BOOK LIST

FAVOURITE BOOKS RECENTLY READ AND PAST FAVOURITES
A * indicates highly recommended books. 

Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall*, Bring up the Bodies, Mirror and the Light. Historical fiction books about Oliver Cromwell.
Kate Grenville – The Secret River, Sarah Thornhill. Two books in a series about a family in early Australia. Good historical fiction. Interesting account of Aboriginal contact. Good read.
The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton. Won the Man Booker Prize 2013. A murder mystery set in Hokitika gold fields in New Zealand. A long book with detailed character development.
Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire
Memoirs of A Geisha – Arthur Golden. Fascinating.
The History of the Knights Templars
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Crawled out of the Window and Disappeared – Jonas Jonasson. Entertaining but implausible plot.
Sir Francis Drake – a great read about somebody everybody knows. May be the most historically accurate, balanced view of Drake.
The Great Sea – David Abulfia. Examines the Mediterranean from ancient times to the present. #1 nonfiction book in Atlantic Books of the Year. Can be tedious reading about all the wars.
The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt. A story about 2 hired killers and the California goldrush. Entertaining but not great
Damn Few: Making the Modern Seal. Rourke Denver – about the navy seals. OK read.
Cormac McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, The Road, The Passenger, Stella Maras. Cormack McCarthy died in 2023
Kabloona – Gontran de Poncins. This man traveled through the central Arctic (all to towns that I have worked in) over 15 months in 1938-39. The book gives many interesting observations about the Inuit. To read an excerpt I did of this book, go to IDEAS – Inuit.
Kootenai Brown, His Life and Times – William Rodney. One of Canada’s true heroes that nobody has heard about. He worked for the Pony Express, hunted buffalo, guided, ranched and was the first superintendent of Waterton National Park. I hiked in Waterton for 17 summers, and like the previous two books, there were places I knew and had a special interest in.
Eating Dirt – Charlotte Gill. A well-written book about tree planting in Canada, especially Vancouver Island and BC.
Jeffrey Archer – The Clifton Chronicles: #1 Only Time Will Tell, #2 The Sins of the Father, #3 Best Kept Secret, #4 Be Careful What You Wish For, #5 Mightier than the Sword, #6 Only Time Will Tell, #7 This Was a Man (last in the series). An escapist series by the well-known British author. Easy reading is best for lazy days on a beach.
Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’ Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball – Rafe Bartholomew. Some insights into Filipino thinking but gets a little boring.
I am Hutterite – Mary Ann Kirby. A fascinating look into Hutterite life. I was originally from Southern Alberta where there were many Hutterites. It was very illuminating to see communal living at its ultimate and the difficulties of leaving the colony.
Agatha Christie – Clocks. Probably the first Agatha Christie I have ever read. Short read to discover her “style”.
True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey. Winner of the Booker Prize. The true story of Ned Kelly, a true Australian hero.
The Doukhobor People – A Tribute to Good Citizens – Ken Morrow. A sympathetic book about the Doukhobors by a man who lived in the West Kootenay in the 50s and 60s.
Prisoners of Geography – Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World. Tim Marshall. A concise overview of the world’s history and how differing geography affected history. Very informative.
The Five Love Languages – How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate – Gary Chapman. A must-read for anyone in a relationship – couples and families with children. One more way to look at relationships, but possibly the easiest to put into practice. The five languages are Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service or Physical Touch.
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad. One of the worst books I have ever read. I was in the Congo when I read it and learned nothing about the Congo. The book is wordy description and all about Kurtz, a trader who appears briefly at the end of the book. I had traded Kindles with another passenger and there was not much to read in his Kindle, but I did stick it out.
We Were Soldiers Once….And Young – la Drang – the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam – Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret) and Joseph L Galloway. About the first big battle in Vietnam. 306 Americans and 4000 Viet Cong lost their lives. The book is an endless story of death. The best part may be the very end when they discuss the decision to continue the war. 58,000 Americans were eventually killed. I would not recommend reading this book.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome – Mary Beard. SPQR (Senatus Populus Que Romanus). A masterly new chronicle, by Britain’s most engaging historian of the ancient world, about Rome from its myth-shrouded origins to the early third century. She shows that the key to its dominance was granting citizenship to so many people.
Spying on Whales – Nick Pyenson. A fascinating book about all things whale
Empire of Cotton: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. By focusing on a sector that until 1900 was the world’s most important manufacturing industry, Sven Beckert offers a fine account of 900 years of globalisation.
A Brief History of Seven Killings – Malon James. Man Booker winner 2015. About Jamaican gangs in Kingston, Miami and New York. Not so interesting with some characters that seem to add little to the story (a CIA agent and a woman who appears in all three sections). A lot of dialogue and swearing. 
Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. By Rebecca Herzig. Most of Earth’s mammals possess luxuriant fur. Only one seeks to remove it. A curious account of hair-erasing, and why people have tried clamshell razors, lasers, lye depilatories, tweezers, waxes, threading and electrolysis to try and free themselves from hairiness. Self-enhancement or oppression?
Breasts and Eggs – Kieko Kawakami. A novel about womanhood in Japan, but a harsh description of Japanese society. 
Harpoon of the Hunter – Markoosie. Based on an Inuit legend, Harpoon of the Hunter is a story of life in the old days, not as it appeared to Southerners, but as it has survived in the memory of the Inuit themselves. Emerging from a largely oral tradition, it is the first novel by an Inuit written in English. Markoosie has the rare ability to capture the richness and imagery of the Inuit language in English.
The Nazi Impact on a German Village – Walter Rinderle & Bernard Norling. I was always interested in what Germans were thinking throughout WWII. This is an anthropologist’s study of a small village in SW Germany and was pretty boring. And I don’t know why I read it to the bitter end.
Testaments: Margaret Atwood. The follow-up book to “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the fall of Gilead. Great Book by a wonderful Canadian author.
Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey – Laurence Blair / Lorne Blair. Two Brits who made documentary films on Indonesia back in 70-80s.
Decoded: A Novel – Mai Jia. About a Chinese genius who breaks ciphers.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz. Winner in the BBC Culture Critics’ poll and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. About New Jersey ghetto-nerd Oscar, it reaffirms the strong connections Latinos maintain with their ancestral homeland’s culture, language and history. It re-energized these questions: Who is American? What is the American experience?”. A chilling account of Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.
The Corrections (2001) – Jonathan Franzen. Winner of a US National Book Award, this big, sprawling, fat, edgy multigenerational family saga touches on some of the most important themes of the early years of this millennium – economic uncertainty, the conflicts between parents and their drifting middle-aged children and the enormous issues of an aging society past its prime. He does it with great storytelling and a lot of humour.
Solar – Ian McEwan (Atonement). Clever book. Picked up in a hostel in Tel Aviv and nice to read a paper book again.
Bad-Assed Librarians by Joshua Hammer – Timbuktu has been the repository of Islamic and historical literature for North Africa for over a century. When threatened by terrorists, 372,000 of the 377,000 manuscripts were smuggled out and are now stored in Bamako, the capital of Mali.
A Visit From the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan. Won the National Book Critics Circle and Pulitzer awards. A narrative around a punk rocker-turned-music producer, his sticky-fingered assistant and a circle of wannabes, has-beens and hangers-on. Juxtaposes timeless literary themes, most notably the inexorable journey from youth to age, with an exploration of how a rapidly changing world reshapes the human experience.
Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart. Won the Man Booker Prize. Life in Glasgow, Scotland. Good writing but it gets depressing as hell.
James Patterson. Triple Cross. The first book I have read by this famous who-done-it author. An entertaining book with many twists and turns.
Zadie Smith – On Beauty. Well written but not my kind of story.

*Edward Abbey – Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives! (ecoterrorism gone mad). Confessions of a Barbarian (selections of his journals 1951-1989).
*Conn Iggulden – Conqueror Series 1. Wolf of the Plains, 2. Lords of the Bow, 3. Bones of the Hills, 4. Empire of Silver 5. Conqueror – a 5 part series about Ghengis Khan to Kublai Khan. Great historical fiction.
Dan Brown – The Davinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, The Lost Symbol.
***Born to Run – Christopher McDougall. A fascinating look at the running shoe fraud, the myth of the heel strike, the Copper Canyon Tarahumara (the greatest long distance runners of all time), and humans and how they hunted.
Killing Pablo – The hunt for Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord.
**1491 and 1493 – Charles Mann. Excellent nonfiction about the Americas before and after Columbus.
*The Dirt on Clean. An Unsanitized History – A fascinating history of washing.
*Unbroken. A World War 2 story of survival, resilience and redemption.
**Ken Follett – Pillars of the Earth – Historical fiction about building a cathedral in England, World Without End – A sequel to Pillars about rebuilding the cathedral. Fall of Giants – Historical fiction about WW1. Winter of the World – sequel to Fall of Giants about WWII, Edge of Eternity – Third in the Century Trilogy, it follows the same families in the US, England, Germany and Russia from the 60s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. All great reads. The Third Twin – a great read about cloned embryos.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – An autistic boy in NY city
Jeffrey Eugenides |
Marriage Plot, an American woman and her manic depressive husband,
Middlesex – Pulitzer Prize Winning book about an intersex girl
John Grisham – every book he has ever written including the nonfiction “The Innocent Man” – A true story about wrongly accused people on death row, The Whistler – a whistleblower exposes a corrupt judge, A Time to Kill, Ford County (a book of short stories, with few of a legal nature). Camino Island (one of his few that does not involve the law but the robbery of the manuscript of the Great Gatsby), The Whistler, The Judge’s List. He is my favourite escapist novelist.
*James Clavell – Shogun, Tai Pan, Gai Jin, King Rat, Noble House. All great reads. Recently reread Gai Jin and enjoyed it.
The Shipping News – E Annie Proulx. Great book about Newfoundland that won 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
**Bel Canto. Fiction about a terrorist kidnapping. One of the hostages is an opera singer. Lovely story.
*The Big Thirst, The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water – A must-read about the world’s most valuable resource, especially for Australians (the driest continent) and those from the desert SW of the US.
*Adventures and Sufferings of John Jewitt. One of the most amazing books. Recently had the chance to reread this in an edition with drawings and annotations. Very enjoyable. About an English merchant boat where, in 1802, the natives of Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island murdered 23 of the crew and took two into slavery for almost 3 years before they were rescued. A unique anthropological study was
*The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner. Joe Kavalier, a Houdini-like escape artist, smuggles himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939 and ends up in New York City. With his Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay, he invents a superhero character called the Escapist and launches the golden age of comic books. Hilarious, this is the second book I have read by Chabon – he is the best. especially improved with all the supplemental information provided by Hilary Stewart.
The White and the Gold: The French Regime in Canada – Thomas Costain. The history of French Canada until about 1690. Fascinating reading, especially the stuff on the indians. Most Quebecois have ancestors dating back before 1690 (mine came in 1664). This should be mandatory reading for every high school Canadian history course, but I think our indigenous citizens would protest (there is much about torture and cannibalism of POWs and slaves). Why weren’t we given this in our reading lists in school?

ASPERGER’S BOOKS
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. By Steve Silberman. How a widely contested condition grew out of conflicts between Nazi psychiatrists anxious for career advancement. The descriptions of how autistic children were treated in the 20th century is especially shocking. Winner of the 2015 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. While reading this book, I came to believe that I am autistic –  a high-functioning Asperger.
The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband by David Finch
Aspergers in Love: Couple Relationships and Family Affairs by Maxine Aston, Christopher Slater-Walker
The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome by Tony Attwood. The best book available on high-functioning Asperger’s.
The Power of Neurodiversity – Thomas Armstrong, PhD. Discusses the positive aspects of ADHD, dyslexia, autism, mood disorders, anxiety, intelligence, and schizophrenia. See my book High-Functioning Asperger’s Syndrome as a summary of this book.
**The Enigma – The life of Alan Turing, a genius in the class of Newton, Darwin and Einstein. Well known to have Asperger’s. 

NORTH KOREA
Nothing to Envy. Ordinary Lives in N Korea
The Aquariums of Pyongyang – both about N Korea. Both are good reads.

MALCOLM GLADWELL 
Blink,
Tipping Point
***Outliers – a fascinating book about the keys to success.
Talking to Strangers

INDIA
City of Joy – A true story about living in the slums of Calcutta
Shantaram – About an Australian criminal living in Bombay
*A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry. Another great book about India – terrifying in showing how bankrupt this country is. Written about the mid-1970s, it is still just as bad today.
*Aravind Adiga. Between the Assassinations – A series of short stories set in one city in India. Very entertaining. White Tiger – another book about India. won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Gives more insights into India.
Being Indian: Inside the Real India. Pavan Varma. A must-read for anyone traveling in India. Explains the Indian psyche that is so different than ours. Will change your view of Indians.
*Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in the Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo – a beautifully written book, humorous about a Mumbai slum. Details the rampant corruption in Indian society

TRAVEL
Vagabonding. An uncommon guide to the art of long-term world travel.
Ronald Wright – Cut Stones and Crossroads (about the Inca), Time Amongst the Maya
Forget You Had a Daughter – Michael Tierney. About a young British woman caught smuggling heroin in Thailand. She spent 4 years in the “Bangkok Hilton” and then was transferred back to British jails – where things got worse!
*First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers – Loung Ung. Written through the eyes of a little girl who survived the Khmer Rouge atrocities 1975-79.
Mexico’s Copper Canyon Country – M John Fayhee. This is a hiking and backpacking guide, but he also tells entertaining stories of his adventures and the Tarahumara.
Dervla Murphy: On a Shoestring to Coorg – An Experience of Southern India (written in the 1970s, about her trip through the Western Ghats of India).
*Shark Going Inland is My Chief – A good book about navigation used to settle the South Pacific and a thorough history of Hawaii.
The Year of Living Danishly – Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. Helen Russell. This book was a fascinating look at Denmark from the viewpoint of an expatriate. Every country should have one of these, and I would love to see one in Japan and South Korea. “Being Indian” is great about India.
Shadow of the Silk Road – Colin Thubron. Interesting with much history, but his writing gets a little boring.
In Xanadu – Willian Dalrymple Does the road from the Middle East to Beijing. This is the first book I have read by this English travel writer and I want to read more. He is very entertaining with a great sense of humour and an eye for travelling. Much better than the previous book on the “Silk Road”.
Himalaya – Michael Palin. He is a good travel writer with obviously a wonderful sense of adventure and humour. I read this when in Nepal which gives it a local meaning.
**Bill Bryson – Down Under, Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, Notes on a Big Country, Notes From a Small Country (about England). One of the best and most humorous travel writers.
Paul Theroux – The Great Railway Bazaar, The Happy Isles of Oceania (about kayaking in the South Pacific islands), Dark Star Safari (hitchhiking from Cairo to Capetown). A good travel writer whose opinions are controversial.
Marching Powder. About a prison in La Paz, Bolivia that travellers often visited.
*The Sex Lives of Cannibals. Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. A hilarious book about an American couple transplanted to a South Sea island.
*The Fate of Africa – Martin Meredith. Incredible book about all African countries from colonial times through independence to the present.
*The Private Life of Chairman Mao – Zhisiu Li. A must-read if at all interested in China and especially Mao. Written by his personal physician of 22 years. Mao was a true whacko: not educated, never brushed his teeth or bathed and wiped down with warm wet towels so never washed his genitals, a sexual monster with 100s (1000s?) of short adventures with nurses, dancers and anyone young. Details the misadventures of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. He could care less if millions died as “China had lots of people”. An interesting bit about preserving his body “forever” – let’s face all these are wax. Both Lenin and Ho Chi Minh had significant rot after a few years.

RELIGION
End of Faith – Sam Harris
God is Not Great – Christopher Hitchens
**Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth – Reza Asian. Examines Jesus the man, not the Messiah. A must-read for anyone interested in Christianity, especially those creationists and evangelicals who take the bible literally (although they probably would not accept any of it, so may be a waste of time for them).
*Infidel My Life: Ayaan Hirsi Ali – A Somali woman raised in a strict Muslim society (she was circumcised as a child), lives in Kenya and Saudi Arabia and then moves to Holland as an immigrant. She gets an education, fights for the rights of Muslim women and children and becomes a member of parliament. Fascinating account of Muslim thinking and Dutch society and its acceptance of all societies.
Harvest: Memoir of a Mormon Missionary – Jacob Young. Very worthwhile read about Mormon thinking – fascinating.
Inside Scientology: North America’s Most Secretive Religion – Janet Reitman. Probably the most authoritative book on this cult
Girls Guide to Homelessness – Brianna Karp. Young American who loses job and home. This bit is not interesting but all the insights into her upbringing as a Jehovah Witness are fascinating.

MOUNTAINEERING
No Picnic on Mount Kenya – Felice Benuzzi. 3 POWs from a prisoner of war camp in Kenya escape and climb the mountain then return to the camp.
**Touching the Void – Joe Simpson. Probably the best mountaineering book of all time.
No Way Down – Graham Bowley. Relates the story of the climb of K2 in 2008 when 11 climbers died – another story of too many people on a mountain who despite the goals of cooperation, didn’t.
*Jon Krakauer – Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, Into the Wild – all great reads
**The Tower – Kelly Cordes. About Cerro Torre.
**Push – Tommy Caldwell. Tells his early life in climbing, culminating in the first free climb of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan.

INSECTS
*Honeybee Democracy – Thomas D Seeley. Investigates how honeybees swarm and find a new hive site based on democratic consensus decision-making.
*Sex on Six Legs – Lessons on Life and Language from the Insect World – Marlene Zuk. Explores the fascinating, weird world of insects.
Edward O Wilson
**Tales From the Ant World – Edward O Wilson. Fascinating (The Superorganism, Journey to the Ants, Insect Societies)
***The Meaning of Human Existence – Edward O Wilson. One of the best books I have ever read, especially the section on Are There Extraterrestrials? Looks at evolution and social development through a very scientific, evidence-based, logical lens.

HUMAN EVOLUTION
*The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? By Nick Lane. A persuasive and demanding attempt by a thought-provoking British biochemist at University College London to answer some of the most fundamental questions in biology. It posits a new theory of how life came to be.
**First Steps – Jeremy De Silva – Another fascinating book about bipedalism – the first thing that started the separation of humans from our common primate ancestor about 8 million years ago. Has a great section on walking that I have reproduced on my About and Hiking pages.
**A History of the Human Brain – Bret Stetka. A fascinating look at the evolution of the human brain, the ultimate creation.
The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber. Reexamines the premise that after hunter-gatherers, we did not turn into selfish, war-like people, caused by the trappings of modern civilization. Unfortunately, it is written in a rather boring, repetitive style.
Sapiens, Homo Deus. Yuval Noah Harari – the evolution of our species and its rise to defy the laws of natural selection and enter the Anthropocene Epoch.
***The Meaning of Human Existence – Edward O Wilson. One of the best books I have ever read, especially the section on Are There Extraterrestrials?
Jared Diamond – The Third Chimpanzee (about the evolution of man), Guns, Germs and Steel (about the rise of civilization), Collapse (about the fall of civilizations, almost always due to environmental degradation), The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies. Very informative reads, but a slightly repetitive writing style.

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl. A holocaust survivor and psychiatrist presents an interesting life philosophy. One of the most read and reprinted books of all time.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. By Carlo Rovelli. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. A startling and illustrative distillation of centuries of science by an Italian theoretical physicist. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre, a poet and a translator, have preserved the book’s lyrical and stripped-down prose.

MICHAEL POLLAN
**The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Food, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.
**How to Change Your Mind: Michael Pollan. Another great book by Pollan. It will want you to try psychedelics, a class of drugs making a resurgence to treat addictions, depression, dealing with dying from cancer and finding your spiritual inner being.

BLACKS IN AMERICA
*The Known World – Edward P Jones. Set in 1855 on the plantation of a black slave owner, this is a stunning work about humans experiencing and surviving American slavery – an epic, complex, unflinching and engrossing view of America’s messy history. #2 on the BBC Culture Critics Poll.
The Grimkes –The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family – Kerry K Greenwich. Multigenerational from slaveowners, white abolitionists, and the black upper class in NE USA.
*The Underground Railroad – Colton Whitehead. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Help – Kathryn Stockett. Great read about a black maid in Jackson, Mississippi.
The New Jim Crow. How mass incarceration and the war on drugs have become the new way to subjugate blacks in America. Unfortunately written in a very repetitive style and could have been one-third the size.

MEDICINE
*War Doctor: David Nott. A compelling story of a British surgeon who repetitively goes to the hell-spots of the world – Darfur Sudan, CAR, and the worst Syria. Syria was replaced by Gaza, surely a testament to the atrocities perpetrated by Israel about his Gaza experience. (He wrote an article in the Economist about Gaza).  Recommended by Dr Rich Davis, an American surgeon working in Kenya.
*The Hospital by the River: Dr Catherine Hamlin. One of the best medical books I have ever read and heartily recommended. It is about Drs Reg and Catherine Hamlin, an Australian obstetrician/gynecologist couple who went to Ethiopia and eventually established a world-famous fistula hospital in Addis Ababa. Heart rendering. May 2024.
This book and War Doctor (above) were both recommended to me by Dr Richard Davis who I met on a beach in Lamu, Kenya. We talked for a long time about medicine and Asperger’s. Dr Davis has devoted his life to work as a surgeon in Africa. He also wrote the Manual of Surgery in Resource Limited Setting.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – The story behind the first human cell culture, the HELA cell
*The Great Influenza. Describes the 1918 influenza pandemic.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE
**Cutting For Stone. About an Ethiopian medical family.
***The Covenant of Water. About Kerala, India 1900-77. A family is stricken by multigenerational drownings due to an inherited acoustic neuroma that produces disorientation in water. A prominent character is a very intuitive Danish Physician. Leprosy is a major thread throughout the book.

SIMON WINCHESTER
**The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Simon Winchester. The intriguing account of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. This monumental task required almost 5 decades. The book is about James Murray, the editor, and the main contributor to the dictionary, an American army surgeon incarcerated in an insane asylum (he had paranoid schizophrenia)  for a murder in London. Highly recommended.
**The Perfectionists – Simon Winchester. Another great book dealt with his great expertise.
Krakatoa – Simon Winchester. Besides the volcano, as informative on plate tectonics, evolution and Indonesia.

Salmon Rushdie
Satanic Verses.
Knife. The story of his assassination attempt and how he dealt with it.

JEWISH BOOKS
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine – Ilan Pappe. A must-read for anybody with an interest in Israel and the Middle East. Will change your mind if you have positive views of Israel and how they have kept this out of their history books and from the rest of the world.
Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel’s Barrier Wall, For Fun by Mark Adams. A must-read (along with “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) for anyone interested in the real story behind the illegal occupation and systematic attempt at destruction of the Palestinian Territory. Don’t believe what Israeli Jews tell you – it is all propaganda they have been fed since birth. Israel must be stopped.
***Simon Schama – The History of the Jews 1000BC to 1492. Belonging. The Story of the Jews 1492-1900. He is a spectacular writer who, despite incredible historical detail, kept me spellbound. Both books are about 700 pages long. I couldn’t put them down. I developed a deep understanding of Judaism and how (and maybe why) they have been persecuted throughout time.
Unfortunately, the atrocities of Gaza (obviously not in these books) have caused a dramatic increase in anti-Semitism around the world. I don’t think Jews have ever behaved this bad – genocide and the purposeful destruction of Gaza driven by the hard-right Jews who clearly believe that Palestinians should be driven out of Gaza and the West Bank permanently. The behaviour of the IDF and settlers in the West Bank is as despicable.