88 books like Weird Indiana

I have always sought out the strange and unusual. This book covers many different phenomena. Whether it is ghosts, aliens, legends, cryptids, or just weird lore, this book has a wide scope. I live in the state and occasionally participate in investigations of these subjects. I even wrote a play Ghosts, Aliens, and Bigfoot. This book almost reminds me of being with my grandfather as a child. He loved to scare with local legends and ghost stories spun with his special brand of creepiness and humor. Reading this late at night took me back to those special times.

Who doesn’t like a good treasure story? When you are an experienced metal detectorist, such as me, this book makes total sense. Much research is packed into the book which covers states: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though only one of these legends came near my home, I enjoyed reading about the history and scanning the old maps. The book’s appearance reminds me of a personal journal written by an old explorer.

This will not provide a treasure map with an X mark on where to dig, but for me, it does incite an itch to dust off the old Gold Bug and take a backroads to drive looking for a promising site to explore and recede to an earlier time when grandma might have lost her broach in the chicken pen.

Every marathoner needs hydration along the race. So it is with a long reading session. Some sessions call for a hot cup of coffee or tea. Some call for cocoa or a sparkling water or carbonated mix. Then there are times when a nice colorful glass of vino fit the occasion. I have always had an interest in chemistry and did quite well at it in school. This book was valuable to me as a newbie vintner. The author is English and he takes the reader through the process while giving tips and recipes and showing the equipment needed to produce your own unique beverage. The book is packed full of information about competitions and where to get supplies and which wines to make during the calendar year. It is an older book and references companies in England, but I would recommend it to anyone who might long to try… show more.

When you have no one in the world to count on, who do you turn to? You have no choice but to charge head-on into the breach. You have never been in trouble in your life and find that someone is suing you. People shake their heads and say that you will lose everything and walk away. This book gave a young man hope and a path to start on. I had to hire a lawyer, but this book prepared me for what to expect. The unknown is frightening. Knowing how the ‘game’ is played helped me to understand the process.

The book covers a broad spectrum of civil cases, but the reader can familiarize themselves with how things will proceed in their circumstance. I didn’t find any victorious solution to my situation, but it did stimulate my logical thinking and need to learn more about the legal process. It… show more.

Like all the young girls in this shortlist of coming-of-age stories, Ashley C. Ford (one of Angelou’s literary children) is a survivor hell-bent on finding a life better than the one she was handed, and, like the others, she is remarkably sensitive, imaginative, and able to paint her world for us in the most tender and unique shapes and colors. How does a young girl weather such brutal realities, experience beauty, and splice together a space for her soul? Ford’s memoir is one such contemporary story. 

The author, a columnist, wrote these family stories as an homage to his bigger-than-life mom Patty while she was battling cancer. Told with heart, laugh-out-loud family anecdotes, and love, always love, Saalman brings you into an unforgettable midwestern world of then and now, although even the modern-day Indiana stories echo with “yore” to my more urban ears: his parents’ solid working-class values, their casino date every Saturday night, Patty’s job as the hostess of a diner. Ultimately, she would outlive her death sentence by five years.

I attended a university just down the road from Marion, Indiana, the site of an infamous lynching of two Black men (and the attempted lynching of a third) in 1930.

The prison from which these men were forcibly taken still stands on the main square in Marion. Many textbooks use the grisly photograph that Lawrence Beitler took of this event to illustrate the horrors of violence against African-Americans in postbellum United States.

Madison deftly weaves the lives, stories, and memories of resilient Black residents of Marion today with the story of the hate-filled mob that lynched Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp and the aftermath of the event in the community to illustrate that individual choices matter, and that how we view the past is shaped profoundly by historical trauma. 

My friends and I discovered Raintree County as undergrads, and found in it everything that matters – history, character, politics, and above all action. Here is life with all its pleasure and horror, apostasy and faith, sacrifice and victory. Here too is the core of American democracy, its glories and fiascos: a love letter to the Republic, more than ever relevant in the factional bitterness of today. An unforgettable novel from a man who killed himself at 34.

Not only does geology shape the land, it can also shape the lives of those who quarry the stone. Rarely is this relationship between human and rock better portrayed than in Scott Russell Sanders’ thoughtful essays about the limestone country around Bedford, Indiana. With graceful and respectful prose, he tells the stories of a “piece of earth where the accidents of geology have yielded a special kind of stone, and where landscapes, towns, and the people themselves bear the mark of that stone.” And, if you seek to see this story on film, I can also recommend one of my favorite movies, Breaking Away, a humorous and passionate portrayal of life and biking in limestone country.

This book is what happens when you give an incredible writer incredible access to an incredible subject.

The late Bob Knight allowed John Feinstein to essentially join his team, the Indiana Hoosiers, for the 1985-86 season, and the result is a deeply compelling and extremely engaging profile of the legendary coach, whose style was… unorthodox, to say the least.

I could not recommend it more.