each other to change. The 1893 Chicago World Fair features as do Punk and Riot Grrl music. Oh, there's a serial killer as well.

Great stuff with some original twists.

Warning! Here be spoilers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Another_Timeline
Click to expand...

Just read this, Comstock is also a character in The Future Of Another Timeline.

In 1893, Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, visited the Chicago World’s Fair and advocated for the closing of one exhibition: the “danse du ventre”—the belly dance. (Excerpted from Amy Sohn’s The Man Who Hated Women.)

___________________________________

By the time Ida Craddock traveled to the World’s Fair, there was plenty of sex information for progressive, curious young people. The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which coined the terms sadism and masochism, had been translated into English a year earlier. In 1894, Havelock Ellis, an English psychologist and doctor, would publish a volume on human sexuality titled Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary and Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. And the Illinois physician Dr. Alice B. Stockham’s popular Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (1883) provided anatomical details about male and female bodies, and promoted strategies for coping with labor pains. Physicians and free lovers published manuals on hygiene, child-rearing, pregnancy, and better sex—many advertised in radical journals such as New York’s The Truth Seeker, edited by D. M. Bennett, and the Kansas-based freethinker and free love journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, edited by Moses Harman. ...

https://crimereads.com/women-sex-radicals-comstock/
 
Not directly Fortean but Forteans could do with reading this book.

How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford.

Host of the BBC Radio 4 regular series More or Less*, Harford is an economist by training and a regular columnist for the Financial Times.
Bored yet? Don't be. He's been drawn into the world of statistics, statisticians and data; gathering, presentation, interpretation.
In this book, he appeals to anyone - those not mathematically-inclined, those uninterested in economics, those only mildly interested when some wonk declares "Such-and-such proves said thing is proved by the data!" This book isn't about statistics but how to look at them.
We've all heard of the old saw concerning "Lies, damn lies, and statistics". We've always been told to be suspicious of statistics. But until now, no one has said how to be suspicious of them. We know some figures don't lie; should we disbelieve them all?

Harford makes things easy. He doesn't say believe all nor does he say dismiss all; he suggests ways of looking at presented data and asking questions about it. From "Does it appeal to you emotionally?", though "Does this mesh with personal experience?" to "Keep an open mind", the book gives great examples and anecdotes of why statistics are important and the hazards of just dismissing them as a branch of propaganda.

Yes, statistics can be used to lie but, like the idea goes, the lie can show truth. You just need to be curious, ask questions. This book, simplistic and wonderfully written, suggests what questions to ask and what you're asking them for.

How to Make the World Add Up; author Tim Harford;
Published by The Bridge Street Press, 2020. £9.99 (PB), 340 pp. ISBN: 978-0-349-14386-6.

*An excellent radio programme, interesting and easy to follow without being dumbed-down. Listen Again and podcasts available.
 
Previously mentioned as a seminal publication, the following is now available to download:

The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena

Bob Rickard & John Michell. 2nd. Edition ... Many of the pictures in this book first appeared in Phenomena (1977) and Living Wonders (1982), both published by Thames and Hudson. ... John Michell and Bob Rickard, 2007 ... Tudor Pole, in his book, The Silent Road (1962): ... the torrent of an incalculable number of strange.

468 pages: 43 MB

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjAAegQIAxAC&usg=AOvVaw1gceaiwgKo8x2ic6K2bDKb
 
I enjoyed Don Cammilo too.

There seemed to be a scary amount of munitions in post war Italy...
 
Naughty_Felid said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Box_(novel)

Audible version.
The narrator was Cassandra Campbell. It took me a little while to get used to her but she was excellent.

The book has moments of great horror and the complexities of living in this world are just not captured at all in the film.

I am stunned at how little of the source material went into the film.

5 out of 5 - A great post-apocalypse novel.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that, I've just finished reading it (it was on offer on Kindle). A gripping read, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
 
Is that the same Ballard who wrote The Siege of Krishnapur?

Damn good book for historical accuracy as well as a good kick at the "Raj".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top