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A Good Read: Book Suggestions & Recommendations

Can anyone suggest a good book on Wren & Hawksmoor?

Not a masonic-psychogeographical one, just a good biographical tale of their work together.
 
theyithian said:
Can anyone suggest a good book on Wren & Hawksmoor?

Not a masonic-psychogeographical one, just a good biographical tale of their work together.
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I've got the Thames and Hudson Hawksmoor, by Kerry Downes - which was, when I bought it, considered pretty definitive.

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot written about Hawksmoor, or for that matter - and even more oddly - Wren. (I'm talking biographical type books, rather than those purely, or mainly, about the architecture.)

Although, maybe in the former case it's not that odd, as Hawksmoor is considered a relatively recent rediscovery - in fact Wiki suggests that the Downes book was 'The major breakthrough in Hawksmoor scholarship', and that was first published as recently as 1979.
 
Hmm, I'd expected to find something on their work together. I may chase the book you recommend though, thanks. 8)
 
Talking of Hawksmoor.

One dark and wintry night back in February I was drinking in The Ten Bells on Commercial Street in London, which is hard by Christ Church Spitalfields. The road directly in front of the church was being dug up and the road-gangs lights were swaying about in the wind and casting all sorts of mad and restless shadows over the area.

Now, I thought, there's the start of a movie right there.
 
I've just finished reading Nile Rodgers' autobiography Le Freak, and besides it already being one of the great music autobiographies, I was watching out for any weird anecdotes as prompted by a recent FT article. There were two: Nile pressed the wrong button on a lift and ended up on the only floor with someone there when the doors opened - to see Nile collapse with a drugs-induced heart attack. If he hadn't pressed the wrong button, he'd be dead now.

Secondly, one of the most moving bits of the book tells of the night his great friend and bandmate in Chic Bernard Edwards died. They were in a hotel in Japan, separate rooms, but the minute Bernard passed away Nile fell out of bed after a nightmare when he saw a good friend float away from him into the sky. He thought it had been an earthquake, but it seemed to be shock from his soulmate's death that he somehow felt, in spite of being in another room.

Anyway, fantastic book, great to see Nile at No.1 in the charts with Daft Punk this week, and highly recommended for a fascinating story on practically every page.
 
Just finished "Ghost Hero" by S.J.Rozan.

It's a crime story (not a murder mystery) set amongst the NY Chinese community. It's not just about goodies and baddies, but involves artists and art dealers, PIs, crime gangs, the American and Chinese governments, and others, all with different agendas, so the plot gets quite complex at times.

But there's plenty of fast-talking NY humour as well to lighten the tone. All in all a very satisfying read. When the ending is all worked out, even the loose ends I'd forgotten about are tidied up.

But, like a Chinese meal, not long after you finish it you find you want more... 8)

Happily, there are more S.J.Rozans for me to read. :D
 
My latest read was Horns by Joe Hill, who is Stephen King's son, which obviously makes you read closely looking for the influence of his father, but this stood up as a decent horror novel in its own right.

Only trouble was I heard Daniel Radcliffe has been making the movie version in the lead role, which sounds like nutty casting, he's a nice guy so I can't imagine him pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down a steep hill in a fit of evil.

Anyway basic story is Dan will play a bloke who everyone thinks killed his girlfriend, but he didn't, and then one day he grows horns on his head which make people act strangely under their influence. Might be a better book than film, I think.
 
Reading Neal Stephenson's "Reamde" which is damn fine (so far - 400 pages in and not at half way point yet.) I expect some readers will give up before finishing it as it's so long, but so far the effort is worth it. (Conceptually it's light-weight compared to some of his earlier works such as Anathem, Cryptonomicon and the The Quicksilver trilogy, but it has more action.)
 
I would recomend "the time travellers guide to medieval england" by Ian mortimer, i have always wanted to travel back to medeval times, just for a holiday, until i read this book.
Still the sport sounds fun, medieval tennis players get extra points if they hit a shot through a window, and if you see a medieval football player on the ground you can be sure he isn't pretending to be injured, looking for a penalty.
 
Mal_Content said:
Reading Neal Stephenson's "Reamde" which is damn fine (so far - 400 pages in and not at half way point yet.) I expect some readers will give up before finishing it as it's so long, but so far the effort is worth it. (Conceptually it's light-weight compared to some of his earlier works such as Anathem, Cryptonomicon and the The Quicksilver trilogy, but it has more action.)
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Not to spoil anything, but he does still have a problem with car-crash endings. I didn't enjoy it as much as Anathem, but it's still worth a read.

Just don't get too attached to any characters.
 
Spent a week in a tent on the tiny sandy island of Schiermonnikoog, in the Waddinzee, last week. Found a copy of The Bull of Minos [Pub. Pan. 2nd ed. 1956], by Leonard Cottrell, in the jam-packed little secondhand bookshop, in the picturesque little village. It's a book I've seen around in various places for years. Must have been a bit of a best seller in its time.

Since it was too hot to do much during the middle of the day, I was forced to retreat to the nearest beach hut, bar on stilts and sit in the shade, drinking Grolsch and reading. I can heartily recommend this book. An introduction to the pioneering work of Heinrich Schliemann, his discovery of Troy and Sir Arthur Evans, with his discovery of the Palace of Minos , at Knossos, on Crete. A great, if slightly dated, introduction, not only to the discovery of these extraordinary sites, but also to the subject of the development of archaeology, as a whole.

Cottrell obviously relishes his subject. His background at the BBC, does occasionally remind one of the Blue Peter approach. It's all very BBC (as I said to some of my Dutch and Belgian friends), but none the worse for that. I have read complaints from readers about the book being bit of a hagiography of these two early pioneers and moaning about their lack of archaelogical thoroughness. Schliemann does come across as a bit of a mid-Victorian oddball romantic and Evans had an early life, as a reporter and campaigner in the Balkans, that puts fictional Indiana Jones in the shade. Archaelogy, back in the late Nineteenth, early Twentieth centuries, was still very much in its infancy. Alongside Pitt-Rivers and Carter out in Egypt, these early diggers were really learning on the job. Archaeology has come along way since then, but I can still remember, back in the late 1970s, early 1980, when some leading archaeologists were still advocating the virtues of an entirely voluntary and gentleman amateur approach to the subject. Worth a read as much for the way Cottrell invokes the gray austerities of post WWII and Cold War Britain and Europe, reflected in the bright warm sunshine of Mediterranean Greece and Crete, as for a good overview of the rediscovery of one most extraordinary periods in human prehistory.

I'm also glad that I found a browning copy of the 2nd ed. from 1956 rather than the 1952 1st ed., because it mentions Ventris's work on deciphering the Linear B script, which was published between editions, in the appendix. Cottrell mentions Alice Kober's contribution to the process, amongst others, more than once.

Well worth a read.
 
Ive not got that one but several of his others, mentioning his friendship with Ventris.

A great read, and an author who has enthusiasm for his subject.
 
Can't see it mentioned anywhere, but Peter Cushing fans might want to check out Stephen (Ghostwatch) Volk's Whitstable:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whitstable-Stephen-Volk/dp/0957392729

It mixes fact with fiction, using a real person in a made-up situation.Worth checking out, a nice quick read.

Here's the blurb from Amazon

"1971. A middle-aged man, wracked with grief, walks along the beach at Whitstable in Kent... A boy approaches him and, taking him for the famous vampire-hunter Doctor Van Helsing from the Hammer movies, asks for his help. Because he believes his stepfather really is a vampire...So begins the moving and evocative new novella by Stephen Volk, published by the British Fantasy Award-nominated Spectral Press in May 2013 to coincide with the centenary of the most celebrated and beloved of Hammer's stars, Peter Cushing."
 
Hell House by Richard Matheson. You can draw a straight line between Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House through this and onto the 1970s paperback blockbusters of Stephen King, James Herbert and their fellows.

It starts out as a genteel, if ominous, attempt to get rid of the haunted house's spirits through scientific means and ends up as totally outrageous, lurid horror as only this decade could do, in print anyway.

Worth a look if you have the stomach for it, I read it in tribute to the late, great Matheson and wasn't sorry. They made a good film from it too, though I see how much they toned it down in translation to the movies. Worrying rumours are that Michael Bay wants to remake it!
 
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, serial killer time travel, vgood. The Iron Jackal by Chris Wooding, probably the best of the Ketty Jay series, steampunk.

Reading Doomsday Men by P.D. Smith.

Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon
Homo sapiens is the only species that knows it will die. The thought obsesses us. From the earliest marks made on cave walls to our most sublime works of art, the fear of death haunts our every creation. And in the middle of the twentieth century, human beings became the first species to reach that pinnacle of evolution – the point at which it could engineer its own extinction.

In February 1950, as the temperature of the cold war approached absolute zero, an atomic scientist conceived the ultimate nuclear weapon: a vast explosive device that would cast a deadly pall of fallout over the planet. Carried on the wind, the lethal radioactive dust would eventually reach all four corners of the world. It would mean the end of life on earth.

One of the founding fathers of the atomic age, Leo Szilard, stated that it would be very easy to rig an H-bomb to produce lethal radioactivity. All you had to do, said Szilard, was surround the bomb with a chemical element such as cobalt that absorbs radiation. When it exploded, the bomb would spew radioactive dust into the air like an artificial volcano. Slowly and silently, this invisible killer would fall to the surface. ‘Everyone would be killed,’ he said.
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http://www.peterdsmith.com/doomsday-men ... perweapon/
 
Don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I finally got my hands on the third book in the Corfu Trilogy by Gerald Durrell.

The whole series is a fantastic read, funny, and full of insight into the natural world as only a ten-year-old boy can see it.

I highly recommend My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, and Fauna and Family (previously titled, "The Garden of the Gods").
 
Offbeat, edited by Julian Upton. If you like old movies and are looking for something British from about 1955-1985, and are tired of Zulu, Carry on Cleo, The Railway Children, The Long Good Friday and all those which always show up on bank holidays, then here's a guide to a select few which you will probably find very interesting, with plenty of reasons why, in review and essay form.

Our glorious leader Dr Sutton is one of the contributors and it's a very entertaining read (if something's rubbish, they'll point it out), packed with memory joggers if you've spent too much time watching British TV on Sunday afternoons or late at night. Plenty of weirdness which seems even weirder now. Only thing that irritated was a slight tendency for the "makes Get Carter look like Wombling Free" school of criticism, only not as a joke, but that's a quibble. It would be great to read a sequel.
 
Great, just ignore the mysterious grudge against Quadrophenia the editor has and you'll really enjoy it.
 
Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer, by Hannes Råstam.

For those who don't know, Thomas Quick/Sture Bergwall was Sweden's most prolific serial killer, having been convicted of eight of the over thirty murders he confessed to - until he changed his mind.

The incidences of what amounts to wilful stupidity and professional dishonesty on the part of certain key authority figures involved in the case are far too numerous to list; in fact they're so common that I found myself thinking that if the book had been a work of fiction I'd have been in serious danger of getting bored with that particular element. However, this is not your run of the mill fit-up; Bergwall collaborated with rabid enthusiasm in the whole process - so much so that, although one of the criticisms of the case is that during the trials the adversarial process effectively disappeared, it's sometimes hard to see what else the defence teams could have done, Bergwalls confessions (and it was all about confessions - there being no forensic evidence at all to tie him to any of the killings) being so adamantly and enthusiastically delivered.

The way in which Bergwall was handed the information he needed to prove his involvement in the various killings is sometimes so unabashed that you wonder how on earth it never really got questioned - at times you get the impression that people around the investigation stood with their mouths open thinking 'no...no...that really did not just happen...can't have', and then walked away shaking their heads at the way the mind can play tricks. Alarm bells did ring, but no-one paid much attention - at least to start with - so enthralled were most people by the serial killer roadshow.

It really doesn't take the contribution of the outside experts Råstam interviews to know that when questioning a subject you don't provide essential information couched within the questions you ask them; you do not set up the scene of a complex re-enactment precisely as it really was (and even redirect the subject when he still manages to get things wrong); when an interrogatee provides the wrong information on a particular point, you do not continually return to that specific point in such a manner that the subject is prompted to realise that there is a discrepancy and consequently change their story.

At one point it is discovered that a vitally important physical element in one of those precisely designed re-enactments was wrong - however, this is only found out after the fact, and after Bergwall has been prompted, in the ways described above, to weave it into the narrative of his 're-enacment' of the killing. It's a clear lie, because it couldn't possibly be true - the anomaly was spotted, but effectively ignored by those in charge

The implication that Bergwall was a victim of the whole serial killer roadshow is hard to avoid entirely - but I also found it hard to stomach. He traded false information for increased medication, generally, it seems, of his own choosing - and clearly basked in the importance the confessions bestowed on him. (It's not an exaggeration to describe his behaviour at times as akin to that of some histrionic prima donna-ish celebrity). Admittedly, victimhood becomes a very fluid element when addiction is a main ingredient of the basic mix - but Bergwall also implicated completely innocent people in his crimes and entirely - and probably irrevocably - sidetracked the investigations into over thirty murders. These, as far as I know, remain unsolved - which is probably the most disturbing thing about the whole sorry story.

All in all really quite bizarre and disturbing - and definitely worth a read.
 
For anyone interested in the case the above book is based on there's an interesting article in The Guardian from 2012:


Thomas Quick: the Swedish serial killer who never was

It reads like a real-life Scandinavian crime novel. In the 1990s, Thomas Quick confessed to more than 30 murders, making him Sweden's most notorious serial killer. Then, he changed his name and revealed his confessions were all faked.

Sture Bergwall resides in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane three hours' drive north of Stockholm. A high wire fence circles the building. CCTV cameras track the movements of the outside world. The narrow windows – some of them barred – are smudged with dirt and thick with double-glazed glass. In order to visit, you must enter through a succession of automatically locking doors and walk through an airport-style security gate. You must leave your mobile phone in a specially provided locker and hand over your passport in return for an ID tag and a panic alarm. Two members of staff, wearing plastic clogs that squeak across the linoleum, escort you through the corridors.

...

Until relatively recently, Sture Bergwall was Sweden's most notorious serial killer. He had confessed to more than 30 murders and been convicted of eight. He called himself Thomas Quick. Assuming this sinister alter ego, he claimed during a succession of therapy sessions at Säter over the years that he had maimed, raped and eaten the remains of his victims, the youngest of whom was a nine-year-old girl whose body has never been found...
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It's quite long - the entire article is here.
 
Going Solo by Roald Dahl.

I was in the children's section and searching for books for my nephew when I stumbled across this. It's episodic, delightfully easy to read (although not really aimed at children) and full of historic detail, most notably about colonial Tanganyika, the RAF, and the Fall of Greece during the war. It's neat, doesn't outstay its welcome at any stage and is the stuff of which history is made. Weave together a few hundred thousand of such personal tales and you have a model of the world at that time, writ small.

I also came out with Ted Hughes's The Iron Man, which transported me back to school.

I'm also three-quarters of the way through Alexander Frater's Tales from the Torrid Zone, a fragmentary autobiography that reveals its subject mostly through his own telling of the tales of others. The thread that binds it all together - perhaps too loosely at times - is the tropical setting, but if taken as a cluster of interlinked stories, it's rather pleasant. The actual writing is superb, as is all of his writing (He's a former travel-correspondent for The Observer with an interesting family history).

My next read is R.N. 'Windy' Gale's With the 6th Airborne Division in Normandy, which may not have universal appeal but is a gripping chapter in the story of the war in Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nelson_Gale
 
30 Things In Life There Should Be Words For

Ever wondered what you'd call an adolescent male's first attempt at sideburns? Or the tilt of an imaginary pint glass to see if your mate wants a drink? The Yorkshire Meaning of Liff will reveal all...

Inspired by Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s cult-classic The Meaning of Liff, first published thirty years ago, The Yorkshire Meaning of Liff recycles the lesser known place names of God’s own county, and twins them with all things in life there should be words for (aka ‘liffs’)…

John Lloyd (QI, Spitting Image, Black Adder, Have I got News for You, Hitchhikers Guide…) who introduces the book, said: “After 40 years in radio and television, I think I’m right in saying I have never produced a show, directed a movie or got involved in a book based on a script sent to me out of the blue by someone I’ve never met. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s never happened yet. Until now, that is.

“Joe first wrote to me earlier this year, after hearing an appeal on Radio 4 for contributions to a programme called The Meaning of Liff At 30. Designed to mark three decades in print of a book I wrote with Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) in 1983, listeners were invited to submit new ‘liffs’ – definitions of ‘things there should be words for’ brought to life by attaching them to a place name. Some 400 people responded to the BBC’s call and the standard of entries was impressively high, but one person in particular stood out. He had not, like most contributors, come up with one or two ideas, he had written an entire book.”
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http://sabotagetimes.com/books/30-thing ... -words-for
 
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