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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 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.
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, I see all the signs of MI6 psyops behind Hoskin's sudden best-selling success.
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.
Real travel comprise three elements: Weird food and strange people (or vice verca) in a new Place with a View. A journey not featuring these three elements at least once, is commuting.
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, original IT guy, crossword specialist and the quintessential British briefcase traveller.
Lyle Cambell's for his "Linguist on the Loose", describing his travels in Mongolia.
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", artist Ai Weiwei for his autobio "A 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrows" on living in modern China, Thomas Hardy who inspired my lifelong love for cider and live music with his portryal of Wessex life in "Under the Greenwood Tree", 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", though it was his "Soul of the White Ant" that was extensively plagiarised by the Belgian author and Nobel Laureate Maurice Maeterlinck after this literal thief discovered the British-taught advocate Marais refused to write his grounbreaking discoveries in English after they started the 1st and 2nd Boer Wars against the Boers.
HS van Blerk's autobio, "Dê Wêreld, Hier Is 'n Kind Vir Jou", showing 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 it did for aviation 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".
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.
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.
Margaret Visser, for her origins of Big Food in "Much Depends on Dinner".
Jakow Trachtenberg, whose harrowing experiences in German camps during WWII led to his easy arithmetic system that uses addition to do complex multiplication.
Giles Milton for his "White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves".
RM Lala's about "Creation of Wealth" a bone-dry but interesting recount about the Tata dynasty in India.
Technical writing, simply worded
The story how I ended up creating technical neologisms with other Afrikaans writers as a motoring journalist 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 shit got real, dude.
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".
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 his "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 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 apocolyptic 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
Zombies are just placeholders for all those unwashed have-nots who will want what your washed self has after TSHTF. We all hope to be among the haves and not the have-nots when this hits, which is why all the thought exercises that is every zombie storie, are so popular.
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.
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 a haiku.
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, "Winternag", vividly paints the bitterly cold highveld winter nights in words.
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 I every man can wish for.
