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| Bookshelves are where the best memories are held until a suitable mind comes along to share it with. |
Robert Ardrey, the OG fight club guy who scripted hits on Broadway and in Hollywood before returning to his actual training as philosopher to report direct from the conflict zone that was (and still is) archeology in Africa.
His sonorous prose goes deep, especialy this: "But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
And this: "We are bad-weather animals, disaster's fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst."
Terry Pratchett, because he was a genuine altruist who crafted satirical fantasy so profound, it needed footnotes. Look how he summarised Audrey's thinking: "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape." Or take Pratchett's summary of the three famous philosophical schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans: "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink."
Lyall Watson, whose "Supernature" had me hooked on this South African-born biologist and zookeeper who explored realms beyond the mere empiric ken of man, which later made me listen with a open mind to the ramblings of both Zulu sangoma Credo Mutwa and the recorded visions of "Boere profeet" Siener van Rensburg. (Though never as open-minded as occult-obsessed author Arthur Conan Doyle.)
Cyril Henry Hoskin, (aka Carl Kuon Suo, aka Lobsang Rampa) a plumber from Plympton who reinvented himself as a reincarnated Tibetian monk and introduced millions of nominal Christians to the much older faith that is Tibetian Buddhism, mainly by plagiarising W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s seminal 1935 book, "Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines". My impressionable 14-year-old self was much impressed. Nowadays, Hoskin's sudden best-selling success shows all the signs of an MI6 psy-op.
Graham Hancock, especially his "Visionary: The Mysterious Origins of Human Consciousness", which led me to Dennis and Terrence Mckenna on shrooms and later, Andrew Gallimore's "Death by Astonishment".
Joseph Selby's short treatise, "The Physics of God", which made me realise I don't have a soul, I am a soul that chose this body and this life, which in turn led to professor Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance postulate and lo, the Monroe Institute.
Morals through fiction and comics:
In primary school, 'twas not the conservative Reformed church that taught me right from wrong, but the writers below, each of whom shaped my ideas of honesty, gallantry, chivalry and the ways To Do The Right Thing that all boys should learn at this age. It helped that my father lived and embodied all these values, for a son will do as his dad did.
Louis L'Amour for his taciturn Sackett brothers who took it on the chin and suffered no wrong.
Dick Francis, for his dapper fighters of crime in equestrian circles.
Afrikaans author Cor Dirks, whose "Die Uile" series deployed Enid Blyton's formula of a young group having adventures and solving crimes.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, as much for his "Tarzan" as for his Barsoom and Pellucidar skiffy adventures taking place on Mars or deep under the (hollow) Earth.
René Coscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo, for their Asterix comic books.
Travel &/ History.
Having at one point lived on the road, driving ~1000 km a day, I know whereoff I speak when I state that real travel comprises three elements: Weird food and strange people (or vice verca) in a Place with a View. Any journey not featuring these three elements at least once, is just a boring commute.
If, however, you can't travel there yourself, (or have them come to visit) reading someone else's travels or life journey is a good third option. In fact, a good travel book can even become the first option to plan a trip, as a few in the list below did.
Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English lit, for his OG travel book, "Canterbury Tales"
Percy Fitzpatrick, whose semi autobio "Jock of the Bushveld" taught me about friendships and cooking on the move, as well as my country's foundations.
Ditto TV Bulpin, especially his "Storm over the Transvaal" and "Natal and the Zulu Country".
Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, especially his semi autobio "Roughing It".
Bill Bryson, any title really, but especially "Made in America".
Paul Theroux, especially "Riding the Iron Rooster" and "The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paddling the Pacific".
Jonathan Raban, especially "Hunting Mr Heartbreak".
Eric Williams, for his "Complete and Free" an autobio/travel/WWII/adventure.
Peter Mayle, for revealing southern France in his droll fiction set there, and for truffle seeking sows hunting for that "sirop of swine" found in a hog's saliva.
Michael Allin, for his "Zarafa, a giraffe's true story", a delightful history of the other events happening during Napoleon's intrusion into Egypt.
Richard Hall's recounting of the north African travels of Samuel and Florence Baker, in "Lovers on the Nile".
Tim Moore's "The Grand Tour: The European Adventure of a Continental Drifter".
Peter Biddlecombe, an 80s IT guy, crossword specialist and the quintessential British briefcase traveller.
Thomas Hardy who inspired my lifelong love for live music and cider with his portryal of Wessex life in "Under the Greenwood Tree".
Lyle Cambell's for his "Linguist on the Loose", describing his travels in Mongolia and the modern-day deification of Genghis Khan.
Honourable mentions go to PG du Plessis, for his ironic essays on town living in South Africa in "Koöperasiestories", Pieter Pieterse, for his caravan recipies; Jan Spies for his deadpan travel stories; Dymphna Cusak for her "Holidays among the Russians"; Tom Cole for his "Hell Bent West and Crooked" on taming the Northern Territories in Australia; C Johan Bakkes, especially his "Moer Toe Die Vreemde In"; Will Ferguson, for his "Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada"; Dr Owen Rowe O'Neil's "Adventures in Swaziland, The Story of a South African Boer"; Chinese artist Ai Weiwei for his autobio "A 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrows" on living in modern China, Dr. George Ernest Morrison's "An Australian in China" and finally, Lee Child, who showed factual America though his fictional Jack Reacher series.
Biographies and autobios:
Eugene Marais, especially his "My Friends the Baboons" and his poem, "Winternag", but not for his more famous "Soul of the White Ant". This book set out how a dispersed organism acts with single-minded intelligence but was unknown until Belgian author and Nobel Laureate Maurice Maeterlinck pliagiarised it.
This literal theft was made easy because the British-taught advocate Marais wrote only in Afrikaans, refusing to publish his grounbreaking discoveries in English in protest against the two wars of agression that the British had launched against his nation.
I've developed the same love-hate relationship with the war-mongering English and their fantastic language as did Marais. This love-hate has just deepended as I learned more about the likes of the Skulls and Bones secret society, from which club hand-picked leaders emerge who use Hegelian principles to "manage conflict through a clash of thesis and antithesis to deliver a controlled synthesis". In practice this means divide and conquer politics, colour revolutions and false flag mass killings to grow their profits.
What I ponder is whether we the "great unwashed" and "useless eaters" would have curtailed our own internecine violence if them Rotchilds and the subsequent latter-day Anglo-Zionists had not spurred our ongoing tribal squabbles into a profitable businesses.
I think not. We are after all, all of us, the surviving offspring of killer apes, who went out armed besides.
HS van Blerk's autobio, "Dê Wêreld, Hier Is 'n Kind Vir Jou", which shows how far my tribe the Boers have come from being mendicant roughnecks working for English bosses. (Also for this polite "goodbey" to the English boss after not getting a job, "OK sir, I foks of now".)
Gustav Hasford, "The Short Timers" about his experiences as a Marine during the fubar US invasion that was Vietnam, later made into the seminal movie, "Full Metal Jacket". (Best read with Pink Flloyd's "Final Cut" in the background.)
Nevil Shute, his auto-bio "Slide Rule" showed all that was bad in English burocracy that still ru(i)ns the Western World today, as these inbreds had ruined neutral buoyancy flight in the 1940s.
JC Kannemeyer's 741-page bio on one of the best South Africans yet, C Louis Leipoldt, in his "Leipoldt, 'n Lewensverhaal". Here was a man who was a surgeon in London, infamously instructed teachers to add wine to clean dirty borehole water in the Cape, and a foody who understood that travel is not about new views, but about breaking bread with strangers while looking at those views.
Linda Lear's bio of Beatrix Potter, who was not only a fine artist and a kind bunny boiler (to get her excuisite watercolours of Peter Rabbit biologically accurate for her best-selling childrens' books), but also a sheperdess extraordinaire, all in an era when women simply did not do such things.
Honourable mentions to James Herriot, who showed all that was good in England in his series of veterinarian stories and Gerald Durrel for his "Corfu" trilogy and pioneering thoughts on zoos and cages and Lillian Comber aka Beckwith, for her Hebridean series about life among the crofters.
Non-fiction
John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker for their 2019 "Empty Planet, The Shock of Global Depopulation" which called attention to super low birthrates around the globe, raising a lot of questions how a world with far fewer people will look. (Hint, it will not be modern no more.)
Giles Milton for his "White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves".
Keith B Richburg, whose controversial quote "Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive. Thank God I am an American," in his biographical "Out of America, A Black Man Confronts Africa", which provides a good summary of humanity's killer ape origins.
Margaret Visser, for her origins of Big Food in "Much Depends on Dinner".
Technical writing, simply worded
The story how I ended up creating technical neologisms with other Afrikaans writers as a motoring journalist during the peak car-owning era of the early 2000s entails a prophetic dream had by a psychic ex, a bit of a bump I had while practising front-wheel-drive handbrake drifts on farm roads in a Ford Bantam pickup (tricky, what with the handbrake placed between the door and seat); and learning fast from the blokes below.
E. B. White and William Strunk's "The Elements of Style", which is the only text book you need to write well. Link their rules with Ernest Hemingway's write-then-cut method, and Jonathan Swift's rule to only use words known to the servants, and you have something that can get published.
Jeremy Clarkson, the JC of motoring hacks.
PJ O'Rourke, especially his "Parliament of Whores", though his "Driving Like Crazy" showed me the standard to aspire to.
Honourable mentions to Vaudeville actor Charles Sale's 1930 skit, "The Specialist", which showed me how to write in English using a vernacular accent, ditto Herman Charles Bosman, whose Groot Marico stories are written in such colloquial English, they are remembered in Afrikaans.
Horror
This is a short list, for I stopped reading horror of all kinds, thanks to King's "Pet Sematry" while house-sitting on a farmstead in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night. That fictional shit got real like, fast, yo.
Stephen King, who told the 80s like it was but got really visual in his Dark Tower fantasy series.
Hugh Scott, that master of implied menace, whose novella "Why Weeps The Brogan" still has me stunned.
Survivors
Gary Paulsen's "The Hatchett", the best survivor / coming of age story from his hundreds of titles.
John McCormack's "The Road". The movie was excellent too.
Ben Maclennan, for his painstaking collection of survivors' stories in his "The Wind Makes Dust: Four Centuries of Travel in Southern Africa".
Jakow Trachtenberg, a true love story of harrowing experiences in German camps during WWII that led to an easy arithmetic system that uses addition to do complex multiplication.
Allan Gurganus, whose fictional "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" had me reading and rereading for months what moms did to survive for most of history.
Skiffeeee!
Science fiction is my best escapism, be it hard scifi, droll skiffy, space opera or post apocalyptic survivors. Most of the wordsmiths below are no longer on my shelves, which is a good thing, as books must be out there, getting read.
Alexander Tshaikovsky, basically anything starting with "Children of...".
Neal Stephenson, especially "Cryptonomicon".
Neil Asher, obviously his Polity series, but especially "Voyage of the Sable Keech".
Isaac Asimov, any of his sciffy but also this Russian-born naval avaiator's "Treasury of Humour", which thick compendium of jokes collected by Asimov as a stand-up comedian (he did that too) I read balanced on the steering wheel of my old VW bus while driving the arrow-straight highway to Cape Town.
Tom Holt, (the lesser spotted Douglas Adams write-alike), whose shape-shifting dragons inspired many a quick bed-time story for my son involving his Hen and the T-Rex and Dragon that had been spun from her DNA.
Robert H Heinlein, especially his "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which challenged my schooling that the criminal classes cannot self-govern and prosper, as preached by 15th-century math teacher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his "Leviathan".
"James S.A. Corey", aka co-authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, in their "Expanse" Series.
Hugh Howey's "Silo" series.
Tom Abraham's "Ash", which does for post apocalyptic fiction what World War Z did for the zombie genre -- bringing logic to the table.
William Gibson, especially his "Pattern Recognition".
Martha Wells for her Murderbot series.
Zombie stories
All zombies stories are thought exercises in how to outwit all the unwashed have-nots who will want your stuff after TSHTF, as it did most recently in Gaza, during the Tutsi massacre in Rwanda in 1994 and during the 1425-days siege of Sarajevo that ended in 29 February 1996. We all hope to be among the haves when "thi s hits", which is why these survival schemes are not just avidly read, but subsconciously studied for best practices.
Max Brooks, for his benchmark "World War Z" .
Jonathan Mayberry, the man who gave us Joe Ledger, V-Wars, Rot and Ruin and so much more.
Diana Rowland for her urban fantasy "White Trash Zombie" series, which is a good analogy of what it is like to be a white African, or any minority in a hostile place.
(A rare exception to this zombie formula is one of my own -- check out "About Those Beached Whales" in this blog.)
Poetry
Not all poets are depressed, (though the best of them are at least bi-polar) but anyone suffering from depression try at least once to makes sense of all the pain via poetry. I've found that most of these ad hoc poets should first have studied Stephen Fry's "The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within" before trying to express intense moods in rhyme.
The poems below though, they resonate with me.
DF Malherbe, "Slaap", which is as much a lullaby as it is a father crying over his dead daughter.
Eugene N Marais, his lyrical "Winternag", puts you in the bitter cold of a frosty night in the South African highveld.
William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence", especially for this line: "A dog starv'd at his master's gate, predicts the ruin of the state."
Edward FitzGerald, "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam".
A M Viljoen, the bipolar stepmom my father struggled to forgive, but whose poems about his father showed a (somewhat obsessive) love from a second wife that everyone can wish for.
