Here are 100 books that Rape of the Rose fans have personally recommended if you like
Rape of the Rose.
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As a child, I learned that I was able to lucid dream at will, speaking to the beings I met in these places I’d never seen before, and it always gave me a sense of interconnectedness. A thread that goes through all of us and our histories. I believe that the ancients dedicated so much of their energy and resources to preserving their stories in order to maintain this connection because it’s so important. Inside all of us is a darkness that, if left unchecked would lead us to ruin. These books all demonstrate the inner struggle we have to understand and redirect that darkness toward the light and the good.
I often ask what the nature of laws and authority is. In the "Old West," when there was no overarching central authority, the survival of the fittest was the law. I’m curious how the clash of the old world with the new becomes a never-ending cycle and where it may lead.
I loved how none of the characters were all good or all bad, they were just survivors. This book is not meant to be liked or disliked. It’s meant to be experienced and "danced with."
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
As a 34-year-old memoirist, one of the most frequent questions I get about my genre, delivered with both curiosity and disdain, is: “Why?” After all, why? What could I, the life experience and literary equivalent of a pollywog, have to share about my journey—or, gasp, what I’ve LEARNED? The fun thing is, as someone who once broke my parents’ computer by using dial-up internet to download Napster, I’m used to disappointing people. Even more fun: as a millennial memoirist, I don’t believe in writing books that will tell people what I’ve learned. I hope my writing shows, through both merit and content, that I have indeed learned something.
All hail the queen. Sally Rooney makes it look easy, with just the right amount of Irish, nothing-is-easy-you-insufferable-wanker on the side. This book has it all: awkward yet undeniably hot sexual tension! Arguments! Cool names! A house that is bigger than yours!
And within Rooney’s stupidly gorgeous prose, we find ourselves not only yelling “EXACTLY!” out loud, many times, to an empty room but answering the book’s central question: right here. As long as we have a good book, that beautiful world is right here.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get…
I read a lot of literary fiction. At the moment, I’m finishing To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, which I’ve enjoyed and whose novel, A Little Life,was brilliant. My interest in thriller fiction is sparked by writers who bring their considerable literary talents to their trade. John LeCarré comes to mind. Writers who sacrifice depth of character or concern for place quickly lose my interest. Thankfully, there are many thriller writers who do a superb job of keeping my wandering nature in check. (A quick note: I also write dystopian fiction under my pen name James Jaros.)
Machine Dreamsis a wrenching novel that chronicles an American family through decades of reflection and turbulence, culminating in the shattering ramifications of the Vietnam War. For those of us who learned to refract the U.S. through the prism of that savagery, which left millions of Vietnamese dead and vast stretches of their country burned and poisoned, Machine Dreams was a novel that radiated the heartsickness of that era on the home front. American families were, indeed, torn apart by that war, but the weaknesses of those bonds had abiding roots. I was weeping by the time I finished this novel but hasten to add that I have no regrets about the experience, only gratitude.
In her highly acclaimed debut novel, the bestselling author of Shelter introduces the Hampsons, an ordinary, small-town American family profoundly affected by the extraordinary events of history. Here is a stunning chronicle that begins with the Depression and ends with the Vietnam War, revealed in the thoughts, dreams, and memories of each family member. Mitch struggles to earn a living as Jeans becomes the main breadwinner, working to complete college and raise the family. While the couple fight to keep their marriage intact, their daughter Danner and son Billy forge a sibling bond of uncommon strength. When Billy goes off…
I’ve written some dozen books. After publishing the first 10, I realized I love to write about young people just finding out who they are and what’s important to them. I love to look back at that impressionable age and watch it unfold. So my last two books were YA—one set at a Quaker prep school and the other set in a dystopian city-state where teenage boys could be killed when they turn eighteen, and teenage girls could be used for sexual exploitation and discarded as easily as old milk cartons. Those troubled, tumultuous, anything-can-happen hovering adulthood years from about fifteen to twenty-one fascinate me and inspire my writing.
Where to start? I’d read The Secret History and found it mesmerizing, but I loved this book more. It was more personal, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
I loved the premise and the relationships between the characters, even though they were completely flawed. I bought into everything they did and thought and wondered what I would have done in the same circumstances and conditions. The writing is extraordinary, and anyone who loves to read prose that sings will adore this book as I did.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the…
I’m a philosopher, writer, and illustrator from Wales, UK. I grew up on ’70s sci-fi—Star Wars (the original trilogy!), Battlestar Galactica (the original series!), The Black Hole (Remember that?! No? Oh well…). Space travel, flying cars, sassy computers you could banter with, cute robots who would be your best friend—it was a time when the future seemed just around the corner. But now, as these things finally start to arrive, I feel I’ve been mis-sold. Data theft? Mass surveillance? Killer drones? Election manipulation? Social media bot farms? This isn’t the future I signed up for! Or maybe I should have read the terms and conditions…
But canyou fight the future? Isn’t it inevitable? This is often how tech companies try to make us think, and that anyone who opposes “progress” is a Luddite. But, as Patrick Sale makes clear in this excellent and heartbreaking historical study, the original Luddites—a protest movement that swept the industrial heartland of 19th Century England—were not anti-technology; they merely thought technology should serve people, not profit. Faced with the destruction of their livelihoods and their traditional way of life, they destroyed machines and burnt factories because that was the only outlet they had for their rage and desperation. And when the “inevitable march of progress” comes to trample you too, you may see that they had a point.
Kirkpatrick Sale is at the tumultuous centre of a technology backlash, actively challenging Bill Gates on the one hand and the Unabomber on the other. The subject of bets, barbs, and grudging praise in the pages of WIRED, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker, Rebels Against the Future takes us back to the first technology backlash, the short-lived and fierce Luddite rebellion of 1811. Sale tells the compelling story of the Luddites'struggle to preserve their jobs and way of life by destroying the machines that threatened to replace them he then invokes a new-Luddite spirit in response…
I’m fascinated by houses and the memories that haunt them. I grew up on a private estate in rural England where my father worked. When I was little I knew a witch. She rode a bicycle, not a broomstick: she cured my warts. The trees I played under were planted when the big house belonged to the 17th-century statesman and historian, Lord Clarendon. I knew storytellers who performed in the local pubs – part of an oral tradition that goes back millennia. I moved to London, but I kept thinking about those rural enclaves where memories are very long. I set my novel in that beautiful, ghost-ridden, peculiar world.
Not just one house, this time, but houses - a whole village in fact. Adam Thorpe’s dazzlingly inventive novel is the story of a rural community over three and half centuries, narrated by a chorus of different voices. Human dramas proliferate: love affairs, murders, executions, violent uprisings. But as people come and go, things stay put, outlasting them. An adulterous eighteenth-century lady is confined to her shuttered bed-chamber, forbidden to go down the creaky old stairs. Fifty years later a garrulous carpenter, reminiscing in the pub, describes the cutting of the wooden scroll that finished the banister of the new staircase he and his mates have built in the Hall, once that lady’s home. Two generations later a consumptive young lawyer, taking down the testimony of dozens of Luddite machine-breakers, visits the Hall, notices the stairs, judges them dark and old-fashioned. Time passes again and a 20th-century television cameraman leans…
Immerse yourself in the stories of Ulverton, as heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime
'Sometimes you forget that it is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voice of the dead' Hilary Mantel
At the heart of this novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton. It is the fixed point in a book that spans three hundred years. Different voices tell the story of Ulverton: one of Cromwell's soldiers staggers home to find his wife remarried and promptly disappears, an eighteenth century farmer carries on an affair with a maid under his…
I'm an author, advisor, speaker, podcaster, and citizen concerned about humanity’s relationship with advanced artificial intelligence. After following developments in AI for many years, I noticed a disconnect between the rapid rate of progress in AI and the public’s understanding of what was happening. The AI issue affects everyone, so I want everyone to be empowered to learn more about how AI will have a large impact on their lives. As a senior policy advisor and a member of the Board of Advisors for Canada's leading safety and governance network, books such as these help me stay informed about the latest developments in advanced artificial intelligence. I hope my recommendations will help you to critically consider how humans should co-exist with this revolutionary technology.
This excellent book provides a detailed history of technology and employment during the Industrial Revolution and up to the present. It is very well-researched and provides many useful insights.
For example, although the term ‘Luddite’ is often used negatively to describe those resistant to technology, the real Luddites were justified in their concerns as they were ultimately displaced due to automation. People were even put to death because they destroyed some of the new machines.
One of the main ways AI might affect our lives is in terms of employment, or rather, a lack of employment.
Frey empowers us to have a greater understanding of previous technological innovations and how they affected workers so that we are able to have more nuanced opinions on the matter.
"Made me look at the industrial revolution, invention, sleeping beauties, contexts and the forces that shape our societies differently."-David Byrne, New York Times Book Review
How the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation
From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long…
I’ve worked in and around the tech, science and startup world for the past 10 years, and hype has played various roles in my work and life. From working in advertising where my job was to build narratives around ideas and products, then in journalism where I was tasked with sorting hype from reality when deciding who and what to write about, to now being a researcher who looks into the very nature and power of narratives, ideologies, political economies and cultures around science and technology – hype has been a recurring topic which is so important in understanding and navigating the tech industry. I hope you find these books as enlightening as I have!
I love how this book has been part of a resurgence of interest in the Luddites and has helped recontextualize the history. It really has punctured the hype around the idea that the Luddites were anti-tech – the book so brilliantly lays out the very fact that this important piece of hype-busting has been needed for some time for us to really come to terms with technology in today’s society.
It’s also just brilliant historical story-telling, and it’s written with fervour, which I always like in a book.
Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year
The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods.
The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines-on punishment of death-and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.
Trained as a physicist and employed for twenty years as an engineer, my great interest in the application of science then led me to write. I authored technical papers on the physics underpinning venerable machines such as pendulum clocks and waterwheels; these were read by the chief editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, who invited me to turn them into a popular science book–the first of fourteen. Often, technological advances were made empirically–the development of sailing ships, bridges, or pocket watches–by working people with no formal knowledge of science, yet their designs survive as triumphs of human thought, as well as useful machines.
Knowledgeable academic experts often write technical tomes that are as dry as their subjects, But Deane's historical exposition of Britain's Industrial Revolution is fascinating, full of insights, and well-written.
Why Britain first? The answers intrigue and engage. Why did other countries (the United States and Germany) outstrip the British from the mid-nineteenth century?
This book identifies the strategic changes in economic organisation, industrial structure and technological progress associated with the industrial revolution, which took place in Britain over the century 1750-1850 and which marked a watershed in world economic development - the beginnings of modern economic growth for developed countries and an example of spontaneous industrialisation for third world countries. The book assesses both starting point and achievement, analyses the substance of economic transformation and evaluates the role of government policy and institutional change in retarding or accelerating economic development. The second edition updates and expands the first by taking into account (and…
I am not a naturalist but consider myself a practitioner of ”lyrical naturalism.” My interest is in the descriptions of nature by poets and artists in previous centuries. The dream is to inspire people to look at the natural environment through the lens of art and poetry rather than the somewhat dry frameworks of botany. My great hero is John Ruskin, a British writer whose lyrical prose has never stopped enchanting its readers. I was very happy to publish a book of essays titled Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c. 1500-1800: Poetry and Ecology. I hope that its richly illustrated essays will inspire readers to look at the environment with renewed wonder.
This book has given me more delight than just about any other book dealing with the woodlands. It is not a herbarium or any other dry enumeration of plants. The Oxford Don takes us by the hand and shows us enchanted spinneys, lovely copses, ancient savannas, woodland pastures, and so much more that were once enchanting. In the everyday environment, the inspiration of poets, the meeting place of lovers, and the haunt of human beings seeking solitude.
"A state-of-the-art survey of Britain’s woods by the acknowledged expert in the field… He seems to know woods like old friends, each with its unique past, its cranky or capricious personality, and its hoard of secrets. And he writes like an angel.” - The Times
'Trees are wildlife just as deer or primroses are wildlife. Each species has its own agenda and its own interactions with human activities ..., Written by one of Britain,s best-known naturalists, Woodlands offers a fascinating new insight into the trees of the British landscape that have filled us with awe and inspiration throughout the centuries. Looking at such diverse evidence as the woods used in buildings and ships, and how woodland has been portrayed in pictures and photographs, Rackham traces British woodland through the ages, from the evolution of wildwood, through man,s effect on the landscape, modern forestry and its…
