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Werner
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Jun 17, 2014 09:57AM
Word-of-mouth has always been the best advertising for books, and the most personal and relevant. This thread is designed as one where we can share our own personal recommendations of books (whether they're in Easley Library's collection or not!) that we think others will like. You can recommend a book to another individual member here, if you want to, or recommend books more generally to fans of particular genres, authors, styles, subject matter, etc. (Of course, the more we learn about each other's tastes from browsing each other's bookshelves, reviews and ratings, comments, etc., the more likely our recommendations will be to hit their target!)
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Paula, I've sort of picked up on the fact that, like me, you enjoy supernatural fiction. Have you discovered the work of Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) yet? He wrote in a variety of genres, but he did some of his best work in the supernatural field, IMO. A lot of his work fits into the "occult detective" mold. A professing Episcopalian, he also fits Christian content into much of his work in various ways.While he wasn't an Appalachian native (he was actually born to missionary parents in what is today Angola) he moved to the North Carolina mountains in the early 1950s and fell in love with the region. A number of his stories and novels have Appalachian settings, especially his body of work about mountain folk singer and "witch-master" (i.e., someone who is "master over" and can defeat the sorcery of witches) Silver John. I can recommend the entire Silver John corpus: the story collection John the Balladeer; The Old Gods Waken, After Dark, The Lost and the Lurking, The Hanging Stones, and The Voice Of The Mountain. All of his later (published after 1971) short supernatural stories set in Appalachia are collected in the book I recently finished and reviewed, Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories. And I'd also recommend his John Thunstone novel, What Dreams May Come.
Wellman is almost completely unrepresented in our collection. :-( But if you'd like to sample his supernatural fiction, our holdings of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contain his excellent story "Toad's Foot" (which is set in the Ozarks just after the Civil War) in the April 1979 issue.
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save EnglandJust finished reading this book and would like to recommend it to those of you who enjoy reading about history. I have not read many books about Great Britain's history, but this one was quite good. The author, Lynne Olsen, has done a very interesting job of describing the period in time before England entered into World War II and beyond. The months between September 1939 and May 1940 are often referred to as the "phony war" in England. Olsen describes the political intrigue that took place as about 30 young men defied their party and pushed for the end of the Chamberlain era and to establish Winston Churchill as prime minister. The book does not read as dry non-fiction, but as a lively look at the lives of these young men (and a few women) who brought together a coalition of political members of Parliament, establishing Churchill as the PM and turning the "phony war" into a real war. This change revitalized Great Britain and its resolve to mobilize to defeat Hitler and Germany. Olsen writes about the lives of these men and their careers after WW II as well. The book was engaging and, while not a quick read, one that I wanted to read to the end.
Today's fog and rain made it begin to feel like fall, to me. Does anyone have an "atmospheric" novel or short story to recommend? I'm thinking scarecrows and pumpkins and lightly ghosty. A little scary but not too creepy, perhaps? Thanks!
Hmmmm! Don't recall that it has any pumpkins, but have you ever read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Feathertop?" (It's one of the stories in Mosses from an Old Manse.)
I haven't, but I will look it up, tomorrow. Thank you, Werner!
No problem, Paula; hope you like it! (It does have a scarecrow. :-) )
Crystal, knowing that you're interested in memoirs, I think it's very possible that you'd like Carolyn Jourdan's Heart in the Right Place, especially since it has an Appalachian setting. We do have a copy here in the library (I donated mine, which I'd gotten through BookMooch, in order to give the book more exposure to a wider audience!)
Werner - I'm not sure that I've read many Appalachian memoirs. I looked that book up and I'm going to add it to my list. It might be the first of the year before I get to it but it's good to know that we have it right here. Thanks very much for the recommendation!
You're welcome, Crystal. I hope you like it!
Even though it's a book that's been in print for awhile, I'd heartily recommend Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church: Every Church Is Big in God's Eyes to every member of this group, and the same for Howard Snyder's The Problem of Wineskins: Church Structure in Technological Age (even though it's even older). I think both of these books encourage believers to look at our church life in a new and more biblical way.
Are any of our group members mystery fans? I was introduced to the genre as a kid, and have liked it ever since; so by now I've read a fair amount in it (though not as much as I have in the speculative genres). So if anybody's interested in recommendations in that area, I can supply a few, both in our collection and out of it.
Do tell, Werner. I don't read a lot of mysteries, but I enjoy them when I do. Thanks!
Hmmm! Paula, I checked out your profile, but I noticed that you don't have any customized shelves to divide your books by genre. (I have a "Mystery/Crime Fiction" shelf, with 50 books on it, though I'd say I haven't reviewed the majority of them.) What are some of the mysteries you've read already, and particularly liked? Like most basic genre classifications, this one is very broad, and covers a lot of variations in setting and style; it's easier to recommend some if I know what you've liked in the past, and why.For starters, if you like Victorian and Edwardian fiction, and are looking for novels, the four novels of the Sherlock Holmes canon are indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the historical origins of the genre. IMO, they're also great reads in their own right. My personal favorite is The Hound of the Baskervilles, because it's the most Gothic of the four. I gave that one five stars; A Study in Scarlet got four from me, and The Sign of Four and The Valley of Fear would have as well if I'd rated them yet.
If you appreciate short fiction (many modern American readers don't, though I've never really understood that sentiment myself!) the collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a great introduction to the many short stories Doyle wrote about his most famous character. And another short story collection, The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton, introduces another great fictional sleuth, who's just as entertaining as Holmes. (We have, or are in the process of adding, all of these books here in the library.)
Holmes is such a fascinating character for mystery fans that many aren't sated with his adventures, despite the fact that Doyle isn't around to write any more. Hence, there are a plethora of pastiches. I've only scratched the surface of these in my reading; but one I highly recommend is The Beekeeper's Apprentice, by Laurie R. King. That one pairs the "retired" Holmes with whip-smart teen Mary Russell, who's an Oxford student by the time this series-opener ends. (I haven't read any further in the series.)John Gardner (not the same John Gardner who wrote Grendel and On Moral Fiction) wrote a pair of novels pitting Holmes against Prof. Moriarty, with the focus mostly on Moriarty, and with the premise that both men survived the Reichenbach Falls incident. (These are The Return of Moriarty and The Revenge of Moriarty. Gardner isn't sympathetic to his evil protagonist, but the concentration on evil in the two books (and the fact that Gardner is somewhat franker than Doyle in his treatment of sexual matters) can make these problematic for some readers. However, both books are extremely well researched in regard to period detail (even to the point of tracking what day of the week particular 1890s dates actually fell on), and the author takes pains to integrate his pastiches into the original chronology of the Holmes canon, and to incorporate some of those events and characters.
Shadows Over Baker Street is a collection of pastiche tales that involve Holmes and/or other characters from the Holmes canon with phenomena from the Cthulhu Mythos tales of H. P. Lovecraft. It's an entertaining mash-up, but really of more interest to fans of speculative fiction than of mysteries.
Some fans think of the era between the World Wars as the "Golden Age" for both traditional mystery fiction and its rival tradition, the noir or "hardboiled" school (no, that isn't an egg-cooking preference!). We have examples of both in our mystery collection, but I'm much more drawn to the former, and especially to the work of the grand dame of the genre, Agatha Christie. There are a lot of her books in the collection; I've only scratched the surface of her output, but I'd highly recommend two titles we have (Murder on the Orient Express and the story collection The Labours of Hercules), and four that we unfortunately don't: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The A.B.C. Murders, The Body in the Library, and Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories.Christie's contemporary, (and a devout Christian) Dorothy Sayers is also represented in our Mystery collection; but I'm ashamed to confess I've never read any of her novels. But I can recommend her short story, "The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head," as one of the best buried treasure yarns I've read. It adds dry British humor to a seemingly insoluble puzzle, and benefits from the appeal of her one-of-a-kind detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. (We have all of the Wimsey stories in the collection, Lord Peter.)
Paula, I don't know if you like short stories much --many modern American readers don't, I suppose partly because your generation and the one after it hasn't been exposed to general circulation magazines that included them as staple fare, as mine was. But if you enjoy the short fiction format, anthologies and collections of mystery fiction abound; and I can single out three for particular mention. One of them is in our own collection (the other two aren't, but are obtainable by ILL).The one we have is The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, which is what its title implies, a compendium of what book editor Tony Hillerman considered to be the best mystery or crime fiction stories written by American authors over the whole span of the 20th century. He showcases the whole gamut of stylistic schools and approaches, but sought to choose quality examples in all cases, and the list of authors included is practically a role call of the genre's big names.
World-class historian Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present) was also an avid fan of detective stories. In 1961, he edited The Delights of Detection, a fine collection of both mystery stories from the earlier part of the 20th century, and some fascinating selections that explore the genre's 19th (and even 18th) century roots. Magnolias and Mayhem (2000) is a less historically significant anthology, but an excellent one, containing mostly stories originally written for the collection, and none written earlier than 1991; so it's a great introduction to newer (as well as longer established) writers from the South. it's a collection as diverse as the South itself is; but the quality of the stories is mostly consistently high..
As a kid, I actually read quite a few contemporary mystery novels (though they wouldn't be that contemporary now). But I haven't rated or reviewed any (except for a Hardy Boys novel, which of course was a kid's book!) and in many cases I don't even remember the bibliographic information well enough to list them. But I can share some recommendations for more recent mystery series, and all of them fall within the particular sub-genre of historical mysteries.The latter are such a big part of the whole mystery field today that we tend to forget that (except for Sherlock Holmes pastiches) they didn't exist until 1977, when respected historical novelist Dame Edith Pargeter (who also wrote mysteries as Ellis Peters) brought the two genres together with A Morbid Taste for Bones, the opener for her series about 12th-century monk, herbalist and amateur sleuth Brother Cadfael. A number of the Cadfael novels were adapted on the old PBS Mystery! series, starring Derek Jacobi as Cadfael, these aren't to be missed either, IMO.
I have a fondness for female detectives, and three series I'm currently following feature them. Introduced in Crocodile on the Sandbank, (by "Elizabeth Peters," a pen name of Egyptologist Barbara Mertz) smart and strong-willed Amelia Peabody, who's been orphaned at 32, travels to 1884 Egypt and finds mystery --and perhaps something else too, but that would be telling! Suzanne Arruda's former World War I ambulance driver Jade del Cameron comes to Africa in 1919 to fulfill a charge from her dead suitor in Mark of the Lion. In that book and the following ones, intrigue and danger will have a way of finding her. Finally, in a slightly alternate Regency London created by Madeleine E. Robins, Point of Honour and its sequels show us how Miss Sarah Tolerance, disowned by her well-to-family as a "fallen woman" (but don't judge her too quickly or harshly!) invented the "agent of inquiry" profession to support herself in a world where single women occupy a much more constrained and precarious position than they do today.
Paula, I think any of the books I've named could be good possible reads for you, if any of them sound interesting. All of the modern works I've listed have either no bad language or very little of it, and no explicit sexual content. (Most don't really have sexual content at all, as such.)
Easley Library Bookworms
Books mentioned in this topic
Mark of the Lion (other topics)Point of Honour (other topics)
Crocodile on the Sandbank (other topics)
A Morbid Taste for Bones (other topics)
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (other topics)
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