Summer Reading 2015: Books to Blow Your Mind

Might make for some good beach reading, some intelligent beach reating, if if, if that's your thing, so yeah, I think it's also probably a good opportunity for the audience to get to know Joe and I a little bit better, to kind of what our interests are and and perhaps uh, some parts of our personalities that maybe haven't come through yet in episodes about things like stigmata and glass mind conditions like you don't already know what kind of a

creep I am I do, but the audience doesn't. That's what this is about, exposing our our inner secrets and creepiness to the listeners and you, and it tends to result in a lot of cool conversations with listeners because either either they've read the books that that we're talking about and have some feedback, or they have some recommendations based on some of what we're chatting about. So I

look forward to all that interaction. Yeah, that's exactly what I was hoping for out of this, was that we'd get um some nice engagement and conversations going with the listeners and that they could possibly recommend some stuff back to us as well. You can contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler where we are blow the Mind, or you can write us at below the Mind at how stuff works

dot com. Let us know what you thought about you know, the recommendations were about to give here, and let's know what your recommendations are based on what we tell you. Maybe you've got something that you can tell us about. Uh that that one of the three of us are all three of us who want to dive into Yeah, and inevitably they're gonna be questions about the titles. You know, what was that book you mentioned? How do you spell

that last name of that author? We're going to make sure that on the landing page for this episode will have all the books that we specifically call out here, as well as links to where you can obtain them, you know. Getting into choosing books for this episode, one of the things I noticed was how little I've been reading the ideal kind of book to talk about on stuff to pull your mind in the past couple of years. I don't know. I feel like, you know, what do

I want to give this audience. I want to give them something very like strange science fiction or something like that. And I haven't been getting into that much lately. I mean, I still love it, but I just haven't been reading it. Yeah, I could see that, But I go through phases with content like that, I think. I mean, you're going to find out today that I'm obviously in a big horror phase, which is probably no surprise to anyone who's familiar with the stuff that I do outside of Us to Works.

But yeah, I think that that stuff ebbs and flows for my own part, right, you know, we we moved offices here at How Stuff Works. We used to be located up in uh in Buckhead and now we're more in central Atlanta at the Coon City Market. So we went from being like a little short walk in like a forty minute train ride from my house to being just a ten minute car ride. So I really lost a lot of the core reading time that I had

set aside. You know, because when you're on the train, or at least when I was on the train, like there was nothing else I could do but read the book, you know, and so there were no distractions other than you know, some weirdo on the train doing god knows what. But aside from that, there were no distractions. Just plug into my my music, pull out a book, and uh and read. And so I've been having I've been kind of struggling to find my key reading times again in

my in my schedule. Yeah, I still ride the train and I take the shuttle here, but I haven't been reading as much. But I've been listening to a lot of audio books. In fact, one of the books I'm gonna talk about today I listened to entirely as an audiobook. I need to get back in it all for me,

I actually like a lot of audio books. I don't think any of the ones I'm going to talk about today I experienced to be an audio book, but I'm a big fan of them because I don't know, I do all the cooking in our house and stuff like that, and it's good to be able to listen to a book while you cook. Yeah. Yeah, this is not related to any of stuff i'm gonna recommend today. I've told

this story to Joe before. But one of the audio books I listened to in the last couple of years was Cormac McCarthy Is the Road, and I listened to it entirely while I was exercising. And let me tell you, there isn't There is not a more depressing book to listen to while you're running. No, but it makes you want to be in good shape so you don't become part of the supplementary band of Katamites. Yeah exactly. I definitely was thinking about how it was getting, you know,

prepared for the dystopian apocalypse. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great book, it is. Yeah, it's pretty much everything. Also. All right, well, let's uh, let's dive into it. We're gonna start with a round of our non fiction recommendations, and then we're gonna skip to our fictional recommendations. Oh. I'm going to kick off here by recommending a book by Douglas j Emlynd titled Animal Weapons The Evolution of battle. Uh. This came out I believe earlier this year or the end

of last year. So it's a new book and it's it's really exceptional. It's it's well illustrated, and it deals essentially, it's a comparison between the evolution of organic defense systems and man made weapons. So it looks at the arms race of evolution, with a particular focus on the economics of evolution, so you know, asking questions like at what point is a crab claw too large? And uh and and and and the other side of the coin is

at what point is an arm's budget too ridiculous? And there's a chapter at the end that deals with mass destruction, you know, which is more of an exclusive domain of human weaponry. Uh, something you're not going to find in the natural world. Uh. And that's where the comparison kind of breaks down and the and the author discusses it.

But but it's a it's a fascinating read. I mean, particularly if you're interested if you're interested in biology, if you're interested in warfare and uh and weaponry, and if you're interested in in fictional monsters like like I am, because um, you know, we we we love to throw outrageous. Uh, animal weapons that are monster designs, and it's it's always a fun exercise to to think, well, huh, well, why why would that creature have a claw that big? What

would have things to pay for that? Yeah, because that's the thing. Weapons. Uh. He discusses that at length in the book. Weapons are always expensive, especially state of the art weapons, whether you're talking about a medieval night if you're talking about an aircraft carrier, if you're talking about an exceptionally large crab claw or a set of antlers, because those things end up requiring resources from the organism.

They opened the organism up for for more damage, for more infections, and uh, you know, and sometimes that the species goes bankrupt because the weapon's budget is too large. Yeah. I think it's fascinating thinking about some of the feedback loops that can be created in in evolutionary development, especially because if you go back far enough, you can trace

it to maybe a single random event. You know, that one organism acquired a mutation that gave it a slight edge in some strange way that wasn't usual in that ecosystem before, and then suddenly every other species that competes with it had to keep up. So I'm wondering because I know you're a big Grant Morrison fan. Have you read We Three before? No, that's that's one I need to borrow from someone at some point, but maybe you can borrow for me. But um, it's related to this topic.

It directly in that it is about house pet animals that are weaponized by the US government and they're intelligent, right, yeah, they're well, I mean they're a little above average intelligence for you know, it's a dog, a cat, and a rabbit. But they're also like implanted with I guess cybernetics, and they were sort of like exoskeletons and they're so is not the natural arms or no, this is not real? This is sci fi? Yeah, but it is. Um it's a very emotional, uh comic book. Oh yes, yeah, I

think you'll enjoy it. I will definitely have to check that out. Um. Yeah, I mean this book I definitely recommend. It's a very readable uh you know, it's not not too thick for the for the average read in the

unity of the advanced science reader. And it's just like every chapter you can actually actually can just spot read this thing if you want, you know, you just set it back on the toilet tank and pull it out whenever you you just want a little bit of of mind blowing science, I mean stuff like, Um, he spends a lot of time with stag beetles and dung beetles, you know, because they have a lot of of of weaponry that they've evolved on their heads for fighting, and

he mentions at one point that in some male dung beetles who actually see the diminishment of the eyes, uh, so that they can grow these elaborate fighting mechanisms. So so the weapons actually like limit the site of the organism in a very real way. That kind of in the same way that like wearing a great helm would would limit your site as yeah yeah yeah, or that wearing armor limits your mobility, right, And all of these things come with a cost, even if it's just a

cost of resource investment. I had a feeling that going into this episode, we're going to come up with some future episode topic ideas, and this sounds like a good one. Yeah, it's I think in the past I touched on this book a little bit in an episode about antlers and one about dung beetles. But I mean it's it's a great text to have around because it covers pretty much everything. It's just a wonderful dive into the topic of of

animal and human weaponry. So cool, recommend it. All right, Well, for my nonfiction selection, I'm gonna bring up a book that's especially relevant to this podcast because we talked about it in a couple of the episodes. Robert and I did the ones about techno religion, and this book is the Remarkable Life of John Murray, Spear Agitator for the

Spirit Land by John Benedict Beaucher. And I apologized to John Benedict Beaucher for saying this, but every time I say his name, I want to say John Carl Buckler, who is the director of Friday the Thirteenth Part seven. Wow, that's that's very specific. You don't know that this guy didn't also direct Friday Part seven under a pseudonym. Well that could be. I mean, it's close enough. They might as well be the same. Way to separate his career. Uh No, this guy, as far as I know, has

not directed any slasher movies. But a good like spiritual if the slasher movie might be, might be worth Oh yeah, that could be really cool. But I thought this, This story was just fascinating because this is a this is a biography of this guy, John Murray Spear, who we talked about in the Techno Religion episodes. And John Murray Spear was an activist, a reformer, you know, an agent of political and social change in most cases for the better.

He advocated some really progressive topics for his time in the early to mid eighteen hundreds. He was for women's rights, He was an abolitionist against slavery, he protested against racism, and so he was in a lot of ways a really great guy for his time. But it's an interesting study in how even people with really admirable intentions can get swept up in bizarre belief systems where John Murray

Spear ended up becoming a spiritualist. Interesting. Yeah, And so he began to think that he was a medium who could channel the spirits from beyond, and he thought he could deliver the words of Benjamin Rush giving lectures on anatomy, and these were subjects he didn't know anything about. So was this like many spiritualists at that time, did he try to monetize this in some way? Like did he advertise it as if like you know, pay him ten bucks and he'll tell you the secrets of the universe.

That really I mean, I mean maybe, I don't know, if you want to be cynical, you could maybe because he did draw people to him through this, Like he definitely lad some projects and had some followers based on messages he was supposedly getting from the spirit world. But I know, I don't get the sense that it was just kind of a crass cash grab. I get the sense that he was a true believer. He seemed really

invested in these these projects, you know. I mean, it's easy to think of his key project, which I'm sure about to discuss. It's kind of an art installation, So you can almost imagine him him as a like a gallery owner who is just super committed to to curating the the the main art installation in this gallery, and and less concerned with actually selling tickets. The spiritualists of that time that I was thinking of are more like kind of I think Joe and I have talked about

this off air before, about like water diviners or oil diviners. Uh, and that they would, you know, obviously like claim that spirits were able to tell them where water or oil could be found. But now John Murray Spear and his followers are more into the idea that spirits could tell you how to build a machine that would save the world and become the new robot Messiah. Oh so he's our buck Buckminster Fuller pretty much. Yeah, this is in the realm of spiritualist. He was. He was a big thinker.

He was definitely outside the box thinker. Yeah, and so that's this led to the New Motor Project, which we talked about at length in our episodes on Techno Religion, and if you haven't heard those, you can go back

and check those out for the fuller description. But basically, he and a bunch of people got together and tried to build a machine based on instructions from spirits that he thought would bring about a new era and sort of change the humans relationship with the spirit world and bring about a positive end of days in a way. So this book that's about him, Um, how how did you find like, you know, the structure the pros it was? It? Is it a den biography or is it um you know,

readable kind of page turner. No, it's not like highly dramatized. So he he doesn't make it into a historical novel or anything. I guess since it's more kind of an academic historians work, But that doesn't mean it's uninteresting, just because the story of John Murray Spear is so weird, so fascinating just in the actual details of what happened that I think even the non historian reader would be interested in this. Cool. That sounds fascinating. Yeah, what's on

the artwork there? Yeah, the cover has this I don't know, kind of creepy looking army of cherubim surrounding what looks like a sewing machine table. Yeah, it seems to highlight the themes. Yeah, there aren't a lot of great pictures of of John Murray Spears, a key creation, so I don't think there's a single photograph of it, just the illustration, a couple of illustrations. Yeah. Yeah, spoiler alert. It looks like a table with a bunch of stuff lude to it. Yeah.

I think we described in the podcast what is a is a dalek and um a coffee table mated? This would be the offspring, Yeah, pretty much, and then you hung that with some Christmas ornaments. Well that's actually a good segue into the book that I chose to talk about today. For my nonfiction selection, which is it's an e book by Warren Ellis called Cunning Plans. And Warren Ellis, for those of you not familiar, is primarily known as

an English comic book writer. He's written a couple of novels, and he's also done some commentary and columns about society and technology and sort of where we're going and how they're merging. Uh. And this e book, which I think it's only likes on Amazon or something like that, is a collection of talks and presentations that he's given on a variety of topics over the last I don't know, maybe five or six years. One of the major categories that he covers in these talks is sort of a

collision between spiritualism or magical thinking and technology and progress. Um. So it's it's it's an interesting, you know, set of transcripts and it reads very well. But here's just kind of a set of topics that comes up in the In this book, he talks about futurism, the speed at which we're progressing scientifically. Uh. The title of the book, Cunning Plans, comes from the tradition in England that I wasn't aware of called the cunning folk. Have you guys

heard of this before? He describes it as a they were sort of like witch doctors or shaman in England at a time. Um. And he compares the cunning folk of that time to sort of technologists. So are time interesting. Um. Mystical wearables is something he talks about. He also talks about Alexander Graham Bell's harmonic telegraph, the combination of magic

in the digital world, why people murder each other. Uh, pop music as sort of like a telegraph of the future, like showing us what the future is going to become, which I think is kind of a theme that stuff to blow your mind has has had over the years when you write about space music. Uh. And he's also you know, no surprise into hallucinogens and gardening on grapes sites.

I never thought about this, but this is one of the other things he talked about was that apparently the soil is rather rich where dead bodies are buried, so it's easy to grow even even with like modern and modern day and age, because we tend to just completely cut the body off from any kind of natural you know, if I remember correctly from the from the book, it wasn't um, the grave sites that he was talking about were not like modern so yeah, it was more like okay,

so it's not like you get your gourds from grandpa. It's like you go fin well, yeah, yeah, m grandpa's crawl space, mushroom. But this is a passage I'd like to read because I think I think that Ellis would probably like that grandpa's crawl space. You know. Sorry, that makes me think. Recently, Rachel and I were driving through South Carolina and who's Rachel for the audience, My wife Rachel, and we're driving through We were driving through South Carolina.

We saw a little like neighborhood community that has a name, as sometimes they have names, and it's called Moss Grove. It's like, man, that is one letter off. Well, this is there's a passage from Ellis's book of talks that I wanted to read here today because I think it kind of captures the big ideas that he's he's trying to convey in these talks, and it's it's very stuff to blow your mind. So this is in I believe

the second one. The Olympus Mons Mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that where you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way into space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere that's taller than ours, but there's barely anything to it. At that level thirty pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth, you may as well be in space. Imagine that.

Imagine a world where you can quite literally walk into space. Wow, that's nice. Yeah, it's kind of fun stuff. Yeah, I mean like, that's a topic where I've certainly done my share of reading about the geography of Mars, and I don't think I think it's ever been presented quiet like that to me. Now, Yeah, that's one of the things I like about Ellis is that he tends to take a lot of popular science type information and he translates it in such a way that just really brings a

lot of kind of strangeness and wonder to it. Yeah, that sounds like one that would be cool to pick up. I haven't. I haven't read any of his, because he has a has a couple of novels out right. Yeah, Crooked Little Vein is one of them. I can't remember the other novels title. He was supposed to release a book called Listener, I believe, but I don't think that

one came out. But there I noticed when I bought this that there are a couple of other books by him available, which maybe other collections of you know, sort of his Internet ramblings and things like that. But I've

always found that kind of thing interesting. In fact, I think I was showing you guys the other day some old issues of this collection of books called Bad Signal that he put out at the early two thousands that were basically his He would take these really sensationalist, kind of weird science stories and then extrapolate them out a little bit further and and they, you know, for the most party kind of sites sources, and it was stuff

from newspapers in the late nineties. And I think it would be sort of fascinating for us to take one or two of those and dive into them, see if you see, if there's some meat on the bone. Yeah. I loved trans Metropolitan and that's the one you told me to read. Uh, Yeah, trans Metropolitan is probably the one he's best known for. Spider Ruth. Yeah, it's basically a sci fi version of Hunter S. Thompson. Uh, kind

of writing about a presidential campaign. Was that accurate? Yeah yeah, and kind of got a weird like alien influence, stopian, cyberpunky gonzo future, transhumanism is a big theme. It works. Um. I think one of the other ones I might have told you Joe to read is called Planetary, and that is sort of his I think he describes as like

an archaeology of weird fiction. So he goes throughout the history of sort of science fiction, weird fiction fantasy and explores it throughout the the the context of this narrative and Planetary, you know, he was involved early on, um in the creation of the Dead Space video game franch Yeah, it's and I think he he hadn't has I don't think he's really gone on the record much for talking about like what specifically his contribution story, because I imagine

there were a lot of cooks, uh preparing that soup. But but I really enjoyed that that gaming franchise. Yeah, me too. I kind of like to to look at it sometime and try and figure out what what in this is is definitely has Ellis's d N Yeah, Yeah, I could see that I had forgotten about that, But you're right. I just played Dead Space three last year. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, that one was fun. I've never done any of those. Their survival horror science fiction games.

I think is a wonderful You have techno religion at the center of it. Okay, cool, all right, so there are three uh promising nonfiction recommendations for you. You know, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna dive into some fiction as well. Alright, we're back and now we're gonna talk a little bit about fiction. And you know, just because it's fictional doesn't mean it's not loaded with a lot of mind expanding topics, a lot of a lot of cool ideas. And that's why

I I am. I'm always drawn to the work of the I n M. Banks Um. Yeah, it's the recurring theme I got I said something funny. No, no, yeah, I know that you've talked about him a lot on the show before, and we were talking about this yesterday that I've actually never read his work before, and so I've heard nothing but good things about him. But what I've heard is that he goes by the name Ian M. Banks when he's writing science fiction, and he's just Ian

Banks right when he's writing sort of just literary fiction. Yes, okay, that's and his sci fi. I pretty much only read his sci fi except for his first novel, UM, The Wasp Factory. I believe that's what. That's more on this sort of literary kind of literary horror, I would say. But but for the most part, I stick to his sci fi, especially as culture series um and and I really think they. I tend to almost always read his books exclusively at the beach. So he's kind of my

go to beach read. So let's back up here a second. I have never thought of you as a beach person. Yeah, well you know, I'm also surprised, Elsie. I love a good walk on the beach. Um. I have to kind of be coaxed into doing all the other stuff like actually getting in the water and all right, and having a toddler certainly helps with that. But but I love walking on the beach. I love, you know, staring out and might of my creative juices run um. So I love reading at the beach. It's a good excuse to

just dive into a book. Well, I gotta say that there are different kinds of beaches also because I don't consider myself a beach person in terms of like happy sunny beaches with people swimming. But you went to the beach just a couple of weeks ago, too, Well that was a family thing, you know, you know, I mean, I didn't hate it. But but the kind of beach I can really get behind is like the Icelandic beach or like where it's like a gray hellscape that's beautiful,

potentially hallucinate things on the horizon. Yeah, you're you're likely to see a troll walking up out of the water. Well. I tend to not go quite that dark in myne beaches. But I like a I like a less populated beach, and I don't like a bunch of people sitting around swift swiking beer and playing Jimmy Buffett. I like a like a you know, a fairly deserted beach. I like like clouds in the sky. But but I also like

getting my feet in the water a little bit. And you know, I prefer sand rather than painful rocks beneath me. A doom metal kind of beach. I guess, yeah, no, I don't know that makes it sound like the sky is full of smog and there's like like Viking ships on the horizon. There you go, all right, so you read you're reading in him banks at the beach, or you recommend reading it there. I mean, it works for me,

but he's he's great to read anywhere. So you know, if you want this type of science fiction journey, um

this particular book. I read the book Accession, which came out in ninety six, and it's the fifth book in his Culture series, which if you're not familiar with it, it's essentially a post singularity space opera that often deals with the meaning of life and a post scarcity society, the limits of utopia, machine intelligence, alien civilizations, war, horror, wonder and he also throws in a fair bit of silliness and humor that kind of balances everything out of

kind of you know, Rye almost kind of it's almost like a Monty Python as silliness at times, and and the kind of pompous air to some of the characters in this uh in this universe, which which helps to you had to balance out some of the heavier ideas that he plays with. And he's British, right or he was, but she passed away last year. Yeah. Yeah, he died in two years ago now, but but he he contributed

a number of books to us before before passing. Um and uh, and the Culture books aren't the only science fiction books, but there, it's that's the university keeps coming back to every key, kept coming back to a number of times. Yeah, it's it definitely sounds like something I need to dive into at some point. My wife has recommended as well. Yeah. The weird thing about the Culture series is that, first of all, it's each book can

be read on its own. It's there, there's stuff that happens in the universe, uh, some key events, and there's definitely a timeline, but that timeline isn't doesn't reflect the order in which the books are published, and so technically you can come in at any point. But then some books are better entry points than others. So I always recommend the Player of Games is a great first culture book to read, as well as consider Flibus, which is

the first one that he wrote. Um. I found Player of Games was the one that I came to first, and I found that one to be the most accessible, and it is one of my my favorite books. Um Accession, however, is very good too, and this one deals uh, like all of his books. You know, there are a number of different elements going on. There's what he calls an outside context event, uh, the appear, which is the appearance

of this thing they refer to as an accession. So an outside context event for the rest of us would be like if you were a member of you know, a primitive tribe and you live on in some coastal environment. You know, you're you're catching your fish, you're cooking them over fire, and you have all these questions about how the world works beyond you know, beyond your your standard myths that have been passed on, and then you look out one day and there's, say, you know, a Spanish

warship out out in the harbor. That is an outside context of the the arrival of a of an advanced piece of technology and advanced civilization, the kind of thing you could not predict. And then once it is in play, you're you're kind of powerless against whatever changes it's going to bring into your world. So he's extrapolating that and

imagining it into sci fi scenarios for our future. Yeah, So like in the culture which is the culture is is one of several galactic civilizations that are employed that are in play in his world. And and this so this is an very space opera age in which ships are running all over the place. Artificial intelligence is extremely powerful. UH. There are a number of elder civilizations that have UH that have sort of gone offline. They've sublime as as

as Banks refers to it. But the Succession UH, the Succession seems to be an entity or or even some sort of a ship that originates outside of our universe. So it's a significant advanced step in technology, far beyond anything that than any of these other civilizations have the power to grasp. And so it it it ends up playing into a couple of other scenarios. There's a there's a warlike species called the Affront that want to take

advantage of it. And then you have the artificial intelligence minds that run the Culture and they're trying to figure out how best to respond to it, while another faction of them are trying to figure out how to exploit the scenario to UH to deal with the Affront. And then at the center of this too, you have a

tragic post human love story UH involving to human characters. Um, because his his post human characters are always so so interesting because he deals with very human qualities, but the human qualities of the sort of human who can live for centuries, that can change gender as much as they want, that can you know, essentially start and restart their lives several times and do anything they want to within this sort of semi utopian society. So this is sort of

transhumanists as well. Then, Yeah, I'm assuming there's like an idea and the restarting of the lives is something that like the mind is separate from the body in a way. Um, yeah, at times like there he explores so many different possibilities in these books, Like they're they're definitely individuals who are disembodied, their individuals who are stored away, their individuals who are

whose mind is put back into a new body. And then individuals in the culture tend to have they have like a neural lace implanted in their brain that gives them all these uh, these these cybernetic interface features they have the ability to to gland different properties. So if they want they want to sleep, uh without being disturbed by dreams, they just have to think about it. And it happens. If they essentially want a powerful stimulant to rev them up, they just think about it and it happens.

So they have their own, their own sort of pharmaceutical reserves just just waiting inside their head. And all I have to do is think that does sound utopian. I would love for a good night, but I just could think about it ahead of time. One thing I think is really interesting there is the idea of how to make a story that's sort of post singularity or post

utopian interesting and full of conflict. That's something I think we've often seen problems within certain incarnations of Star Trek, for example, where people wanted to go to utopian with it and say, oh, these petty concerns people used to have, we've grown beyond that now. But then you've got no interesting conflict between the characters. There was just that I O, I, yeah, I was gonna say so, Robert. I read it, and then I saw that you posted it to the stuff

to blow your own Facebook account. There was a start. You go ahead and describe it. It was basically stemming from like a new documentary. I think that Yeah, Shatner has come out with Ye, but apparently The really interesting

stuff deals with roddenberries involvement. Jean Roddenberry created the original Star Trek, his involvement with the Next Generation um which it sounds like he was kind of dragged into it partially by his own ego where you really want to work on another Star Trek series, uh, but he also

didn't want to see it happen without him. And so you have you have Roddenberry and in his key associates pushing for a really utopian vision of Star Trek and everything has to be perfect within the Federation at any rate.

And then you have you know, the other voices that they were saying, but we want, we need conflict, we need these other things that are not necessarily in line with this utopia still supposed to be a story, right, yeah, yeah, and the pieces written by Charlie Jane Anders, who's a regular over there and one of my favorite writers at Ionine. And I suppose that you could go watch this documentary.

In fact, I want to say that there might have been an embed at the link too, but you could find it on our Facebook page or probably search Ionine Star Trek The Next Generation. It will come up to. Yeah, I'll put a link to it on the landing page for this episode if anyone's interest. So again, that book is accession by I M. Banks. I recommend it. I recommend the entire cultures all right. Well, for my fiction selections, I didn't have anything just quite as perfect as that

is a fit for this show. So I picked just a few of the books I've read recently that really wowed me, and I guess I'm gonna focus specifically on one, but I'll mention a couple others first that I've read in the past year or two that amazed me. One was actually went back and I never read uh Tony Morrison book, but I read The bluest I and that was man sad, painful, beautiful, brilliant. It was actually her first novel, and I get the impression a lot more

people have read beloved or later books of hers. But one of the main themes in this book is not necessarily the external racism that happens in society, but the internalizing of racialized concepts, like how the young black girl in the book comes to adopt basically a white supremacist conception of aesthetics that equates beauty with whiteness, like her idea of what beauty is is what white girl beauty is.

And I think this is an interesting example. I mean, it's very sad in the book, but it it explores the concept that our esthetics can be charged with ideology, and I think that's something that's interesting too, maybe worth exploring on the show sometime if we haven't before. The idea of what you find visually interesting or what you find beautiful that seems to be politically neutral, but in a lot of cases it might not be. Like what

our values are can determine what looks good to us. Yeah, absolutely, I mean I'm of the opinion that all of culture is us just trying to make sense of the sort of bombardment of chaotic information that the world presents us with. Right, and no matter how you do that, it's ideological. Last night I went to a presentation of there's a theater here in town called the Fox Theater, and they were

playing Ghostbusters. They're playing the original Ghostbusters and before it, I don't know if you guys been to the Fox or not. This is my first time. They play old black and white newsreels from the nineteen thirties, and I was noticing, Um, there were a couple of them that were sort of celebrating female like stars of the time. Uh, either from you know, the stage or maybe the radio or something like that. But I was just noticing that that the conception of beauty even in the nineteen thirties,

between now and then is so different. Um. So I think that there's certainly something to be said for the culture change between the then. You know, I hadn't read the Blue Eyes book, but thinking back on the episodes that Julie and I put out earlier in the year about implicit bias and racism, Um, that work definitely came up in some of the sources that we're looking at. Oh yeah, yeah, so so that was an amazing book.

Another amazing one I want to mention is actually in the title The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Shabon. Yeah, this is a great book. Yeah. So, I've got a friend who loves Shabon and he's been recommending this book to me for years. But I finally read it this I've been it's been recommended to me for years, and I almost read it several times. I think you would enjoy it. Oh man, it's absolutely fantastic.

I it's an amazing epic story. It's epic in the way that you know the great Dickens novels or epic, and that like you're almost amazed at the end that you that the story has gone this far and and completed this arc. And in many ways, I think this story is interesting because it's about the genesis of storytelling.

Like it deals with how the contents of the stories that storytellers create can be equal parts inspiration, personal obsession, and just mercenary necessity, and how all those things come together to make the canons of literature we love. Yeah, it's been a while since I've read it, maybe ten years, but um, you know, it's no secret, especially if you've

just didn't listening to this episode. I've already mentioned to comic book writers, but I'm big on comic books, and part of the plot of Shabon's book is that these two guys create a comic book character called the Escapist. I believe that is what the name of the book is. Uh. And this novel itself is a reflection of the Siegel and Schuster creation of Superman and the sort of political issues that went on behind that and the in this

sleazy business that went on behind that. Yeah. And and it's also a lot about being a Jewish American in that time, and and and immigration, uh, and sort of understanding again culturally, understanding your place in American society. And Superman. You know, it doesn't actually really show up in this book, but that the Golem does, and and and the Golem of Prague. And you can sort of see Superman and the Golem of Prague as like a sort of metaphors

from one another. Nice. Yeah, And so I can't recommend those two books enough. And then I've got one third fiction selection that I want to mention, which is The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo'keish. We ever read this, Yes, this, this has been recommended to me, but I have not read it. Oh, I think you'd love it, Robert. So it's called The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Dana location Kish was a Serbian writer. He's probably more well known among English speaking audiences for his book A Tomb for

Boris Davidovich. But this book, The Encyclopedia the Dead, was published I think in nineteen eighty three. The translation copyright it's nineteen eighty nine. And the English translation was by Michael Henry him and this book is fantastic in my opinion. It's a it's a book of strange, fantastical short stories. They're pretty much all about death in one way or another, and they're fantastical elements are very much in the style of Borhees, and some of them are just so great.

I want to talk about at least one of the stories have me at Boes. Yeah. So the title story is The Encyclopedia the Dead, and it tells the story of a woman who finds herself in a Swedish library overnight where she locates a copy of this book called the Encyclopedia of the Dead. And it's a tone written by this religious order that makes it their duty to record every single detail about a person's life, and I

mean every single detail. Every person they meet every meal to aid all the flowers they grew in their gardens, and then also the historical context for every period of their lives. So if you lived in World War Two, the encyclopedia would also give you a complete and thorough understanding of what happened in World War two. And these are all like like on paper. Yeah, that's so there's a kind of surreal there's a sort of like impossible

absurdity to the world it describes. And then, of course, the narrator of this story, she finds the entry for her father, who had died just a couple of months before the story takes place. And the only rule for inclusion in the Encyclopedia of the Dead is that those included and it cannot be included in any other encyclopedia. Interesting, and much of the story is just the narrator trying to make notes on her father's entry before she runs out of time and has to put the book down

and leave the library. But I thought this was a fascinating take. And I don't want to spoil too much about the story. You should just read it. But I think it's a fascinating take on the sort of absurdity of of trying to capture human experience, uh in language that there's no way to really tell a story completely. And then there's another story in this book that I wanted to call out. It's called Simon Magus, which is just an awesome retelling of some of the apocryphal Simon

Magus legends from the I'm unfamiliar with this. It's early Christian tradition that Simon Magus is a character that appears is in the Bible. He's in the Book of Acts, and he's sort of a a counter apostle in a way, like he's he's doing some magic tricks and he has a confrontation Peter Magus. Like mg U, s yeah, I

haven't heard of this guy before. Okay, yeah, yeah, So he has a confrontation with Peter that's in the Book of Acts, but they're also apocryphal legends that didn't make it into the Bible, but they deal in a more extensive way with with Simon Magus and something he sort of has like wizard battles with Peter that are pretty cool and one of those legends. Actually a couple of those legends are retold in this story. So I loved this book. I thought it was awesome. That sounds like

a lot. Yeah, and touches on the things I'm interested in. I think you guys would be into it. The Christian sorcery. I'm awf So the wizard battle is with Peter the apostle in the apocryphal sources. Yeah, okay, it's like they like Harry Potter ization of the Bible. They have like miracle contests and they sort of curse each other. Okay, nice, nice, So it kind of flows into some before we were talking about in the Grim Moore episode we did. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

In fact, um, that's where I had read about Simon. I pronounced that magus. Maybe it's wrong, but yeah, that's probably right. Before was that he was an inspiration for a lot of those grimoires. I think I'm saying it the anglicized way, meg, but yeah, um, he if I remember correctly, from the research for that episode, there was even some legends that he was the one who had

written some of the original text for those grand wires. Yeah. Yeah, his And of course you end up sort of losing losing the individual and all of the myth lose him completely, probably, but but yeah, he definitely his name definitely came up a few times in that episode. Is that recall? Okay, well, it's my turn for my fiction selection. I had too, So I feel I feel better now that you had a couple, because I was a little worried that I had to. Um. The first is the audiobook that I

mentioned earlier that I had listened to. It is a recent novel by I believe you'd pronounced her last name Bukes, Lauren Bukes. She's a South African novel We talked about her. She wrote The Shining Girls was a novel that she came out with, and then something with like animals on wherever, Zoo City. That's the one I've read. Yeah, I haven't read either. Well, I have read part of Shining Girls,

but not zoos City. This one is called Broken Monsters. Uh. And I listened to the autobook version of it, and I will recommend to our listeners to just read the book. Uh. The audio book had several different actors narrating and playing the parts of the characters that are there's probably like four or five different protagonists throughout the book, and it

was very distracting. Uh. There were there were points where I just stopped listening to it for you know, a month at a time, and then I would come back and give it a shot again. The story is great though. What she's written is fantastic. It's a contemporary murder mystery, um, sort of you know, along lines of that serial killer story thing that's kind of popular right now in fiction.

The Detroit police find a dead body that's how it begins, and it's the dead body of half of a young boy fused together to half of a deer um, and this book just spins out from there. It's about everything from modern adolescents as it follows the daughter of the police detective investigating this murder, social media anxiety, and bullying. I really felt like Bukes had her finger on the pulse of kind of what's going on in social media

right now, especially for adolescence. And I don't think I mean, I suspect she's probably, you know, in her thirties at least, but she just she's really insightful about, um, how that is affecting growing up. Uh. Also something that we're familiar with, the idea of clickbait YouTube journalism. There's a character in there that's sort of trying to create his own YouTube channel,

personality presence um. And of course because it's in Detroit, they talk about urban renewal art quite a bit, and there's that they go to art parties the serial killer as an artist. Um. There's some interesting stuff going on aesthetically with that. I found this to be a genuinely creepy and disturbing book. I read a lot of horror. I watch a lot of horror, and it's it takes uh a lot to to kind of jar me, and the stuff in here jarred me. Um, but yeah, I

read it, don't listen to it. Okay. Yeah. It's always weird with the audio books because they were kind of like the two the two approaches. One is to just have a solid narrator just reading you the books, and then it's then it's the other direction is performance, and so sometimes you get that weird area. We have a good narrator, but maybe he's just trying a little too hard to do like the female voices in the book,

or you know, weird balance. There was, there there were, and I'm sure, uh, you know, our listeners can relate to this because they're listening to a podcast right now in which they're listening to our voice voices, and there's probably things about our voices that maybe, for instance, I I know that I am accused of having vocal fry often and that that can annoy listeners sometimes. But the cadence of some of the people reading this story just it just rubbed me the wrong way. Um. There was

the woman who performed the adolescent girls chapters. She was a great narrator, but she was doing it from the voice of a thirteen fourteen year old girl. Uh, And it just graded on me after a while. I guess I'm the kind of person who prefers the audio book where it's just a single narrator. I often prefer if it's the author themselves reading, because I feel like that brings a lot to it. Yeah, Neil Gaiman, particularly reading

his own I could imagine if he would. Yeah. Um. The one audio book that I've listened to that did a very good job with the format of having multiple actors was the audiobook for World War Z. That was the one where I was really surprised. I felt like it was actually better than the pros um they had. You know, several actors, including like people like Henry Rawlins come in and do the voices of some of the characters that are interviewed throughout the course of that book.

So the other uh A fiction recommendation that I have is, again no surprise, it's a graphic novel. Uh. It is a book called High Crimes by Christopher Sabella and Ibraham Mustafa, and it's a nice hardcover graphic novel collection of a twelve issue digital comic that these guys did over the last couple of years, and I just I've loved the digital version of it. I've been following it since they first came out with it. Um if you've seen me on video before, you might have seen me wearing a

high Crimes T shirt. Actually it's a skull with UM two climbing implements over it, and it's sort of in the shape of mountains because this is a murder mystery that's set on Mount Everest, and the idea is that the main character is a climbing guide who helps people get up Mount Everest, but also on the side, she robs the bodies of people who have died on Mount Everest and then uh promises to return either the bodies or their property to their families who are living back

home for a for a fee, you know, for a price. So she's kind of like a vulture scavenger on Mount Everest and h the plot is that she she finds a body that has a connection to a government conspiracy back in the United States. So this leads to, you know, she tries to sell the stuff at leads to a sort of caton mouse game chasing up Mount Everest, but it's a meticulously researched Sabella does a really good job

of depicting what climbing Everest is like. Not that I've done it, but it seemed very well researched, down to the equipment, the effects on your on the human body, especially at the like different sort of zones of the mountainous. Yeah. I did climb Mount Kinnabalu when I was younger, which is in Malaysia, in Borneo, and it reminded me a lot of that. Yeah, I know that it's it's come

up in episodes before here. It's stuff to put your mind discussing just just what the environment is like as you as you ascend a particularly high mountain and the atmospheric changes and the effects it has on the brain. Uh, sort of really fascinating stuff. And the character is a drug addict too, so it's interesting to see like her going through uh she's jones and really as she's traveling up the mountains, she sort of runs out of stuff.

That effect, combined with the effects of the environment, that makes me wonder if people, if anybody climbs mountains to get like hypooxia trips. It sounds like an episode it will now all right, So now we're gonna finish up the podcast here by just going around and discussing what we're reading now, what we're hoping to read an the future,

what's on the plate. Uh, and this, you know, will be another good place for for the listeners to say, yes, those are great selections, or no, don't read that that's or or you know, or just to mention some things that are in the same vein. Um. So I'll start right now. I am just jumping back into a reread of Frank Herbert's sci fi classic Dune, because this is the fiftieth anniversary of the book. And uh, and Joe and I are actually planning to do a couple of

episodes on the science of Dune. Um. This is also on my now reading listes you're you're you're currently reading it as well. So I've I've also picked up The Science of Doom edited Doune edited by Kevin R. Grazier, pH d, which is a collection of essays that in which different individuals analyzed the science of everything from the still suit to the sandworm um to to the consumption of of spice. And it's and it's an and its

effects on the on the human mind. And then I also picked up a copy of the Dune and Cyclopedia from the nineteen eighties compiled by Dr Willis E. McNelly. And this is this has been long out of print, so the book, the book just smells fabulous and has that wonderful nineteen eighties h aroma to it. And this is a book I have a lot of nostalgia for.

But because before I've read any of the Dune books, I picked this up in my local small town library and just started going through it and just you know, they have they have all these different encyclopedic entries about various factions, family members, individuals, technologies that that make up the Dune universe. And it's um just really inspiring stuff. It's not all cannon because it came out before Herbert had written all of his Dune books, but but it's

it's wonderful stuff. I'm surprised there isn't a revised version that is that is still in circulation given the popular ality of that series. You think you think they would, uh, especially, I mean, it's still an industry of the Dune books are still an industry, you know. I wonder if the Internet, like having the Web has really cut into stuff like fictional cannon encyclopedias. Because when I was a kid, I

remember a lot of these things. When I was looking at this stude encyclopedia book, I was like, oh man, I got that feeling like this is a book I would have found somewhere when I was a kid, like in a you know, beach house or something like that, and then sat down and started flipping through it and suddenly the entire days gone. Uh. It has that feeling because I don't know, for some reason when I was a kid that I love stuff like that Star Wars encyclopedia.

I had the Star Trek. It's like I think it was called it was like a guy to the alien species of Star Trek. Yeah, and it was this came out like a you know, next generation era. So each each spread had you know, a nice little black and white drawing of the species and then you know some very uncy colopedic information about them in their home world. And yeah, I just I just remember pouring myself into that. Yeah.

I mean, I suppose you're right that Wikipedia and like other sort of wicki uh data entry sites have sort of taken over that place. But there's still there's still something nice about holding a book like that, Like I love reading RPG manual even for games that I'll never play. Yeah, I'm a sucker for a monster manual. Yeah, it's that me a good monster manual and I will just I'll lose myself in it. You know, Robert's the guy to consult.

I remember a while back, I was wondering, what kind of save do you have to throw from somebody, uh trying to drive you mad? They're casting a drive you mad spell? What did you say, Robert? I can't remember what my specific answer was, but I looked in the latest Dungeon Master Guide and also my Cathla book. So oh, I love Call of Cthulu. It was at the D one version. I don't know, it's not that I don't think it's the most current edition. Yeah, that's the the

D one hundred is the is the older one? Um that I think that somebody else, another company maybe bought it up. A Chaos um is the company. Yeah, and this one definitely came from that company. Yeah, that could be a great like workplace RPG, like, you know, you get pulled into the meeting room and the boss Monster is about to drive you mad. Yeah, I feel anytime I'm in a long meeting I started losing. Yeah, absolutely, especially when you're in a conference call. Oh yeah, that's

the minus five standity points right after that. So just and then briefly, what's on the plate for later. I I fall into the trap every year of just thinking more about things I want to reread that I love, rather than exploring new things. So so along those lines, I would love to have some recommendations from other people, but I feel like I need to reread our Scott Baker's The Judging I and the White Luck Lawyer, The White Luck Lawyer, The White Luck Warrior. The White Luck

Lawyer would be a different novel. What's his name? John graham Er John Grisham book um The White Luck Yeah, yeah, Actually The White Luck Warrior, which is the second book in his second trilogy that all takes place in his dark fantasy, highly philosophical world of the Second Apocalypse. But he has the third book in this series coming out at some point in the next several months, hopefully titled The Unholy Consult. So I want to make sure that I'm I dive back into the world fully and then

they're in a number. I feel like I probably need to finish reading Stephen King's Revival because people keep telling me it's good. I still haven't finished that one. I started it rather Uh yeah, it's been on my list. Yeah here, it has some wonderful science fiction elements in it, but I just need to press further along in it,

I guess. And then and then we're gonna hit Halloween, so I'll probably reread some Lagatti, some Kings and Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and of course Brian McNaughton, my my all time favorite horror writer. So that's what's on the plate for me. Well, as I said, I'm also reading Done right now, and I'm loving it so far. I love the richness of the world, how complete it feels.

We were just talking the other day about how going back and reading Done, I feel some elements that you see in the George R. Martin Game of Thrones universe feel sort of not not lifted from Done, but similar to Doune in terms of, you know, all the backstabbing and these warring houses. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was a big influence on him, at least in

terms of structure, and I guess epic nous. Yeah, I feel like it's it's definitely a work that it's it's roots spread throughout genre fiction for for decades, for decades to follow. So I'm absolutely loving it and I can't wait to do the Science of Doune episode. But also, I was reading a book when I started reading Dune that I need to pick back up because I loved this one as well. It was The Secret History by Donna Tart read this, Yeah, I read that a while ago.

What was it The story with that is it came out in like the nineties and then she didn't write another book for like twelve years or something, right, and I think Little Friend is the other book that she's come out with since then. Actually I didn't even look this up. I have no idea when this book was written, but I was. I thought it was fantastic so far,

that's good. The pros is it's one of those books that, you know, this sounds like such a reviewers cliche, but it's very rich, meaning sort of the opposite of minimalist or stark or bear. It's just overflowing with ideas and images and jokes and very similitudes, and so I was really loving that one. It deals also with the kind of weird cult like behavior that can sometimes arise in

a you know, college professor in student scenario. Absolutely, I had a professor exactly like this, the the one that was in The Secret History, and I had a sort of classroom unit that was very worshiped him in a similar way. And if I remember correctly, it's been a long time since I read it, But isn't he a

Greek historian? Yeah, well, I don't know if historian. I haven't finished the book yet, but yeah, he teaches Greek and classics, and he talks about Greek philosophy a lot, and that he does these sort of like long monologues, these lectures that the students just find all this crazy inspiration. In so far, the book was awesome and I'll have to go back to it once I've finished with Dune. But then also lined up next, I've been thinking about how I've apparently got to read to me and in Banks,

So there we go on that. But that also I was thinking about reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine, which is a nonfiction book that she wrote about memetic theory. And Christian. You're kind of smirking. I have an interesting story about this book. So I read this book early two thousand's and I loved it. It's really good. I think that. And if you're looking for sort of an explanation of Dawkins memetics theory, this is a good place

to start. I made the mistake of in my early twenties taking a young lady delightful young lady to uh Susan Blackmore presentation as our first date, so you know, not not not protecious at all? That goes? Do you want to go here about my medics from this British author with pink hair. I love her hair. She's bad. She's come up in in past episodes before. Oh yeah, she was super cool. I've seen YouTube videos of her giving like speeches and stuff. She seems really awesome in person.

I've never read a book of her, so, so I wanted to read this also because I've read a little bit in about meme theory. Like you know, I read Dawkins The Selfish Gene, which came out in the seventies, and I think that was the first major exploration of meme theory. Yeah, I think, And if you're not familiar with meme theory. It's the idea that there are units of cultural copying and transmission analogous to genes and living organisms, but in culture they're they're called memes, and they're just

like genes. They get copied with mutations throughout generations. Yeah. I would also add to this, at least from my experience and graduate school, that the theories of memetics of Dawkins and blackmore a heavily frowned upon. Oh yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people hate them. Yeah, they don't feel like it has any quantitative value. Yep, I've heard that too. I I I still think that they're interesting, and in fact, we did a What's a Meme?

Episode for brain Stuff that our colleague Jonathan Strickland performed. So if you if you want just like a short five minute primer on memetics, go find that. Of course, then again, one thing I will say is that it seems like a lot of the criticisms of memetics that I've heard. No, I'm sure there are some very good criticisms. Some of the ones I've heard kind of rang hollow to me and also seemed like they were coming from people who personally dislike to the people who promote meme theory.

So I don't know what what to deal with that is, but I'll see once I read the book. Well, I am currently reading a book called Devils and Demons that I picked up at our local used book store. The booknook Uh. It is a collection of short stories all about hell, demons, and Satan that are selected by a guy named Marvin Kay. And this book was published in um. Some of it is is isn't really my thing, some of it's not for me, But there have so far

been some good stories I've read in here. Paula Volsky wrote a story called The Tendency of Mr. Eks Uh. There's a great Robert Block story in here called Enoch. If you haven't read that, read that one. But he's yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. And then this book led me down the rabbit hole to really get into Arthur Macon because I've only read a little bit of his stuff before. But there's a story in here called The Novel of the White Powder by him, which led me to again going

on to Amazon. It turns out that Amazon has these collections of books like like makens work, you can buy like twenty five of his stories for cents. So I got this collection and over this this last week. I actually just read The Great God Pan. Have you guys read this before? That is an incredibly potent and creepy fail. Yeah, it's a novella that he wrote first, was published in eighteen nine, and it is, you know, it's probably like one of the unsung stories of the history of horror literature.

I'd never heard of it until until just the last you know, maybe two or three weeks, but it's it's hugely influential. Lovecraft called it. He said, no one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds in that story. And Stephen King said he thinks it's one of the best horror stories ever written, maybe the best in the English language. I

really enjoyed it. So I'm I'm thoroughly I'm planning to to to really take a deep dive into our they're makings material, and then what I've got on the plate for later, probably after I read all that making stuff, although I might dabble in this stuff back and forth. A friend of mine recommended this book by a guy named Layered Baron, who is another sort of weird fiction horror author. Uh. And this is a collection of his short stories called Occultation. And all I know about this

guy is he's won a bunch of awards. He's a former I did a rod Racer And uh, my friend who is a is a horror writer just sings his praises loves of stuff. Yeah, this is an author that keeps coming up in um at least automated recommendations for me and things like Amazon. And and he's of course his name stands out so much. Yeah, uh yeah, I probably need to check out some of his work as well. I, like I said, I keep falling into the habit of rereading things. Uh, while I should really branch out and

explore some some more contemporary horror authors. Well, I can let you borrow this when I am done with it. I'm I'm really looking forward to the idea of bouncing back and forth between a guy who's contemporary like us and a guy who was alive over a hundred years ago, really kind of writing similar stuff with Arker making Arthur Makin's kind of huge collection of short stories. Yeah, I feel like you guys are really showing me up in terms of appropriately weird stuff here, I'm gonna have to

catch up for next year. It's gonna be it's gonna be all sci fi and demons for five days. That's gonna heavily influence the show. I think I'm already weighing this in the demon category. Maybe a little bit too much, but the uh, I mean that John Murray's Spear Book sounds really interesting and I've never heard of is it? Danilo kisses that there's a K I s And there's the little carrot over the s. So I think the Serbo Croatian way of saying keish. But yeah, I apologize

if that is wrong. I believe that sounds appropriately weird. The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Yeah, now, um, author Makin and the the Great God Pan and all that, I think. I think I rich only saw reference to it in one of the Lovecraft's essays about supernatural And yeah, that quote that I just read from was from Lovecraft's book is it Supernatural Literature Literature and Horror or Supernatural Horror in Literature. It's a short nonfiction book that I believe

he put. This is all off the top of my head, but I believe that Lovecraft compiled it from letters that he shared with people like Robert Block who were sort of in his circle of horror writer fans, and he sort of came up with this guide of how how to write horror literature. Yeah. Yeah, and that's where it was mentioned that where I pulled that quote from at least, so maybe that's where you saw it. Yeah. I also was turned on to a number of like old classic

and horror and pulp writers. I used to go to a wrestling message board and one of the contributors there was this guy. It was this guy John Pellen, who who is a horror writer and editor. Do a search for his name and we'll see, you know, various anthologies he's edited. He's I think he's worked with Edward Lee on a few different books. And uh, and he was

he has an encyclopedic knowledge of of horror literature. So he turned me onto a number of key authors that I've grown to to just completely adore, like Michael Say Yeah, Michael Shay actually wrote the introduction to that Layered Baron but abo to read. Yeah, and uh, I also thought of you as I was flipping through this last night and reading all the sort of in praise of layered baron stuff at the beginning, because he got a right up from St. Josh in here. Oh yeah, he's been

on the show. You had St. Josh on the show. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of for for those who who don't know. St. Josh is, I guess like the Lovecraft scholar. Yeah, he's known as the scholar of sort of weird fiction. Yeah. And if Michael Shea recommends this guy, all the more reason. Sha was just brilliant and he's sadly passed and uh in the last year or so. But his particularly his he wrote science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but his his dark fantasy work particularly is his nipp The Leen Tales

are just beautiful, just just phenomenal. Most of them deal with journeys into a into a subport into the sub worlds, which are kind of a fantasy, a fantastic Dante esque underworld, except with just concentric layers of of awfulness and wonder.

And then he that man had a gift. So that's yet another person I'm adding just to the piece of paper, just between the three of us talking, I have a list here, probably ten different things I need to read, but I'm still curious of what the audience is going to recommend to these after hearing of what we're what we would recommend to them, what we're reading right now, and what we're going to read next. That's right, so hey. In the meantime, head on over to stuffable your mind

dot com. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, all the videos, all the blog posts, and the landing page for this episode again will feature all the titles and authors that we've mentioned here with appropriate links out to place who you can buy them and if you want to, let us know what books you recommend we read and maybe if we really like them, will repeat them back out to our audience and spread your ideas

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