Here are 100 books that Solenoid fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m an information junkie who loves to dance. I fell in love with folk dancing at age 6, European archaeology at 11, linguistics and cognition at 21—and could never drop any of them. My scientist-father always said, “Follow the problem, not the discipline,” and I began to see how these fields could help answer each other’s questions. Words can survive for millennia—with information about what archaeologists don’t find, like oh-so-perishable cloth. Determining how to reconstruct prehistoric textiles (Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years) then led me to trace the origins of various European folk costumes, and finally even to reconstruct something about the origins of the dances themselves.
Humans also draft dance to help heal body and mind. I loved Kligman’s personal ventures deep into the complex concerns about life and death, fertility and health, found in related pre-Christian rituals in three areas of the Balkans: the Căluşariin SW Romania, the Rusaltsiin NW Bulgaria, and the Kraljevi—often with other names—just west in former Yugoslavia. (The word Rusaltsicomes from Rusalka, a Slavic name for the “dancing goddess”, as does Rusalii, the thrice-yearly festival in their honor.) Her intriguing study comes from direct observation of the healing rituals, and on personal discussions with the dancers—including one who was particularly vulnerable to trance! This is also true of L. Danforth’s remarkable account of the firewalkers of SE Bulgaria and northern Greece (Firewalking and Religious Healing).
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am a comic book writer, novelist, and vampire aficionado. I always want to learn the truth of a matter. I’ve moved in and out of the gothic subculture for years and spent time with members of the vampire subculture. I’ve found that most people’s understanding of vampires (and really, everything) is influenced by fiction. Even if you point out that their beliefs are only as accurate as a movie, they will still argue for them. As much as I love a good vampire movie, I want to shatter illusions and explore the myths and folklore that reflect our human experience in all of its horror and glory.
This book has engendered controversy for almost forcefully bridging the gap between the 15th Century Wallachian Prince Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler or Dracula. Stoker had already constructed his character, called “Count Wampyr,” before he learned of his future namesake. However, he quite clearly establishes a connection between the two through an explanation provided by Abraham Van Helsing. The Dracula of the eponymous novel is a heavily fictionalized version of the real-life figure, but so are most similarly positioned characters in literature, film, and television. Florescu and McNally provide a cursory overview of Slavic and Balkan vampire folklore, a biographical sketch of Vlad the Impaler, and illuminate the process by which Stoker adapted this violent, cunning, and sometimes brilliant nationalist and military tactician into a fictional monster.
The true story behind the legend of Dracula - a biography of Prince Vlad of Transylvania, better known as Vlad the Impaler. This revised edition now includes entries from Bram Stoker's recently discovered diaries, the amazing tale of Nicolae Ceausescu's attempt to make Vlad a national hero, and an examination of recent adaptations in fiction, stage and screen.
I am an adventure traveller, author, blogger, and dog-ma. Tired of living life in thin slices, I quit work to live my dream. I wanted to travel meaningfully and get to know the countries I visit in a way that is not possible in a two-week mini-break. B.C. (Before Canines). I hurtled, slid, submerged, and threw myself off bits of every continent except Antarctica. A.D. (After Dog), Mark and I became Adventure Caravanners. Our aim: To Boldly Go Where No Van Has Gone Before. Against all advice, we toured Romania for three months and fell in love. Since then, I have been on a one-woman mission to set Romania’s record straight! My forthcoming books will chronicle our progress around Poland in a pandemic and our Brexit-busting plan to convert a 24-tonne army truck and drive to Mongolia.
Romania is not all Dracula and Olympic gymnasts. For example, did you know the original Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, was an ethnic Saxon from Transylvania?
During my time in Romania, I found her people bright and engaging. Simmer that in the melting pot of a turbulent multi-cultural history formed at a crossroads between powerful empires and it’s no surprise that the result is great insight, resilience, and wisdom. However, Romania’s minority language and time as a secretive Soviet state conspire to ensure their worldview has not been shared widely.
Besides introducing some famous names whom you might not associate with Romania, this book is genuinely inspirational and captures the country’s spirit, humour, and culture.
Romania. For most of the world, the name usually conjures up images of Dracula, Olympic gymnastics legend Nadia Comaneci—and not much else. Yet this country with a rich history stretching back thousands of years contains countless wonders and hidden gems, producing many people who’ve made a major impact on our world. Their Wisdom has remained hidden behind the barrier of a language spoken by less than 25 million people worldwide. All selections within this book are from people born in Romania, including: • Hollywood legends Edward G. Robinson, Bela Lugosi (the original Dracula), and Johnny Weissmuller (the original Tarzan) •…
In the small town of Grady, Montana, twenty-four-year-old Tad Bungley has a reputation for trouble. When he lands a job at Come Around Ranch, however, his life seems to take a positive turn. As he develops a soft spot for Sam, the ranch owner's disabled son, and a special bond…
I moved to Britain from Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, in 1986. Still in my early twenties, I was a published poet in Serbian, but I didn’t dream I would eventually become a novelist in English. I devoured any English book that dealt with East-West encounters. I must have read several hundred as I researched my first book, Inventing Ruritania, a cultural study of the “Wild East”. I returned to them when I wrote Iron Curtain, a novel about a “Red Princess” from an unnamed East European country who marries an impecunious English poet. I sometimes thought of it as Ruritania writes back.
This is another story of a hapless, now unnamed, English academic in Eastern Europe, yet McGuinness’s Romanian novel couldn’t be more different from Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange, and not only for being tied to a very specific moment and place: Bucharest in the final months of 1989.
It captures the darkness and the deprivations of Ceaușescu’s regime just before its fall. It is a Cold War novel written by a poet and this shows in the richness of its melancholy and sinister atmosphere.
Once the gleaming "Paris of the East," Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Old landmarks are falling to demolition crews, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere. Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He is taken under the wing of Leo O'Heix, a colleague and master of the black market, and falls for the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, friendships are compromised, and…
I am an adventure traveller, author, blogger, and dog-ma. Tired of living life in thin slices, I quit work to live my dream. I wanted to travel meaningfully and get to know the countries I visit in a way that is not possible in a two-week mini-break. B.C. (Before Canines). I hurtled, slid, submerged, and threw myself off bits of every continent except Antarctica. A.D. (After Dog), Mark and I became Adventure Caravanners. Our aim: To Boldly Go Where No Van Has Gone Before. Against all advice, we toured Romania for three months and fell in love. Since then, I have been on a one-woman mission to set Romania’s record straight! My forthcoming books will chronicle our progress around Poland in a pandemic and our Brexit-busting plan to convert a 24-tonne army truck and drive to Mongolia.
This funny and fascinating memoir is a great read and provides a window into what life was like behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s, under a brutal and oppressive regime.
Mackay spends two years in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, as visiting professor at the University. Spied on, treated warily by locals, and forbidden to travel, he nevertheless finds ways to see the country and gain insight into its culture and people.
Whether you want to find out more about Romania or you just want a captivating read which will open your mind to how different life can be without the freedoms and privileges we currently enjoy in the West, you will love this book.
Sent deep behind the Iron Curtain to Bucharest by the British Government in 1967, Ronald Mackay serves as the “sharp end” of a trade initiative. How will he fare in communist-run Romania where suspicion abounds and Ceausescu’s Secret Police are everywhere? With irony-tinged humour, Ronald tells of seductive informants; an ex-political-prisoner-turned-spy; fearful minorities; a hunting trip with the Communist elite; travels in Dracula’s Transylvania; of running into a company of armed tanks; and of threatening Charles de Gaulle’s attempt to be the first Western premier to court this bright but baffling tyrant-run country.
I am an author and natural navigator. I set up my natural navigation school in 2008 and am the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling books, including The Natural Navigator (2010) The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs (2014), How to Read Water (2016), and The Secret World of Weather (2021), some of the world’s only books covering natural navigation. I have spent decades hunting for clues and signs in nature, across the globe, which may be why I am sometimes nicknamed: “The Sherlock Holmes of Nature”.
A unique book. Read this and you'll find yourself in a disappearing world. Northern Romania eschewed the modern conveniences and less delicate touches of capitalism for most of the twentieth century. Blacker shares a life wholly dictated by the rhythms of nature. This is a world where the locals recognise someone visiting from another village at a distance, not by their face or their clothes, but by the horse they are riding.
Chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall's online book club The Reading Room by HRH The Prince of Wales
When William Blacker first crossed the snow-bound passes of northern Romania, he stumbled upon an almost medieval world.
There, for many years he lived side by side with the country people, a life ruled by the slow cycle of the seasons, far away from the frantic rush of the modern world. In spring as the pear trees blossomed he ploughed with horses, in summer he scythed the hay meadows and in the freezing winters gathered wood by sleigh from the forest. From…
When a high security prison fails, a down-on-his luck cop and the governor’s daughter must team up if they’re going to escape in this "jaw-dropping, authentic, and absolutely gripping" (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) USA Today bestselling thriller from Adam Plantinga.
I am an adventure traveller, author, blogger, and dog-ma. Tired of living life in thin slices, I quit work to live my dream. I wanted to travel meaningfully and get to know the countries I visit in a way that is not possible in a two-week mini-break. B.C. (Before Canines). I hurtled, slid, submerged, and threw myself off bits of every continent except Antarctica. A.D. (After Dog), Mark and I became Adventure Caravanners. Our aim: To Boldly Go Where No Van Has Gone Before. Against all advice, we toured Romania for three months and fell in love. Since then, I have been on a one-woman mission to set Romania’s record straight! My forthcoming books will chronicle our progress around Poland in a pandemic and our Brexit-busting plan to convert a 24-tonne army truck and drive to Mongolia.
Former BBC reporter Ormsby presents a compilation of anecdotes from his time living in Romania.
The stories vary between shocking, upsetting, and laugh-out-loud funny. They are authentic and absorbing sketches of the characters and hardships that make up everyday life in Romania before the country had shaken every vestige of its communist past.
Since each chapter is a complete story, this is a great book to dip into for a little light entertainment. If you’re thinking of visiting Romania, it will help to give perspective on what makes the locals tick.
'Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania' has been described as one of the best guide books on Romania. If you want to discover Romania with someone who knows it well, Mike Ormsby’s travel writing is for you. Whilst the average Romania travel guide provides details of places to visit, this writer takes a different approach. Ormsby gets up close and personal, blending journalistic objectivity with dry wit to craft true-life stories about the people who live in Romania: from friendly hikers and shepherds in Transylvania, to exasperated taxi drivers and bossy bureaucrats in Bucharest. Ormsby's bittersweet short stories are a…
Morally gray heroes are my absolute favorite kind. Whether it’s Batman, Dean Winchester from Supernatural, or the heroes on this list—if he’s not dark and stormy, well, I’m not interested. There’s a depth to these characters that others often lack, and I find it so fascinating. Especiallywhen there’s romance involved. The books on this list are nearly all polar opposites, and yet... they each stretch our capacity to love to the very breaking point—and then make us catch our breath. How far into the darkness can he go, and still come back with a heart left to give to his heroine?
There is nothing about this book, and the heroine in it, that isn’t fun and hilarious. Jen is mouthy and wild, and more than willing to tempt Decebel—a hunky, dangerous werewolf—to throw all his rules against getting involved with humans to the wind. This grumpy and sunshine book hooked me before the grumpy/sunshine trend was even a thing. But don’t let the fun fool you—dark magic is at work, and they will be up against life-and-death odds if they’re going to make it as a couple.
Jennifer Adams, best friend to a werewolf and a gypsy healer, is spicy, outspoken, a little crazy, and completely human...or so she thought. Jen has just found out that human DNA isn't the only thing that resides in her veins. She happens to share that little pesky werewolf gene, although it isn't more than just a drop. Now that she and her friends are living in Romania with Fane's pack, she is oh-so-conveniently stuck with the object of her affection, the broody furball, Decebel. Drawn to each other by something…
I’m Marsali Taylor, a retired teacher of English, French and Drama. I’ve always been interested in women’s history—not queens and countesses, but what life was like for ordinary people like me. A chance to research women’s suffrage in the Scottish National Library got me started reading these women’s stories in their own words—and what stories they were, from the first women graduates to the war workers. Women’s Suffrage in Shetlandtook two years of fascinating research, and Ihope it’s the foundation for more work by other researchers, both here in Shetland and in other communities whose women fought for the vote.
When she died in 1917, Dr. Elsie Inglis was given a memorial service in Westminster, with columns of press tributes to one of Scotland’s first women doctors, and the leader of WWI frontline hospitals staffed entirely by women. ‘Go home and be still,’ the male doctors said when she suggested it, so she went to the women’s suffrage societies for funds. Her doctors, nurses, orderlies, and ambulance drivers chanted ‘Go home and be still’ gleefully to each other under fire and on retreats with the allied army in France, Serbia, Romania, and Russia. Somehow, whatever the difficulty, if Dr. Inglis said it had to be done, it was. An inspirational leader and a truly remarkable woman.
An auctioned storage locker comes with a box of Raggedy Ann books and a dresser drawer stuffed with grisly momentos. A small college town in Georgia is now ground zero for a mind-bending cold case.
Local journalist James Murphy wishes he had never bought the storage unit which either contains…
I’m passionate about the theme of this list because I’ve experienced a lot in life already, even though I’m only 24 years old, and I know about the different situations that these books describe well. I’ve experienced a few traumatic situations later in my life (after I read these books) that these books have, it has turned me into somewhat of a realist over time, and I like to use my own talent of writing and creating characters to create, teach, and make people aware of scary and traumatic situations that can happen to anyone in real life. I hope more people will see the valuable lessons in these books.
This book is nonfiction, so it’s about real people rather than fictional characters. I love this book because it gives a descriptive perspective on what was happening and what was going on in Nazi-occupied Germany and Poland during World War II, and the horrors of the concentration camps (mainly Auschwitz) that were built and used to kill everyone the nazis hated for whatever insane reasons they had.
I’ve always had an almost alarming interest in World War II. It was my favorite lesson from the history classes I’ve taken, and this book really put some of the evil things that were done during that time into perspective.
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of…
