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Book recs please
Wang's Upon a Time 27 Apr 23 14:08
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I like to have a FACT book on the go alongside my staple diet of mavdicfic, so please hit me up.

dont much care for most biographies and nothing about politics pls but other than that am agnostic.  Sciencey or historyy would be great.

Just finished a book on the stoics.

someone recommended a good on on alexander the m7 a while back but i forget the details

 

 Cheers

I've recently finished Momenticon and Rotherweird by barrister Andrew Caldecott.

Momenticon had some great ideas and a good story. Of the two, though, Rotherweird was better written, and I shall be getting the sequels.

Mr Caldecott clearly has a fertile imagination and good way with words (as one would hope), and yet... and yet... as with some other authors (Charles Stross springs to mind) while some of the scenes are well described, there are some bits which seem to miss a step or are lacking a part of the explanation which makes them less than clear. For example: in Rotherweird (no spoilers) there is a bit where we are told that there is an aberrant bit of sky. We're not told how high up it is, or how large it is, but later in the book people are able to reach it from a tree. It would have helped to have a bit of an explanation as to how it was sited. That's one example. There were other instances.

Momenticon had slightly more holes, and instances where you'd think "Why on earth did that person do or say that?"

Overall, though: Enjoyable sci-fi/ fantasty/ steampunk-esque romps, sufficiently cool/ weird/ fun that I'll look for his books going forward.

(It is at this point that Mr Caldecott confirms that he's a Roffer)

I'm about to start "The Girl Who Could Move Sh1t With Her Mind", which is NOT part of the Dragon Tattoo series. 

The Peter Frankopan new one is a wondrous blend of science and history and I love it, and him.

Adjacent to Ronald Coase's rec there's a good one about the economics of kidnap by a lady professor (who actually i stumbled across via Frankopan's podcast come to think of it) - lots of insurance issues around eg boats going near somali waters.

oh and I qu fancy but have not yet read The PRemonitions Bureau (not sure how they've got an entire book out of if - a vanity fair style long article would have had me hooked instantly)

Yeah, I bought it after watching the tv show (the first series of which is only the first half or so of the book). It's a proper page turning read. They were seriously mad bastwards. 

John Nichol's Lancaster. Don't be fooled by the cover, it's not really about the plane itself and nor is it a recounting of WW2 exactly. Rather it's about the people who flew in the planes and the people who suffered the consequences of the bombs dropped from those planes. Loved it.

Red notice by Bill Browder is really good, it’s about putin, privatisation oligarchs and corruption on a massive scale 

hoping the kgb aren’t monitoring this 

I have bought the two gemmel books, riverlands and propo's sciency one.

Pancakes, if you like that sort of thing, I would recommend metazoa by godfrey-smith and the rise of the mammals by steve brusatte

Christian Wolmar’s history of British Rail. Highly political, to an extent that surprised me, but then I suppose any british railway history should be

Oh yes absolutely, what pancakes said. World For Sale. It's in the same view but even better again than my marine insurance book. You will never look at Glencore share prices in the same light again. 

Porpo, i have finished "what if".  Enjoyable but slightly irritated by that thing yank boffins do of trying to do funnies and failing epically.  You just know they write [pause for laughter] in their lecture notes and are met with walls of silence

Clive, FYI am much enjoying the Liojn of Macedon!

 

on the subject of ancient greek fic, a shameless plug for my mate's book, released to day "Jason, Blades of Bronze" (the follow up to his excellent tome, Argo)

Glad you're liking it Wang. Think I might read it again myself! Will be interesting if you prefer it or Dark Prince when you get to it.

Gemmell has also done some Arthurian stuff in a similar vein.

 

Gemmell's best work IMO was mainstream sword/sorcery fantasy - I don't know whether he was quite as at home in a historical (or in his case quasi-historical) setting as say Bernard Cornwell (eg Last Kingdom series).  I agree that period stretching from the Heroic Age/Bronze Age collapse to the Diadochi is not only tremendously interesting but provides a lot of material for a good writer to exploit (ditto the period/cultures covered in River Kings).  Some years ago I had a quick flip through Pressfield's Last of the Amazons, which was surprisingly enjoyable (as I've found what I've read of eg Conn Iggulden distinctly underwhelming).  It touches on several things that interest me - horse domestication, confict between steppe and settled cultures, Greek myth (Theseus and Antiope).  Worth a squizz if you have a spare hour or so.  

I am struggling to think of a purely factual book to recommend tho.  

Tbf to Gemmell all his work aside from the Trojan War trilogy was historical fantasy/ dystopia or straight fantasy. Met him a couple of times- lovely guy. My fav books are the two Greek ones I recommended to Wang.

Pressfield a lot better than Conn.

Not quite historical fantasy but may be worth looking into Guy Gavriel Kay. He's written lots of books. They are usually inspired by a historical era but set in a secondary world so not tied to history. In most of them fantastical elements are minimal.

He's written books inspired by Moorish Spain, Byzantium and medieval China among others. A wonderful writer.

Has anyone read the new book by judge rinder?  I mean, I am assuming it will be awful because they have resorted to the thursday murder club/janice hallett style cover design so you buy it by mistake, but I would appreciate conf

That looks good leuOO m7, on the list!

dont do bios really and deffo not tedious football ones

i see on my amazon recs that michael caune has written a novel

If you've never read The selfish gene and/or The blind watchmaker, you should definitely read one of them, or both.

Also, I saw a book on the Krebs cycle the other day and I thought it would be good, so I tried to look it up for you.

It is a measure of how utterly shite Amazon's search engine is that when I typed 'Krebs cycle' the fourth, sixth and seventh responses were French books by one Sophie Krebs and the twelfth was a book about bicycles. So, sorry about that.

All the time in the world by John Gierach

The longest silence by Tom McGuane

 

if you like fly fishing that is

 

or if you don’t try the sun also rises by Hemingway. pre sensitivity editing please 

 

I'm sure it's just me, but the two Holland books I read (In the Shadow of the Sword and Millennium) I somehow lost the thread of the argument somewhere in the middle. Each starts with a fascinating vignette, but then at some point in the book I asked myself "Wait, have we already moved past the vignette?"

Update- just finished a book on the interregrum by the aptly named Anna Keay.  Very good.  Replete with "i did not know that"s.

now started on The Wager by David Grann - epic tale of 17th C shipwreck and mutiny.  Laz, would appeal to your disaster tastes.

Chen Guangcheng, The Barefoot Lawyer. Blind child born into subsistence farming family in China turns himself into human rights lawyer, by way of challenging the poll tax on blind people, then business stealing/polluting the water from his village, then the enforcement of the one child policy by forced abortions and forced sterilisations. Then he escaped - on his own - blind - from house arrest and made it to the US embassy in Beijing and is now in the US.  Big praise for the current UK Ambassador to China, Caroline Wilson, for helping him on the water pollution when she was in a more junior posting, and also for being a decent person to him. 

Desmond Shum, Red Roulette. Less heroic individual but still  an interesting description of the corruption of all development in China in recent years.

Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. Autobiography. Enchanting photos of him at all ages with his father. Not  a materialistic man whatsoever.  

I’ve just finished the new biography of JL Austin, ordinary language philosopher and - it transpires- D Day landings mastermind. Any of you military types/Oxford afficionados would like this, I do believe. 

If you haven't read any Carlo Rovelli then he is very good at making quantum physics accessible (largely by including lots of history etc).  Reality is not what it seems is particularly good. 

Wang, I'm puzzled by your response to me - I think it was to me - about emailing a wang challenge?

Anyway, I'm just coming to the end of The story of China by Michael Wood, so I thought I would recommend it to you. Well written, I particularly like the way he relies on contemporary writings, many of which only recently discovered, to explain what was going on over the millennia.

oh, theshellfishgene was my username and email for years after I was banned for posting "joseph looked suspiciously at the donkey" in the context of the immaculate conception

Seconded on a Gentleman in Moscow. One of the best books I've read in years and a pleasure rather than a slog to read.

The City and the City by China Mieville also a hard recommend. Fantastic conceit.

I also always recommend House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. A properly uncanny and physically weird reading experience. 

I will counter clubman's outside-the-rules recommendation of Wes Streeting with Jess Walters "The Cold Millions". Novel set in 1910 US Pacific North West, mining rushes, Wobblies, strike breaking. It is about the fact that in an unfair country, for every Wes Streeting who makes it to Cambridge, there are the cold dead millions who die prematurely of the injuries and diseases of poverty.

Just finished Ben McIntyre's book on Colditz which is an interesting tale running from the arrival of the first prisoners to the end of the war with a few amusing interludes as well.

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