Favourite books?

If pushed for a single favourite book, I would have to say the same book that I became obsessed with aged seven, 'Treasure Island' by R L Stevenson. It was the book that turned me on to reading fiction.

Other fiction that I have enjoyed greatly:

'Lord of the Rings' - John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

'Paddy Clarke HA HA HA' - Roddy Doyle

'The Dying Earth' - Jack Vance

'Stormbringer' - Michael Moorcock

'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' - James Joyce

'Ulysses' - James Joyce

'Borstal Boy' - Brendan Behan

'The God of Small Things' - Arundhati Roy

'The Firedrake' - Cecelia Holland

'Elidor' - Alan Garner

My favourite non-fiction book:

'History of Greece' - J B Bury - this is partly because the 1941 edition I have is delightful as an object - how it sits in the hand - but mostly due to its content.

No actually. I wanted to, but always ended up too scared that it just won’t feel the same, especially since I’m not really interested in Egyptian mythology. I’ve also never tried Magnus Chase. 
But the new Percy Jackson books got me nostalgic… So I might try it. Did you like it (I’m assuming you read it)? 

Have you ever tried the Kane Chronicles series? 

I love Brave New World Revisited as well, which is a second non-fictional part.

Just a few of my all time favourites (not good at decision making):

Good Omens

The Percy Jackson series

Lord of the Rings (obviously)

Atonement

I know. I was sad they didn't include the St Mungos bits in the film. I really liked that part. 

I was so scared of the Basilisk when I was little I had night terrors after reading it!

The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley 

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

The Time Travellers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Brave New World -Aldous Huxley

Expecto_Patronum said:

Potentially because I find Lockhart really annoying

I love the story but totally agree his character is so annoying. I also like how you get to see him again in the Order of the Phoenix book where he's still crazy when they go to the hospital lol  Sadly they didn't include that part in the movie.

Thank you for that, I think we forget we are part of the animal kingdom and a lot more goes into our choices than conscious thought and acting out those thoughts. Obviously different levels of hormones between the species play a role too. We are much more advanced than our chimpanzees cousins thankfully but the movies like planet of the apes are a frightening play on those fears that we are not so different after all. 

I think he's right in that we may well tend to project our own biases on older cultures that didn't leave their literature and books. However a lot can probably be discerned from the pottery and artwork they leave behind. 

I really need to get my hands on some Gimbutas books, my partner has them but they would be a bit difficult to lug over from the UK.

Have you read Before War from Elisha Daeva? She's not a formal academic, and she dies make the very interesting point that the world of academia can be very power driven. Start making unpopular claims and the gden doors of academia will close against you, and you will become a pariah, a laugh G stock. That is how dated paradigms become entrenched. I don't know if her imagination runs away with her too, she discusses her personal life rather a lot in her book, she's very much a 90's hippy. Must say she does also red like a breath of fresh air.

An acquaintance of mine corroborated the ideological/philosophical closed door in also producing a series of books on anthropology and philosophy under a pseudonym - he didn't want to be pilloried for supporting the more mystical side of Kant and William James either. This acquaintance is very much on the side of patriarchy as a necessary evolution though, where this was the path to getting away from human sacrifice. Good old Euripides.

I met thinkers such as Monica Sjoo who were critical of the more patriarchal side of a lot of New, Age thought, and the problematica side of this, though she was woke before her times too: she criticised my tarot artwork for not having enough Black peoe in my deck, though I did include Black characters.

Daeva is of the opinion that patriarchy evves under trauma, which could conceivably include mass dying off such as plague pandemic - and there is certainly scientific proof that Plague dud kill off thrici  Neolithic communities. But drought and famine could also be responsible.

It does seem that the harsh conditions of desert communities are often the matrix for authoritarian monolithic religions. A certain Vitaly Malkin sent me his book to review for free, on that topic. It's called The Ruse of the One God. 

The Venus figures are unmistable. So too is the fact that Micenean pottery is full of images of war and fighting, but Minoan art and frescoes show nothing like that. 

I think the writer who first drew attention to all that was Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape. Yuval in passing says that in social situations we behave embsssingly like chimpanzees. We do share so much of our DNA with them. There is another book worth reading, alas I don't remember the title, maybe it's to book you are referring to, that talked of the way males in each of our species can become lethally aggressive in party groups. That book also suggested we are a little split between a more aggressive chimp heritage, and the more friendly tendencies of the bonobo. Seemed a bit reflective of the Cain and Abel myth?

My 3 faves are: 
Memoirs of a geisha
Dracula
To kill a mockingbird.

Half Blood Prince is definitely one of my favourites but Chamber of Secrets is my least favourite. I'm not really sure why I don't like it as much. Potentially because I find Lockhart really annoying.

I've got the Dr Moreau and I read The War of the World's.

I had a collection of HG Wells stories in a single volume when 13 or something. I liked those stories.

In had some stuff from Jules Verne too, 20,000 leagued under the sea.

I always think of the Philosophers Stone as my favourite but I think that's very much a nostalgic thing with it being the first one and the one I fell in love with. 

My favourite after this is the Half Blood Prince. I love finding out the extra details about Voldemorts background and how they got to the position they were in.

Some academics too have more recently suggested that Gimbutas’ ideas about a more peaceful Neolithic Europe are valid, yet they are not universally accepted. She turned out to be right about many things, so she was a pioneer even if her methods were at times unsound. She is certainly responsible for reinterpreting the debate. Her Neolithic figurine ‘mother goddess’ hypothesis isn’t generally accepted by archaeologists, although her contribution kick-started serious research in the subject.