Must Read Books

[John Gryphon]

Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy's finest..sub titled An Evening Redness In The West
Graphic storytelling at its best of Indian scalp hunters and other assorted scum back in the day..

 

[levigsp]

Fly fishing by JR Hartley, well worth reading.
Buffalo, Elephant and Bongo by Reinald von Meurers. Very good and says it as it is! also anything else by him.

 

[User00035]

Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy's finest..sub titled An Evening Redness In The West
Graphic storytelling at its best of Indian scalp hunters and other assorted scum back in the day..

An under-appreciated modern masterpiece that more people should read. No amount of Hollywood westerns can hold a candle to his depiction of the old west. His description of an attack by an Apache war party is worth the price of the book alone. And then there's the Judge..

 

[John Gryphon]

His description of an attack by an Apache raiding party is worth the price of the book alone.

Yes, and the sodomy description brought tears to my eyes lol.

No amount of Hollywood westerns can hold a candle to his depiction of the old west.

I have been waiting 20 odd years for someone game enough to make the film.

 

[User00035]

I have been waiting 20 odd years for someone game enough to make the film.

I hope they don't actually. I don't think film is a medium capable of doing justice to McCarthy's writing. His biblical narration just doesn't translate to script format and so much would be lost that the book would be hollowed out.

That is what happened with The Road. Film writers just don't seem to get what McCarthy is about. They thought The Road was a cautionary tale about climate change and environmental apocalypse when in fact it's about one man's relationship with his son and an immolated world stripped of civilisation is the stage set. The book is like a Beckett play but they filmed it as a fantasy disaster movie and drained all the power out of it.

No Country for Old Men works because it was never written as anything but a rollicking good boy's-own adventure story. He practically wrote it as a film script to start with. In fact I suspect that's exactly what he did.

Outer Dark might work. The story and the characters have a powerful Tolkien element about them, if someone could find a way to retain the poetry in the narration.

 

[John Gryphon]

The right bloke with a bit of 'bent' would make it...Sam Peckinpah!

 

[User00035]

Yeah, he's certainly about the only director who could handle such a relentless chain of violence without making it absurd. But who on earth would play the Judge....?

 

[Southern]

The earliest realistic book of Indians in the West, which I read, was "The War Chief", the first book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan. It was never well-known. Burroughs knew the subject well, as he was a calvary soldier who tracked Apaches from the scenes of their attacks.

A really good historical novel with lots of authenticity is, "The Frontiersmen", by Alan Eckert. I bought it when it first came out, knowing nothing about it. It is still in print. If you like, "The Last of the Mohicans", and "The Deerslayer", this is maybe even better.

 

[tozzybum]

Another vote for Simon Scarrow, his Roman and Napoleonic war trilogy take you there .
And again Treasure Island and another old favourite Kidnapped. Fine story telling from a simpler time.
Factual favorites include Cornelius Ryan,s Berlin and Stephen Ambrose,s Band of Brothers. So much more in the book than the tv series imho

 

[John Gryphon]

But who on earth would play the Judge....?

Clint Walker with a shaved head

 

[User00035]

Clint Walker with a shaved head

When I first read the book I pictured The Judge as Sheffield actor Brian Glover

Suitably bald with a hint of the psychotic about him but not completely hairless - he still had his eyebrows and lashes and he wasn't seven feet tall or albino.
Unfortunately both Glover and Clint Walker have the disadvantage of being dead and The Judge, as we know, will never die.

 

[Old-YOP]

Right now Corbett's man eaters ... just to round out the .275 Rigby acquisition.

Pekinpah? I remember that the big shoot-up in the Wild Bunch (was it slo-mo?) left the younger - and obviously far more wimpy - me a touch nauseous.

He hangs about subconsciously though. Even now the first deer of the evening to be gralloched is christened 'Alfredo Garcia'

 

[User00035]

'Alfredo Garcia'

Now that was a shoot-up.

 

[Klenchblaize]

"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" by Laurie Lee

K

 

[User00035]

And A Moment of War. In fact the whole Cider With Rosie trilogy. Magical books. Like the literary equivalent of listening to Vaughan Williams. Makes you ache with a yearning for a lost time.

 

[camodog]

Any by Max Hastings....'All Hell Let Loose', 'Nemesis', 'Catastrophe', 'Armageddon' and his latest, 'Vietnam' ! All brilliantly written.

 

[The Sporting Bookshop]

Any by Max Hastings....'All Hell Let Loose', 'Nemesis', 'Catastrophe', 'Armageddon' and his latest, 'Vietnam' ! All brilliantly written.

Including 'Outside Days' to give the thread a shooting relevance,Max is a keen shot and stalker.

 

[Klenchblaize]

This one is worth it for simply delighting in the woodcuts by Tunnicliffe:


K

 

[Namman]

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. The West from the perspective of the American Indians looking East to the coming of the White Man.

"The White Man made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; They promised to take our land, and they took it"
Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Teton Sioux.

Who today has not heard of Chieftains such as Sitting Bull, Cochise , Crazy Horse and Geronimo?

Well worth a read.

 

[User00043]

Available from abebooks hard or soft cover from a little as £3.20 post free