The Magic of Stories
Here are some of my favorite books with links to Amazon.com. Should you buy a book through my website, at no extra cost you’ll bless me with the standard Amazon referral fee. Thank You and Enjoy.
MY BOOKS
Billions of Virgins In Ecstasy
By Strange de Jim
In 1970s San Francisco, real-life town-fool/masseur Strange de Jim accidentally does something brilliant which brings him hundreds of wonderful new best friends. He hopes you'll use his discovery to improve your own life a thousand percent. He then massages thousands of assorted men and women, and learns something completely shocking. Finally he fantasizes falling in love with an erotic masseuse trained in the Indian healing arts, a ravishing triple-jointed Mininuko Courtesan and a young Olympic gymnast with a most amusing sexual problem. They lead Earth to a spectacular Orgasm of Light. Billions of Virgins in Ecstasy also has wonderful photos.
San Francisco’s Castro
By Strange de Jim
Nestled in the Eureka Valley area, the Castro is arguably the most well-known of San Francisco's neighborhoods, having been the epicenter of the gay rights movement since the 1970s. This new collection of photographs shows the area's growth from a smattering of Victorian houses built for working-class families in the 1870s to the flood of young gay men who settled in the neighborhood during the 1970s. This influx transformed the area and led to the rise of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to a major public office. This book also chronicles the 1978 assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, the subsequent riots, and the effects of AIDS on the community in the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, these stirring images bear witness to the resilience of the Castro today.
The Strange Experience
By Strange de Jim
San Francisco's Official Town Fool/Masseur figures out how to attract literally hundreds of wonderful new friends onto his massage table. The book contain s photos of a hundred of said friends, with the author's full explanation of his simple and effective techniques.
NEW-AGE/SPIRITUAL
Be Here Now
By Ram Dass
In March 1961, Professor Richard Alpert – later renamed Ram Dass – held appointments in four departments at Harvard University. He published books, drove a Mercedes and regularly vacationed in the Caribbean. By most societal standards, he had achieved great success... And yet he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing.
A Course in Miracles
By Helen Schucman
Offers ecumenical meditations on love, perception, forgiveness, eternal life, and theoretical concepts in theology. It also has 365 exercises which show the reader how to perform miracles.
Handbook to Higher Consciousness
By Ken Keyes, Jr.
This perennial bestseller is more popular than ever and has helped countless people experience dramatic changes in their lives from the time they begin applying the simple, effective techniques. Just what it says. Especially good in dramatizing the benefits of nonattachment. I wouldn't give up my copy for anything.
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
By Richard Bach
An easy-to-read account of the power of manifesting.
Seth Speaks, The Nature of Personal Reality
By Jane Roberts
Seth challenges our assumptions about the nature of reality. He explains how the conscious mind directs unconscious activity and has at its command all the powers of the inner self. Included are excellent exercises for applying these theories to any life situation.
The Glass Bead Game
By Hermann Hesse
An intriguing story of a game which encompasses the Universe and a major contribution to contemporary philosophic literature and has a powerful vision of universality, the inner unity of man’s cultural ideals and his search for personal perfection and social responsibility.
Life After Life
By Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D.
A study which found that many of those who have been pronounced clinically dead and then revived have met spirit guides.
The Teachings of Don Juan
By Carlos Castaneda
An anthropology student becomes the apprentice of a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. A good account of other realities.
The Sybil
By Par Lagerkvist
A Nobel Prize winner describes what it's like to surrender to the All.
2150 A.D.
By Thea Alexander
A novel about a society in which everyone has access to his or her higher self.
The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
By Thaddeus Golas
It's a short book, and I like it. This classic book is full of useful tips on how to live a more conscious life and to be an engaged and aware member of the universal community.
FUN/FANTASTIC
Stranger in a Strange Land
By Robert Heinlein
This Hugo Award-winning all-time masterpiece is often credited with starting the New Age movement, and George Lucas credits it with inspiring Star Wars. Valentine Michael Smith is born and is the sole survivor as the 1st Mars expedition crashes on that planet. The incredibly wise and powerful Martian Old Ones raise him with their own nestlings, bringing out many abilities we Earthlings have no idea we possess. The Old Ones allow the 2nd Mars expedition to take Mike back to Earth where he displays the abilities George Lucas gave Yoda and the Jedi. It's a story of a group marriage, based on integrity, whose goal is the development of the members' highest potential. Fascinating.
The Diana Chronicles
By Tina Brown
As she entered her teens Diana Spencer decided she was going to marry Prince Charles. She learned that, as the head of the Church of England, he had to marry a virgin, who would actually be given a medical examination; so she kept herself pure. Prince Charles dated many beautiful women, but he couldn’t marry any of them (or his present wife). The rest is history. Tina Brown had access to all the Royals, the journalists, the servants, the paparazzi, etc. This is truly an amazing story.
According to Listopia Best Gay Fiction of All Time: Armistead Maupin has 6 novels in the top 100, including the first Tales of the City at #11. Tales started as a shocking and immensely popular daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle and went on to become 9 novels and 3 television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney. You are truly in for a treat.
Tales of the City
By Armistead Maupin
The first of nine novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.
More Tales of the City
By Armistead Maupin
The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgänger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all—without ever leaving home.
Further Tales of the City
By Armistead Maupin
The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in a San Francisco park.
Babycakes
By Armistead Maupin
When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.
Significant Others
By Armistead Maupin
Tranquility reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the world’s most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin’s cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.
Sure of You
By Armistead Maupin
A fiercely ambitious TV talk show host finds she must choose between national stardom in New York and a husband and child in San Francisco. Caught in the middle is their longtime friend, a gay man whose own future is even more uncertain. Wistful and compassionate yet subversively funny, Sure of You is the pitch-perfect sixth novel in Armistead Maupin’s legendary Tales of the City series.
Michael Tolliver Lives
By Armistead Maupin
Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver — the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers — for a single day at once mundane and extraordinary... and filled with the everyday miracles of living.
Mary Ann in Autumn
By Armistead Maupin
Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is a touching portrait of friendship, family, and fresh starts, as the City by the Bay welcomes back Mary Ann Singleton, the beloved Tales of the City heroine who started it all. A new chapter begins in the lives of both Mary Ann and Michael “Mouse” Tolliver when she returns to San Francisco to rejoin her oldest friend after years in New York City… the reunion that fans of Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City series have been awaiting for years.
The Days of Anna Madrigal
By Armistead Maupin
The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching novel, follows one of modern literature’s most unforgettable and enduring characters—Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane—as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her past.
Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of “leaving like a lady,” Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker Jake Greenleaf; her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter Shawna; and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades.
Some members of Anna’s family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where 60,000 revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.
My Gorgeous Life
By Dame Edna Everage
Perhaps the most inspirational book that will ever have you rolling on the floor.
Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors. His novels have sold over 40,000,000 copies. The ones below are all about the Discworld, very much like Earth. Read any one, and you'll be hooked. Here are a few of my faves. I’d start with...
Witches Abroad
By Terry Pratchett.
Granny Weatherwax knows that beneath the voluminous layers of her clothing there's bare skin, but that doesn't mean she approves of it.
Mort
By Terry Pratchett
Death needs an apprentice, and innocent young aptly named Mort gets the job.
Maskerade
By Terry Pratchett
Witches Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax watch as potential witch Agnes try for a career in opera.
Hogfather
By Terry Pratchett
A story of Discworld where the Hogfather, a Santa Claus figure, has disappeared, with Death taking his place.
The Fifth Elephant
By Terry Pratchett
Samuel Vimes, the hard-bitten captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, gets caught up in an uneasy truce between dwarfs, werewolves, and vampires in the theft of the Scone of Stone (a particularly important piece of dwarf bread) and in the old werewolf custom of giving humans a short start in the hunt and then cheating.
Thief of Time
By Terry Pratchett
The Monks of History live in a Tibetan sort of area known as "enlightenment country." Their job: "to see that tomorrow happens at all." A mysterious Lady wants time-obsessed Jeremy Clockson to build a totally accurate glass clock. It will trap time and stop it, eliminating humanity's irritating unpredictability.
The Truth
By Terry Pratchett
When printing comes to Ankh-Morpork, it "drags the city kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat." William de Worde, well-meaning younger son of reactionary nobility, has been providing a monthly newsletter to the elite using engraving. Then he is struck (and seriously bruised) by the power of the press. The dwarves responsible convince William to expand his newsletter and the Ankh-Morpork Times is born.
The Last Continent: A Discworld Novel
ByTerry Pratchett
A lighthearted tour of the fantasy land of Fourecks, a very Australian sort of place, with brief courses in theoretical physics and evolution thrown in for good measure.
Making Money
By Terry Pratchett
The hero, a scoundrel, is put in charge of the mint.
Pyramids
By Terry Pratchett
It's bad enough being new on the job, but Teppic hasn't a clue as to what a pharaoh is supposed to do. First, there's the monumental task of building a suitable resting place for Dad — a pyramid to end all pyramids.
The Wee Free Men
By Terry Pratchett
Supposedly this is a book for teens. Don't tell anyone I really enjoyed it.
Wintersmith
By Terry Pratchett
A continuation of the story of the Wee Free Men.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff
By Christopher Moore
Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. Just what it says. Christopher Moore is another of my favorite authors. I’d start with this one.
Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story
By Christopher Moore
A vampire tale set in San Francisco. The author has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, Dave Barry and Douglas Adams.
You Suck
By Christopher Moore
A continuation of the vampire story. Waking up after a fantastic night unlike anything he's ever experienced, Thomas discovers that his girlfriend, Jody — the woman of his dreams — is a vampire. And surprise! Now he's one, too.
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
By Christopher Moore
The setting is the California coast near Big Sur. Any book that begins , "As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good," can't be all bad.
