Hello everyone, I'm new to this website and forum, I've been writing since 2014 and have to-date published four books on Amazon, my book genre's are humor and fantasy/mystery. I'm currently working on my fifth book.
My latest book 'The Jasper Claxton Mysteries' has just come out and it's a follow up to my earlier book 'The Ghost from the Molly-House'. This will be a sequence of books, I'm working on the third book in the series which I hope to have out early in 2019.
Jasper Claxton was only twenty when he died in the early part of the 18th century in Newgate prison in London, because of gross injustice and cruel, barbaric beliefs, and practices. He’s now a super ghost who travels through time, helping others who are either the victims of crime, or troublesome and dangerous spirits. The Jasper Claxton Mysteries is a collection of three ghost stories that mix actual places, and historical events, with fantasy.
The first story is set in Haiti in 1933. While searching for some ancient stones that are said to have mystical powers, Jasper finds himself helping MI6 who are looking for a missing agent while investigating dark voodoo rituals, drug smuggling, and modern-day slavery.
The second story is set in Paris in 1900. Jasper works with a perfumier and spiritual medium, to try and stop a sinister Brotherhood, who are trying to become immortal and want to control the supernatural and the natural order of things.
The third story is set in Venice, Italy in 1934. Jasper finds himself back with MI6 who are investigating a research centre and sinister Artificial Intelligence.
Here is the prologue, which gives the backstory of the character.
Prologue
My name is Jasper Claxton; I was born in 1706 in London, England. I can remember some things about my life from that time but not everything, although there are many things I don’t want to remember. The past is the past, and for me, that is where it belongs, but it can teach us many lessons, that is of course if we’re willing to listen and learn. But memories can feel like a burden, and I don’t remember ever having had any hopes, dreams, or aspirations.
I never knew my parents, and I don’t know if I ever had any brothers, sisters, aunts, or uncles, but I do remember being one of many who was in the orphanages of the period, and the cruelty, hardship, and all the injustices of that time. It was a world full of ignorance, difficulty, and fear, although I know that for many the world still is today, yet the solutions to me seem simple. Surely most people would spend their lives in joyful service, working towards building a healthy loving world if due care and consideration, food, shelter, and a modest standard of living was provided. But I guess someone somewhere will always want the last fish in the sea.
For me, everything stopped in 1726; I remember being very cold, glacially cold; everything was so bleak and austere. The biting winter winds were howling, my body was weak, my legs were frozen, and I couldn’t move my limbs, my breathing became shallow, I slowly closed my eyes and the harsh world I knew faded forever into darkness.
So now I’m gone from your physical world, and although I’m in a much better place, I find I’m unable to describe it to you, I have a thousand questions that I can’t ever seem to answer. All I can say is that I feel safe, at great peace and very contented, not happy or sad, and I drift between the past and your present when you call me. Although you won’t know that you’ve called me, in fact, you probably won’t even remember me after I’ve gone, but I hope I leave you in a better place during your time in this world.
When I was born, I was put in a parish house or orphanage for the relief of the poor; this represented an important parish building, and as such came to serve as the focus for many parish activities beyond just the comfort of the poor.
I was lucky because for a time I was provided with the necessary food, some primary education, rudimentary health care, and clean clothing, although many children were brutally treated and the death rate amongst children was very high.
When I was around eight, I was apprenticed to a weaver for textile labour, and worked 12-hour shifts, and slept in a small barracks attached to the factory in beds just vacated by other children about to start the next shift.
As an orphan, the workhouse, as they became known, was a given and never a choice for me, but in the harsh economic poverty of the time, many people were reluctant to enter workhouses and resorted instead to begging on the streets. The early eighteenth century was an era of unusually severe and cruel punishment; beggars were a familiar feature of most towns and cities in my day. They would be found around shops, markets and other busy places, which where smelly, noisy, and chaotic, all aspects of life could be seen. But begging was a hazardous activity; vagrancy remained illegal throughout the century and beggars were regularly whipped and imprisoned in ‘Houses of Correction’.
Most criminal cases during the 1700’s went before local magistrates, who dealt with crimes without the benefit of a jury. Magistrates were unpaid officials from the ranks of the wealthy who defended English law as amateurs. As a result, many magistrates could be corrupted, some people even saying, ‘the greatest criminals of the town were the officers of justice.’
More severe crimes such as murder were referred to Crown courts, like the Old Bailey in London. The Courtrooms were sprinkled with herbs and scented flowers to mask the stench and smell of unwashed prisoners, and much of the courts’ business was conducted in Latin. Witnesses were usually examined by the judge and members of the jury.
The 18th-century criminal justice system relied heavily on the existence of the ‘bloody code’; this was a list of crimes that were all punishable by death and would grow to include over 200 separate capital offences. Guilty verdicts in cases of murder, rape, and treason and lesser crimes such as poaching, burglary, shoplifting, and criminal damage like chopping down trees for firewood could all end in a trip to the gallows.
Many felons were transported to the American colonies (and later to those in Australia), where they served out their sentences in hard labour.
Criminals convicted of lesser crimes were fined, branded, or shamed in front of the public by being whipped, or being set in the pillory (a wooden framework with holes for the head and hands, in which offenders were formerly imprisoned and exposed to public abuse and pelted with rotten eggs and vegetables). Long-term prison sentences in ‘Houses of Correction’ were also imposed.
Prostitution was another highly visible alternative to pauperdom. Many vulnerable young girls and boys were forced or tricked into prostitution through their failure or inability to secure work. In London, scores of streetwalkers openly plied their trade not only on the streets but in the theatres and taverns of the capital. Dozens of infamous and dangerous bawdy-houses could be found up narrow alleyways, and down side streets, sexual activity was a very public affair in the London of the 1700’s.
There were other ‘beggarly trades’ that provided more ‘respectable’ incomes: as costermongers (a person who sells goods, especially fruit and vegetables, from a handcart in the street), shoe blacks, crossing sweepers, and market porters, but these were often objectionable and very physical jobs. However, they offered the poor an independent and honest way of making a living.
I finally escaped the workhouse on the Lords day, a church Sunday in 1720 and was lucky to find work as a scullion (a menial servant) with Master Taylor at The Silver Cross Tavern in Whitehall, London. Which was a prominent meeting place, a place for socialising and business where people gathered to drink alcoholic beverages and be served food. It was hard work, but it offered some occasional respite from the misery and grind of daily life.
It was in 1724 while working for Master Taylor that I met Mistress Margaret Clap who ran a coffee house at her private residence in Holborn, London. She felt that I seemed “agreeable” and offered me regular employment as a scullion along with simple board and lodgings.
I soon learned that her coffee shop served as a Molly-House for the underground homosexual community also known as sodomites, today you would call it the “Gay” community. Not that it concerned me, I had been surrounded by thief’s, criminals, ragamuffins, drifters, vagabonds, and prostitutes and seen double standards many times from those seen as paragons of virtue within the church and the local community. I judged people on their character, honesty, and how they treated me, and others, not on their sexual proclivities. Daily survival makes you develop a sixth sense where this is concerned; you do what you must do to survive.
I can only speak as I find, and Mistress Clap or Mother Clap as she was known and her husband Master John, showed me some basic kindness and consideration. This was the first place in my life that I could ever think of as any kind of home. Mistress Clap looked after her customers, the homosexual men who frequented her premises. We would have thirty or forty chaps every night, but more on Sunday Nights.
*We had regular customers and paying guests who were friends of Mistress Clap. Of course, at that time homosexual activities were illegal and heavily prosecuted and remained capital offences until 1861 when the death penalty for sodomy or buggery was repealed. So, our customers lived in a dangerous underworld, many lived in secret, not daring to talk about love and relationships. It was dangerous to love another man, and they became the ideal target for exploiters, blackmailers, and vicious entrapments. Homophobia has a long history, and I know that even today a homosexual or “Gay” life can be a difficult one for some.
*Mistress Clap and I were always present during the Molly-House's working hours, and I would often run across the street to a local tavern the “Bunch o’Grapes”, to buy drinks for our customers. Some thought of Mistress Clap’s house as a brothel, but she intended to provide a safe meeting place for the homosexual community where men could be true to themselves, socialise, drink, dance, and, yes, have sex with one another. Mistress Clap’s Molly-House had security at the door to ensure that the men who came in could be vouched for as sodomites.
*Over time the Molly-House developed its own “camp” culture which certainly wasn’t to everyone’s taste and included elaborate transvestitism, mock male marriages, and even simulated births, in which a Molly would deliver a wooden doll that was then baptised. Many Mollies would dress in female clothing, assume a female name and identity, and affect feminine mannerisms.
*On a Sunday night in February 1726, Mistress Clap's Molly-House was raided by a squadron of police constables, and we were all arrested and taken to Newgate prison. The police were unlike the police forces you think of today, in London, a system of paid watchmen operated across different parishes; they performed various duties on top of the detection and arrest of suspected criminals. The Molly-House had been under observation for some time.
*The surveillance was instigated by a collection of vengeful Mollies-turned-informants who led policemen into Molly-Houses, introducing each of them so that they could investigate the goings on more thoroughly. Although for some Mollies this could have backfired, and they may have found themselves forced into becoming informants to avoid prison.
However, the real driving force behind all of this was the Society for the Reformation of Manners, which was founded in London in 1691. Its aims were the suppression of profanity, immorality, and other lewd activities in general, and of brothels and prostitution.
*Mistress Clap was eventually found guilty of keeping a disorderly house, and for encouraging customers to commit sodomy. We were sentenced to stand in the pillory in Smithfield Market, to pay a fine, and two years’ imprisonment; while three customers were hanged for sodomy. I never saw Mistress Clap again.
I remember how Newgate prison was swarming with lice and vermin and full of emaciated people all with diseases expiring on the floors in cramped loathsome cells, we were lucky to get two pennyworths of bread a day. The cruelty, stench, and decay were torments; I will never forget the awful smell. I prayed and pleaded with God to help me, begging him for mercy, but he didn’t seem to hear me. So, I spent my time trying to care for the many sick until my own demise along with numerous others, from disease, starvation, and hypothermia that same year. The average life expectancy in the 18th century was only 40, so I guess I managed to live out half of my life such as it was, which is more than many others did.
For a while after my death, I found myself drawn back to Mistress Clap’s Molly House in Holborn, it gave me some comfort. I don’t know how I ended up in my ghostly world or how long it will last, could it be forever? That I cannot answer. But in my life, I’ve met many people with blood on their hands, people who have killed, maimed, imprisoned, and tortured people. I’ve witnessed terrible cruelty, wrongdoing, and experienced terrible hardship.
I’m not a vengeful ghost, but now it’s time to do the right thing. I can appear, anytime, anyplace, anywhere. You see, I’m drawn to fighting injustice, oh, and the odd troublesome spirit, of which there are many. I now travel through time and try to work for the greater good, although it’s often complicated and rarely straightforward.
My ghostly past is always with me, it has a strange way of residing in the present and often catches me off guard because one day I’m in Paris in 1849 and the next I could be in Africa in 1790, but I always try to blend in. A rainy day in England can suddenly remind me of a thousand rainy days I’ve experienced all over the world in different time periods.
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr the 19th-century French critic, journalist, and novelist said something to me in 1849 while I was in Paris, which I have never forgotten, ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.’ Meaning, ‘The more it changes, the more it's the same thing.’ Often translated as ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ And I can relate to that because time travel has given me an eidetic memory and vast knowledge, as well an aptitude and understanding of people.
I can read people, it’s hard to describe, but it’s often the little things that give people away, a nuance, a hesitation, a gesture. Sometimes it’s not the future that stands in our way but the past. One must always look to the future, that’s where the obstacles await you, but you cannot face the future until you’ve conquered your past, then you will be free. Be scared, but do it anyway, life begins every single day. Sometimes you don’t always get what you want, but what you need.
Thanks for your interest, I hope I've tempted you to investigate further.
Grahame Peace
Huddersfield
England
September 2018.
-
In total there are 38 users online :: 2 registered, 0 hidden and 36 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am
New Book: The Jasper Claxton Mysteries (The Ghost from the Molly-House)
Authors are invited and encouraged to present their FICTION books solely within this forum.
Return to “Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book!”
Jump to
- General Discussion
- ↳ Religion & Philosophy
- ↳ Current Events & History
- ↳ Science & Technology
- ↳ Arts & Entertainment
- ↳ Everything Else
- Non-Fiction Books
- ↳ The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - by Mark Manson
- ↳ What non-fiction book should we read and discuss next?
- ↳ Non-Fiction General Discussion
- ↳ Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!
- Fiction Books
- ↳ The Handmaid's Tale - by Margaret Atwood
- ↳ What fiction book should we read and discuss next?
- ↳ Short Story Discussions
- ↳ Fiction General Discussion
- ↳ Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book!
- Special Forums
- ↳ What are you currently reading?
- ↳ A Passion for Poetry
- ↳ Author's Lounge
- ↳ Creative Writing
- The Archives
- ↳ Archived Book Discussion Forums
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2022-2023
- ↳ Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - by Yuval Noah Harari
- ↳ The Day of the Triffids - by John Wyndham
- ↳ The Hidden Life of Trees - by Peter Wohlleben
- ↳ How the World Really Works - by Vaclav Smil
- ↳ Slaughterhouse-Five - by Kurt Vonnegut
- ↳ How to Read the Constitution -- and Why - by Kim Wehle
- ↳ Big Time: Stories - by Jen Spyra
- ↳ Meditations - by Marcus Aurelius
- ↳ Divided We Fall - by David French
- ↳ Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce... - by Steven Pinker
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2020-2021
- ↳ Crime and Punishment - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ↳ The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars - by Jo Marchant
- ↳ Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - by Adam Grant
- ↳ Books do Furnish a Life - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Another Country - by James Baldwin
- ↳ Dracula - by Bram Stoker
- ↳ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - by Isabel Wilkerson
- ↳ To Kill a Mockingbird - by Harper Lee
- ↳ A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic - by Peter Wadhams
- ↳ The Rosie Project: A Novel - by Graeme Simsion
- ↳ The Righteous Mind - by Jonathan Haidt
- ↳ The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2018-2019
- ↳ American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good - by Colin Woodard
- ↳ July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century - by Arthur C. Clarke
- ↳ The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution - by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett
- ↳ Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong - by James W. Loewen
- ↳ The Last Unicorn - by Peter S. Beagle
- ↳ Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped - by Garry Kasparov
- ↳ 1984 - by George Orwell
- ↳ Finding Purpose in a Godless World - by Ralph Lewis (Foreword by Michael Shermer)
- ↳ Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - by Yuval Noah Harari
- ↳ The Time Machine - by H. G. Wells
- ↳ Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis - J. D. Vance
- ↳ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy - by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2016-2017
- ↳ Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - by Neil deGrasse Tyson
- ↳ The Master and Margarita - by Mikhail Bulgakov
- ↳ A People's History of the United States - by Howard Zinn
- ↳ Darwin's Dangerous Idea - by Daniel Dennett
- ↳ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - by Jules Verne
- ↳ A Short History of Nearly Everything - by Bill Bryson
- ↳ Uncle Tom's Cabin - by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- ↳ God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction - by Dan Barker, foreword by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging - by Sebastian Junger
- ↳ The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition - by Ernest Hemingway
- ↳ Up From Slavery - by Booker T. Washington
- ↳ Soul Identity - by Dennis Batchelder
- ↳ On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt - by Richard Carrier
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2014-2015
- ↳ The Martian - by Andy Weir
- ↳ Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser - by Guy P. Harrison
- ↳ The Post-American World: Release 2.0 - by Fareed Zakaria
- ↳ Go Set a Watchman: A Novel - by Harper Lee
- ↳ Flowers for Algernon - by Daniel Keyes
- ↳ Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief - by Lawrence Wright
- ↳ Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark - by Carl Sagan with Ann Druyan
- ↳ King Henry IV, Part 1 (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Pt. 1) - by William Shakespeare
- ↳ Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century - by Lex Bayer and John Figdor
- ↳ Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism - by Richard Carrier
- ↳ Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus – by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- ↳ The Big Questions: Philosophy - Simon Blackburn
- ↳ Science Was Born of Christianity: The Teaching of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki - by Stacy Trasancos
- ↳ The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom - by Jonathan Haidt
- ↳ A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One - by George R. R. Martin
- ↳ Tempesta's Dream: A Story of Love, Friendship and Opera - by Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
- ↳ Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2012-2013
- ↳ The Drowning Girl - by Caitlin R. Kiernan
- ↳ The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga - by Sylvain Tesson
- ↳ The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion: The Mormons - by David Fitzgerald
- ↳ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce
- ↳ The Divine Comedy - by Dante Alighieri
- ↳ The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Dubliners - by James Joyce
- ↳ My Name Is Red - by Orhan Pamuk
- ↳ The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Man Who Was Thursday - by G. K. Chesterton
- ↳ The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker
- ↳ Lord Jim - by Joseph Conrad
- ↳ The Hobbit - by J. R. R. Tolkien
- ↳ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - by Douglas Adams
- ↳ Atlas Shrugged - by Ayn Rand
- ↳ Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman
- ↳ World War Z - by Max Brooks
- ↳ Evolutionary Psychology - by Robin Dunbar, Louise Barrett, John Lycett
- ↳ Moby Dick; or, the Whale - by Herman Melville
- ↳ A Visit from the Goon Squad - by Jennifer Egan
- ↳ Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel - by Russell Banks
- ↳ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - by Thomas S. Kuhn
- ↳ Hobbes: Leviathan: Revised student edition - by Thomas Hobbes
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2010-2011
- ↳ The House of the Spirits - by Isabel Allende
- ↳ Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens - by Christopher Hitchens
- ↳ The Falls: A Novel (P.S.) by Joyce Carol Oates
- ↳ Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection - by D.M. Murdock
- ↳ The Glass Bead Game: A Novel - by Hermann Hesse
- ↳ A Devil's Chaplain - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ The Hero with a Thousand Faces - by Joseph Campbell
- ↳ The Brothers Karamazov - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ↳ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - by Mark Twain
- ↳ The Moral Landscape - by Sam Harris
- ↳ The Decameron - by Giovanni Boccaccio
- ↳ The Road - by Cormac McCarthy
- ↳ The Grand Design - by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
- ↳ The Evolution of God - by Robert Wright
- ↳ The Tin Drum - by Gunter Grass
- ↳ Good Omens - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - by Dan Ariely
- ↳ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel - by Haruki Murakami
- ↳ ALONE: Orphaned on the Ocean - by Richard Logan & Tere Duperrault Fassbender
- ↳ Don Quixote - Translated by Edith Grossman
- ↳ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - by Oliver Sacks
- ↳ Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - by Nikolai Gogol
- ↳ The Passion of the Western Mind - by Richard Tarnas
- ↳ The Left Hand of Darkness - by Ursula K. Le Guin
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2008-2009
- ↳ The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - by Lewis Carroll
- ↳ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle - by Chris Hedges
- ↳ The Sound and the Fury - by William Faulkner
- ↳ The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ When Good Thinking Goes Bad - by Todd C. Riniolo
- ↳ House of Leaves - by Mark Z. Danielewski
- ↳ American Gods: A Novel - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved - by Frans de Waal
- ↳ The Enormous Room - by E.E. Cummings
- ↳ The Picture of Dorian Gray - by Oscar Wilde
- ↳ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - by Christopher Hitchens
- ↳ The Name of the Rose - by Umberto Eco
- ↳ Dreams From My Father - by Barack Obama
- ↳ Paradise Lost - by John Milton
- ↳ Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism - by Kevin Phillips
- ↳ The Secret Garden - by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- ↳ Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists - by Dan Barker
- ↳ The Things They Carried - by Tim O'Brien
- ↳ The Limits of Power - by Andrew Bacevich
- ↳ Lolita - by Vladimir Nabokov
- ↳ Orlando - by Virginia Woolf
- ↳ On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not - by Robert Burton
- ↳ 50 reasons people give for believing in a god - by Guy P. Harrison
- ↳ Walden - by Henry David Thoreau
- ↳ Exile and the Kingdom - by Albert Camus
- ↳ Our Inner Ape - by Frans de Waal
- ↳ Your Inner Fish - by Neil Shubin
- ↳ No Country for Old Men - by Cormac McCarthy
- ↳ The Age of American Unreason - by Susan Jacoby
- ↳ Ten Theories of Human Nature - by Leslie Stevenson & David Haberman
- ↳ Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
- ↳ The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature - by Stephen Pinker
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2006-2007
- ↳ A Thousand Splendid Suns - by Khaled Hosseini
- ↳ The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - by Philip Zimbardo
- ↳ Responsibility and Judgment - by Hannah Arendt
- ↳ Godless in America: Conversations With an Atheist - by George A. Ricker
- ↳ Interventions - by Noam Chomsky
- ↳ Religious Expression and the American Constitution - by Franklyn S. Haiman
- ↳ Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future - by Bill McKibben
- ↳ The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Woman in the Dunes - by Abe Kobo
- ↳ Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction - by Eugenie Scott
- ↳ The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - by Michael Pollan
- ↳ I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 - by Robert Graves
- ↳ Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - by Daniel Dennett
- ↳ A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East - by David Fromkin
- ↳ The Time Traveler's Wife - by Audrey Niffenegger
- ↳ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - by Sam Harris
- ↳ Ender's Game - by Orson Scott Card
- ↳ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - by Mark Haddon
- ↳ Value & Virtue in a Godless Universe - by Erik J. Wielenberg
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2004-2005
- ↳ The March: A Novel - by E.L. Doctorow
- ↳ The Ethical Brain - by Michael Gazzaniga
- ↳ Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism - by Susan Jacoby
- ↳ Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Battle for God - by Karen Armstrong
- ↳ The Future of Life - by Edward O. Wilson
- ↳ What is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live - by A.C. Grayling
- ↳ Civilization and It's Enemies: The Next Stage of History - by Lee Harris
- ↳ Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space - by Carl Sagan
- ↳ How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God - by Michael Shermer
- ↳ Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain - by Antonio Damasio
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2002-2003
- ↳ Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right - by Al Franken
- ↳ The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - by Matt Ridley
- ↳ The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - by Stephen Pinker
- ↳ Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Atheism: A Reader - edited by S. T. Joshi
- ↳ Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark - by Carl Sagan
- ↳ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - by Dee Alexander Brown
- ↳ Future Shock - by Alvin Toffler
Quick Links
As an Amazon Associate BookTalk.org earns from qualifying purchases.