Tanos's weblog

Posts tagged "books"

9 Dec 11 The Single Market and the Marketplace books

It's been a pretty momentous day, with Eurozone countries and aspiring Eurozone countries forming their 'euro-plus' grouping with tighter controls on governments' borrowing and budgets. This may lead to the European Commission or something like it vetting and possibly vetoing the budgets of democratically elected governments, and I doubt Britain will be the only non-Euro country to refuse to sign in the end. In fact, I can see some Euro countries failing to participate if it goes to a referendum. So huge, defining political moments of our time etc etc. But all day it's been reminding me of Laura [more...]

25 Oct 10 "Slave Girl of Gor" by John Norman

I have a vivid memory of seeing a display of Gor books in a branch of W.H. Smiths in about 1978, when I was 6 or 7 years old. Some of the books were face-out so I could see the tempting pictures of chained, half-naked slave girls. The title of one, "Slave Girl of Gor", jumped out at me, as I was already secretly fascinated with all aspects of slavery - well, at the least the aspects that could be gleaned from television, films, and children's books. Would that woman begging the king's mercy in the Ladybird "King Alfred the Great" make a good slave? Probably not, I thought, but these Gor books looked [more...]

29 Sep 10 Slave Girl of Gor

I've started re-reading Slave Girl of Gor, which I think I last read in about 1997. I have a love-hate relationship with John Norman's books: they're badly written and have been horribly misused by online roleplayers, but they're bloody hot in places. Most of all, they're hot in a very D/s way. Hot psychological and emotional scenarios about submission and subjugation, rather than just physical stuff - although there's plenty of that too. [more...]

5 Jan 10 "The Curious Human Phenomenon" by Peter Masters

A couple of years ago I reviewed Peter Masters' previous title, "The Control Book", and "The Curious Human Phenomenon" is very much in the same vein. It doesn't try to teach you BDSM techniques, but instead tries to explain some of the reasons behind elements of BDSM. Masters summarises this by saying BDSM has an "abundance of 'how'" but a "scarcity of 'why'". [more...]

20 Nov 09 BDSM Book News launch

BBN is the latest version of my list of BDSM and Fetish books, which I've been maintaining from 1998. Since January 2007 I started ranking the books according to sales on Amazon.com to produce a Top 100 bestseller list, and almost three years later it's time for a relaunch. [more...]

24 Dec 08 Surviving

For the last six weeks the BBC has been showing "Survivors", a reworking of a 1970s series, in which a group of people survive an influenza pandemic that kills almost all of humanity - leaving only hundreds or thousands alive in the UK where the action is set. The climax last night was a bit of a surprise - mostly that they were so lame about using violence. [more...]

14 Nov 08 "The Human Pony" by Rebecca Wilcox

Rebecca Wilcox's new book has been getting a lot of coverage in Open Air BDSM and Pony Play circles, and I received my copy last week. I am very impressed by the quality of this book, and that's speaking as someone who isn't a real pony play enthusiast. [more...]

22 Feb 08 Longer than you'd think...

How long have the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish been in the British Isles? At school, we were told that the Celts had turned up with the Iron Age, maybe around 300 BC and not long before the Romans came and conquered them in turn. The peoples who built Stone Henge and left bronze axe heads had been wiped out by the Celts, but when Imperial Rome gave up, the Celts - now called Britons - were left to their own devices. Waves of Angles, Saxons and Jutes from North Germany and Denmark then invaded, driving the Britons into Cornwall, Wales, Brittany and Scotland - so only Anglo-Saxons were left in England [more...]

16 Jul 07 "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson

Neo-Victorianism is one attractive basis for Household D/s: the Victorian / Edwardian period was the last time middle-class families expected to have servants and live in hierarchical, extended households. Neal Stephenson's novel "The Diamond Age" doesn't deal with D/s or service, but it does present a Neo-Victorian world which I'd like to explore in this review. [more...]

17 Apr 07 "The Control Book" by Peter Masters

Peter Masters had an outline of this book on his website since the early 2000s and if you're really curious some of these versions are still there on the Internet Archive site. However, he's now produced a printed edition, published by Jack Rinella in March 2007, and this review is based on that expanded version. [more...]

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