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A Good Read: Book Suggestions & Recommendations

As recommended on one of the other threads, I found an old copy of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword in my local Oxfam shop and finished it on my train commute home last night.

With its dramatis personae of men, shield maidens, elves, trolls, goblins, shape-shifters etc. magic aplenty, massive battles, characters breaking into verse and, of course, the eponymous broken sword, comparisons with Tolkien are inevitable.
This though is far darker, with elements of sex (notably incestual), torture, madness and despair which Tolkien tended to skirt around.
The style is very archaic and written much like an Icelandic saga - I had to look up the meaning of a few medieval terms.
Along with the fantasy and elements of Norse mythology - The Wild Hunt, Changelings, Odin and Loki manipulating events on Earth like a chess game etc. the challenge to the old ways and the world of faerie from the spread of Christianity is a recurring theme.
Not an easy read, but undeniably powerful and memorable.

I read that and was taken aback by the sex and violence - it was published at the same time as LOTR. I found it a little flat and didn't really care about the characters.
 
While I searched for something else, Amazon served me this. I have not read it, but the comments are interesting:

Set in Paris after the Millenium, the narrator is a part-time perfume employee/masseuse, offering wide-ranging and much appreciated ‘extended services’, who is transformed, incrementally into a pig that her clients cannot resist. She revels in their attention and so is able to save up enough money for a new dress. Her transition to her animal state has its social and psychological consequences even before she encounters a werewolf lover.
The book is capable of many different readings - its various targets include the beauty industry (more specifically, what Naomi Wolf has called "the Beauty Myth"); capitalist consumerism; tabloid television and "dumbing down"; intense farming methods; political correctness (consider the terrifying storm-troopers of the "Society for the Protection of Animals")...the list is almost endless.


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pig-Tales-...AYMRMZRZNER&psc=1&refRID=AC6J16V1ZAYMRMZRZNER
 
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Found in the same manner, but I immediately bought this book:

During one night shift, an unnamed, middle-aged pharmacist in Taxham, an isolated suburb of Salzburg, tells his story to a narrator. The pharmacist is known and well-respected, but lonely and estranged from his wife. He feels most comfortable wandering about in nature, collecting and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. One day he receives a blow to the head that leaves him unable to speak, and the narrative is transformed from ironic description into a collection of sensual impressions, observations and reflections.

The pharmacist, who is now called the driver, sets out on a quest, travelling into the Alps with two companions—a former Olympic skiing champion and a formerly famous poet--where he is beaten and later stalked by a woman. He drives through a tunnel and has a premonition of death, then finds himself in a surreal, foreign land. In a final series of bizarre, cathartic events, the driver regains his speech and is taken back to his pharmacy—back to his former life, but forever changed.


https://www.amazon.de/Dark-Night-Le...+handke&qid=1571599216&s=digital-text&sr=1-17
 
I am currently reading Debbie Harry's autobiography. Blondie were my favourite band as a kid. A few years ago I Read an article in the FT by Gary Lachman, am reading about Gary Valentine (as he was in Blondie). Debbie Harry describes him as a "young very good looking kid" who "looked like he ought to be in a rock band.

If that was me I wouldn't be able to get my fat head through the door. :)
 
A few years ago I Read an article in the FT by Gary Lachman, am reading about Gary Valentine (as he was in Blondie). Debbie Harry describes him as a "young very good looking kid" who "looked like he ought to be in a rock band.
I think he's a fairly regular contributor to Fortean Times.
 
Highly recommended. While reading about Machiavelli, I found the book "April Blood" about the Pazzi conspiracy. It's a renaissance "Game of Thrones". I will present a few quotes.

April Blood (Lauro Martines)
THE SIGNAL FOR the deed came at a moment in High Mass, possibly the elevation of the Host, though some said the priest’s communion, while others fixed on the words, Ite missa est. 2 Memories varied. Witnesses claimed that the first bloody thrust, backed by the exclamation, ‘Here, traitor!’, was delivered by Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, a man from an old banking family allied to the Pazzi. Giuliano de’ Medici staggered back a few paces, his chest punctured, as a second assailant, Francesco de’ Pazzi, went at him with a fury of dagger blows. When the tottering man collapsed in that part of the church, not far from the door nearest to the Via de’ Servi, he was in no condition to catch sight of his brother, Lorenzo the Magnificent, who was some twenty to thirty yards away. Giuliano’s lifeless body was to show a dozen to nineteen wounds. Again, memories clashed but were curiously precise. Cries, shouts, and the slap of racing feet erupted in that cavernous space, as seasoned politicians, ambassadors, servants, citizens, women, priests, and children ran about, bolted from the church, rushed into neighbouring houses or wherever their panic led them. Was it an earthquake? Some worshippers feared that Brunelleschi’s dome was about to come crashing down, while a few bold and curious spirits pressed in closer to the melée, nearer to those brandishing knives and swords, trying to see what was happening. Minutes before, two priests had edged their way up behind Lorenzo, who was still moving about on the southern side, by the old sacristy, chatting with friends. The two carried concealed weapons. When the signal came, one of them lunged at Lorenzo from behind, grabbing him by a shoulder, either to steady himself or to turn him round for the stabbing. Instead of which, receiving only a slight wound on the neck, just under the right ear, Lorenzo bounded forward, drawing his mantle up to his left arm and shoulder, then spun around, short sword in hand. He parried another thrust or two, before his retreat was covered by friends and defenders, as he jumped over a low wooden rail into the octagonal choir and crossed in front of the high altar, to seek the protection of the north sacristy. Francesco Nori – one of the top managers of the Medici Bank and a close friend – stepped in to help defend his employer, but he was mortally wounded when Baroncelli’s long knife got him in the pit of the stomach. Giuliano’s angry assassins had gone after Lorenzo too, despite the fact that the banker, Pazzi, was already limping, having been stabbed in the thigh either by one of his own servants or by himself, in the frenzy to kill Giuliano. The other priest, wielding a sword and small buckler, was fought off by a Medici servant, but in the fight a young man from the Cavalcanti family, one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s companions, was badly wounded in one arm. The bleeding Francesco Nori, quickly dragged into the north sacristy, died a few minutes later.


April Blood (Lauro Martines)
The two priests who had agreed to murder Lorenzo, Maffei and Bagnone, had found shelter with the Benedictine monks in the Badia Fiorentina, around the corner from the cathedral itself and across the street from the enclave of Pazzi mansions. They were finally seized on 3 May, and their Benedictine protectors would have been attacked and battered by a crowd, but for the arresting guardsmen and intervention of cooler heads. All the same, on the way to the government palace, the two men were beaten and mutilated: they were turned over, without ears and noses, to the Priors and Eight, to be hanged, like the Archbishop, from a window facing the spacious government piazza.

April Blood (Lauro Martines)
With one exception, however, there was soon to be a notable change in mood, as the governing elite regained its bearings. The middle and late 1470s were a time of rising food prices and famine. In this setting, the ready spilling of blood, the swelling fury against the conspirators, and the lewd flaunting of torn body parts, must have brought home to the ruling group the sense that the energies of the over-wrought mob, being so unstable, might well take a nasty turn and go against the ‘good’ sort of upper-class families. After all, there were armed men among the angry demonstrators, and the wild sacking of the Pazzi and certain Salviati houses had only just been prevented. The great wealth of the Pazzi had to be set aside for their likely creditors and the government’s coffers, not abandoned to a rabid crowd. Tensions were common in walled-in Florence, roused not so much by differences between the well-fed and the hungry (though these could be exploited), as by the Medicean system of government, with its cleavage between the webs of political privilege on the one side and the many political outcasts on the other.

April Blood (Lauro Martines)
Prevented from entering that piazza, but determined to go on exhibiting their humour and enjoying their howls of glee, they yanked and pulled ‘Jacopo’ to his own palazzo, where they banged his head on the door, while calling out, ‘Who’s in there? Who’s inside? What, is there no one here to receive the master and his entourage?’ That afternoon, finally, they worked their way south to the river with their ghastly hostage, moving up stream a bit, and then dumped it from the bridge at Rubiconte, now the Ponte alle Grazie, into the rushing waters of the Arno. As the corpse floated downstream, crowds of people rushed to the bridges to watch it flow past. A day or two later, near Brossi, boys again pulled it out of the water, hung it up on a willow tree, and beat it as though they were beating a carpet, then cast it back into the Arno, to let it continue its grotesque journey down river, under the bridges of Pisa, and out to the open sea. The travels of Messer Jacopo’s body end here, but its fate, surely for years, was to echo in the Florentine imagination.
 
Saw this yesterday in the bookshop. The audio book has the best reviews:

Unexplained: Supernatural Stories for Uncertain Times
by Richard MacLean Smith


https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40054078-unexplained?ac=1&from_search=true
I listened to the audiobook of this, because I think Richard MacLean Smith is a wizard when it comes to all things audible, and he really went all in for this. Music, sound effects, voice actors, his own smooth as velvet voice... incredible. A great listening experience, absolutely the audiobook I've enjoyed the most.
 
My review, it's in FT385.

Dark Emerald Tales: Folklore, Legends, Dark History and Hauntings Of Ireland.by Ann Massey O'Regan.
19 September 2018. Beuk Aithris.. 183 pp. PB. £7.99. ISBN-13: 978-0995778429

A wide ranging collection of Dark Irish Folklore retold in a popular fashion. The Ancient Gods and Goddesses are covered - The Morrigan, Boann, Aoibhell, Crom Dubh, Lugh. Mythical characters such as Oisin and Fionn and the cycles of their tales are discussed As are the Celtic Harbingers Of Death - Banshees, Hellhounds and The Dullahan.

The narrative swiftly moves on to the 15th Century Wizard Earl of Kildare, Gerald Fitzgerald who studied Metallurgy and Alchemy as well as more arcane subjects on the Continent before returning to Kilkea Castle where he was eaten by a cat after transforming himself into a bird.

Those with an interest in the Fairy Realm are well served by the inclusion of short pieces on Changelings, Fairy Shock Troops ( malevolent spirits sinking boats, fought off with iron), Cait Sidhe (soul-reaping black cat) and of course Leprechauns. Leprechauns are descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann and come in 57 different varieties ranging from Leinster (keeps a low profile, likes honey) to Ulster (good poet and hurler) to Connacht (hardworker, reclusive) to Munster (extrovert, hard drinker).

Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and Demons all pop up. The Werewolves of Ossory were cursed by an Abbot but aided by a priest who gave the Last Rites to a dying Werewolf in 1182, supposedly documented in a report to Rome in 1185..

FT readers will be keen to learn about Charles Fort in Kinsale and it's Lady in White, the ghost of woman who committed suicide at the Fort after finding the corpses of both her husband and father.Plenty of more haunted sites in Cork including the City Gaol, St Finbarr's Hospital and Carr's Hill Cemetery (ghosts of Famine victims).

If you want to go for a pint in a haunted pub in Dublin then you're spoiled for choice. The Gravediggers convenient to Glasnevin Cemetery, great pint of Guinness, old haunt of grave robbers. Brogans of Dame Street next to the Olympia Theatre, gets Tharical Ghosts. Mulligans of Poolbeg Street, more great Guinness, frequented by poltergeists. The lord Edward in Christchurch Place, haunted by the ghost of the eponymous United Irishman. The Brazen Head dates to 1198 but is haunted by Robert Emmett who held meetings there. I preferred it when it was more ramshackle and only sold bottled Guinness.

An entertaining guide to Ireland's Dark Side let down by dodgy spacing and a sloppy general layout. Still it should appeal to tourists. 6/10..
 
All this thread... My poor pockets, you meanies!

I will limit myself to three science fiction books:
  • Star's Reach by John Michael Greer;
  • The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse;
  • Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson.
These were selected because they are unconventional. You don't want to always read the same stories, right?
 
Just a 'heads-up' to say that although I don't yet have a copy myself, this new title been getting some excellent reviews. It seems to be somewhere between post-modern 'hauntology' and a more traditional exploration of old-fashioned ghost tales--with a personal narrative to hang it all on. Also, although I know that you proverbially shouldn't, what a great cover! Looks like a Christmas present to me.



91kSv0uGQHL.jpg


In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.

In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man…

Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

Previews Etc.
https://edwardparnell.com/
 
Just a 'heads-up' to say that although I don't yet have a copy myself, this new title been getting some excellent reviews. It seems to be somewhere between post-modern 'hauntology' and a more traditional exploration of old-fashioned ghost tales--with a personal narrative to hang it all on. Also, although I know that you proverbially shouldn't, what a great cover! Looks like a Christmas present to me.



View attachment 20963

In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.

In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man…

Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

Previews Etc.
https://edwardparnell.com/

I'm halfway through it and I think it ticks a lot of boxes for people on this forum. Recommended and quite similar in style to Rings of Saturn.

Also holds quite a lot of interest for birdwatchers as well, strange as that sounds.
 
I'm halfway through it and I think it ticks a lot of boxes for people on this forum. Recommended and quite similar in style to Rings of Saturn.

Oh wow! If it's like "the rings" then I must have it :)
It's available as an audiobook on Audible, Yay!
 
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I'm halfway through it and I think it ticks a lot of boxes for people on this forum. Recommended and quite similar in style to Rings of Saturn...

I bought this a while back, when it still had zero reviews on Amazon (and Goodreads, I think). It was the Rings of Saturn comparison that finally sold me on it (I mean, apart from everything else - it looked pretty intriguing to start with).

I haven't started it yet - frustratingly it is at home, and I'm working away, and even if I had it with me I'm so buggered at the end of the day that I can barely read a page before I'm away with the faeries.
 
I bought this a while back, when it still had zero reviews on Amazon (and Goodreads, I think). It was the Rings of Saturn comparison that finally sold me on it (I mean, apart from everything else - it looked pretty intriguing to start with).

At least it's not just me that sees the similarity. Was a bit wary comparing the two.
 
At least it's not just me that sees the similarity. Was a bit wary comparing the two.

I can't recall where I read it - possibly in the promotional blurb.

And now, on top of everything else, I really want to read The Rings of Saturn again.
 
I am currently reading HG Wells' A Short History of the World. It is short and pretty concise. One does not have to plough through a mass of detail. I think Wells is a good writer, and I have read much of his fiction. It is interesting to discover what was believed about the world in those days and comparing it with contemporary theories.

For some reason I was unable to find a copy of this book on Amazon a few months ago. I thought it might be out of print. However, when on a day trip to a local town known for its second-hand book shops, I went into one on the off-chance that they might have a copy. They didn't, or, at least, not a copy that I could afford. I was offered a collector's copy for £100. During my conversation with the shop owner, I made the comment that I thought books were for reading, not collecting. The shop owner thought this was really funny - reading a book instead of collecting it. His shoulders were heaving as he walked away from me.

Later I had another look in Amazon and lo and behold, I was able to purchase a new copy at a more reasonable price. It seems the book is not out of print as I had thought.
 
I bought this a while back, when it still had zero reviews on Amazon (and Goodreads, I think). It was the Rings of Saturn comparison that finally sold me on it (I mean, apart from everything else - it looked pretty intriguing to start with).


An edited version of the chapter dealing with William Hope Hodsgon was printed in a recent copy of FT. He goes into depth about Sebald, The Rings and The Emigrants over a couple of later chapters, visiting locations from both books. Interesting stuff.
 
I am currently reading Debbie Harry's autobiography. Blondie were my favourite band as a kid. A few years ago I Read an article in the FT by Gary Lachman, am reading about Gary Valentine (as he was in Blondie). Debbie Harry describes him as a "young very good looking kid" who "looked like he ought to be in a rock band.

If that was me I wouldn't be able to get my fat head through the door. :)

Some guys have all the luck eh?
 
Saw this book yesterday and I'm listening to it now. It's interesting and funny:

HOUGHTON: But they made it work. And, in fact, the acoustic part of Acoustic Kitty reportedly had no problems. The cat was a very effective bug, a listening device.

KELLY: So the electronics worked.

HOUGHTON: Right. The electronics worked. The ears were used, essentially, to funnel the noise into the microphone. The tail was the antenna. So part of it worked out pretty well. The problem was, like we mentioned, how do you get it to do what you want it to do?

KELLY: One more animal story to ask you about - Project X-Ray, which I will summarize as strapping bombs onto bats. And the bats would then swoop down onto Japanese cities during World War II. And it sounds like the problem with this one was they actually field-tested it, and it worked too well.

HOUGHTON: Right, too well. And this is something that was field-tested. And it didn't just burn down the mock Japanese city that was built for the test, but it burned down...

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/575262/nuking-the-moon-by-vince-houghton/

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/22/7257...y-schemes-that-didn-t-make-it?t=1573930053191
 
Searching for a weird brand of modern philosophy I stumbled into this rabbit hole. Don't know if the books are good or readable at all, but the titles and blurbs are fascinating:

Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious
Traditionally, we have associated cognition with consciousness and hence only with human beings. Unthought provides evidence from neuroscience, literary studies, economics, urban planning, robotics, computer science, and other fields to demonstrate that this narrow view is not only restrictive but dangerous. Hayles shows that if we think of cognition as pattern recognition and the capacity to respond to environmental changes, then most living things and many technical devices are cognizers.
https://www.amazon.de/Unthought-Pow.../ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. Cyclonopedia is a Middle Eastern Odyssey, populated by archaeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.
https://www.amazon.de/Cyclonopedia-...S2J25T1R9YB&psc=1&refRID=WNJS0KDX5S2J25T1R9YB

Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History
Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal.
https://www.amazon.de/Spinal-Catast...S2J25T1R9YB&psc=1&refRID=WNJS0KDX5S2J25T1R9YB

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
https://www.amazon.de/Speculative-E...XXHCC25HWXD&psc=1&refRID=6ZY237GXDXXHCC25HWXD

Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado's diaristic account of his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.
https://www.amazon.de/Testo-Junkie-...XXHCC25HWXD&psc=1&refRID=6ZY237GXDXXHCC25HWXD
 
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. Cyclonopedia is a Middle Eastern Odyssey, populated by archaeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.
https://www.amazon.de/Cyclonopedia-...S2J25T1R9YB&psc=1&refRID=WNJS0KDX5S2J25T1R9YB

I have this one and have read perhaps 10% of it, it reads, partially, as a satire of some of the more outre manifestations of theory with an overlay of Lovecraftian Horror but is mostly just tedious and impenetrable. There's a very modest and superficial conceit that it is a novel but that is dropped pretty quickly. It has an interesting premise - that The Middle East is an entity or at least the vast oil wells are one, and that it has been roused by drilling and the many wars in that area, and the juxtaposition of dense, jargon laden academic prose with cosmic horror is also a great idea but the end result is desultory. Also, Lovecraftian type horror as a metaphor for the alienation and vast impersonality of modern civilisation within philosophy is a trope that's been around a while.

This podcast discusses it:

http://thesometime.com/seminar/18-cyclonopedia/
 
My review, it's in FT 386.

Life In Medieval Ireland: Witches, Spies and Stockholm Syndrome by Finbar Dwyer
C-format, paperback | 232pp | ISBN: 9781848407404 | Release Date: June 2019 €11.95.


This is a popular history of Norman Ireland covering the period between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries. It is a story of dispossession of the native Irish by arriving Norman colonists, of alliances, backstabbing, wars, famine and plague. There never was a truly peaceful period as the Normans engaged in Civil War and Ireland was invaded by Edward the Bruce. The dispossessed Gaels retreated to their mountain fastnesses but often emerged to slaughter the invaders and burn towns.

But there is much of interest to Forteans as well. We have feuding Franciscans killing each other in a fracas between Anglo-Norman and Gaelic Irish Friars at a meeting in Cork in 1291, maybe someone passed the mead the wrong way around the table. Fighting clerics were not unusual in Ireland at the time as the Hospitaller Order in Dublin often sent warrior monks into the Wicklow mountains to subdue Irish raiders.

The Knights Templar were also powerful in Norman Ireland controlling ports and access to inland waterways. Their immediate access to ships may have allowed some members of the order to escape (with treasure no doubt) when they were suppressed in Ireland as no ships are listed among the items seized by Royal Officials. The accused faced a panel of Three Dominican and Two Franciscan judges in a trial that lasted for six months. No verdict is recorded and the Templar Brothers were eventually released and given a stipend of two pence a day. Better than burning at the stake as so many of their Brethern did elsewhere.

Times of famine resulted in cases of cannibalism. In 1295 the poor of Dublin were reported to have eaten the bodies of executed prisoners. On 27 June 1331 the people of Dublin were saved from starvation when several hundred whales beached themselves at the mouth of the Liffey. There are no reports of anyone trying to save the whales (other than salting down their remains).

Tales of witch trials usually resulted in the execution of servants rather than any person of status. Alice Kyteter who had four husbands die in suspicious circumstances came close to facing the gallows/stake but connections saved her.

Heresy trials in some cases came about due to the marrying of old Gaelic beliefs with Christianity. A mythical Irish hero Aedh Eanghach would save the Irish, but he gained his powers from Mother Nature.A reaction to the Christian Church supporting the Norman Invaders. For preaching such a creed, Adam Dubh O’Toole was burned at the stake in Dublin in 1328. The heresy continued to gain currency as two more men were burned at the stake in 1353 at Bunratty by order of the Bishop of Waterford.

An entertaining popular history based on surviving records than myths. 8/10.
 
The Legacy is a series of books based on what happens after Atlantis (Stargate Atlantis) landed in the San Francisco harbour at the end of season 5, they are well written and i love them all, so much in fact that i am re-reading them now. There is a total of six books in this season. It was nice to find some well written books as i was, as were a lot of fans, peed off because it was not allowed to have a film, this series of books, for me, should have, been the film. The writers stick well to how the characters are and they handle the action well, also we find out more about the Wraith and their ships.


Probably no good unless you have watched the series, sorry. Maybe not a lot of fans on here, i have no idea
 
In light of his recent death, why not enjoy Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James? I'll be dusting our copy off in the next day or two.
 
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