Feeling to Float

Wild: An Elemental Journey
by Jay Griffiths (2006)

Radiohead Connection:
“It is an astonishing piece of writing and it was exactly what I needed to read….I was not in the greatest of places .. I was feeling low, getting increasingly disturbed and frustrated by the state of pretty much everything in the 21st century, which, can be simply summarised as the inability of the vast majority of our business and political leaders to truly look after the welfare of the vast majority of this planet’s citizens and the earth that we all live in […] Well… this book was truly medicinal and like all great music, it helped to lift me up and pull me out of this low level depression… Reading it, felt like one of those amazing moments in life where one feels an overwhelming sense of relief and amazement that someone could actually be writing about the very things that seemed to be affecting oneself ….. It makes you feel less alone….And it does this in such a beautiful, passionate and raw way …. If you got a copy of ‘The Universal Sigh’, you will notice that Jay Griffiths contributed a piece to it.” - Ed (x)

Description:
“I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home.”

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Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
by Douglas Coupland (1991)

Radiohead Connection:
“Douglas Coupland’s Generation X is one of the few books of recent times that can be described as epochal. The book’s promised sense of protest clearly shares much with Radiohead. ‘I read Generation X and thought: I’ve got this sussed,’ Thom has said.” (x)

• Listed as one of Jonny’s favourite books. (x)

Description:
Generation X is Douglas Coupland’s acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s — a generation known vaguely up to then as “twentysomething.”

Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit “pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause” in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they’ve mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs — “low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry.” They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.

A dark snapshot of the trio’s highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges—landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, “Elvis moments,” and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.

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Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for Lost Civilization
by Graham Hancock & Santha Faiia (1999)

Radiohead Connection:
“And I’m reading this really wacko book about stars and pyramids as well… OK, it’s got a terrible cover. Just ignore the cover…  I saw it while we were working, and it slightly freaked me out. It’s a book that has this theory that there are a lot of ancient sites around the world that pyramids and temples are built on which correlate exactly with stars in the heavens and correlate with things like the Mayan calendar, which is like more accurate than our calendar and takes the wobble in the earth into account. A lot of it is about the idea that in all ancient cultures and myths there is a flood, and before the flood there was a higher form of civilization, a higher form of life on Earth that that was wiped out. And in order to tell us that they were here, they left all this stuff. So, within all this, with the symbolism stuff, they indicate that our period is coming to a close and the next period is about to start.” - Thom Yorke (x)

Description:
In Heaven’s Mirror, author Graham Hancock continues the quest begun in his international best-seller Fingerprints of the Gods: to rediscover the hidden legacy of mankind and to reveal that “ancient” cultures were, in fact, the heirs to a far older forgotten civilization and the inheritors of its archaic, mystical wisdom.

Working with photographer Santha Faiia, Hancock traces a network of sacred sites around the globe on a spectacular voyage of discovery that takes us from the pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt to the enigmatic statues of Easter Island, from the haunting ruins of pre-Columbian America to the splendors of Angkor Wat. It is a journey through myth, magic, and astounding archaeological revelations that forces us to rethink the cultures of our lost ancestors and the origins of civilization.

The Famished Road
by Ben Okri (1991)

Radiohead Connection:
“The song ‘Street Spirit’ from The Bends was completely influenced by Ben Okri’s book The Famished Road, which I read on tour in America.” - Thom Yorke (x)

“The main character has these forces following him around and pulling him about - I feel like that.” - Thom Yorke (x)

Description:
Set in an unnamed African country at an unspecified time (though the similarities with Nigeria in the early 1960s are unmistakable),The Famished Road is narrated by Azaro, an African spirit-child or abiku who, in the folklore of southern Nigeria, is destined to move continually between life and spiritual paradise in an unending cycle of infant death and rebirth. Azaro, however, is tired of never staying long enough to experience life, and decides on this occasion to remain, “to put”, he says, “a smile on my mother’s face”. Pursued by vengeful spirits, and endowed with special powers that lead him into mischief, Azaro introduces us to a whole world of wonders — to his mother and father, an impoverished market trader and a load carrier struggling courageously to keep their dignity and their independence; to Madame Koto, the local bar owner whose journey from innocence to corruption mirrors the realities unfolding around her; to the politics, poverty and brutal reality of life in a shanty town in post-colonial Africa; and to Azaro’s own intensely imagined visions.

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clipartcovers:

OK Computer by Radiohead. Original.

Requested by boyswithguns and by oliveandclementine.

VALIS
by Philip K. Dick (1981)

Radiohead Connection:
”[Paranoid Android’s] theme of imperial collapse came from a friend in New York and Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel VALIS.”

“The main character sees California superimposed with the Roman Empire.” - Thom Yorke (x)

Description:
What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick’s groundbreaking novel, the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world. VALIS is essential reading for any true Philip K. Dick fan, a novel that Roberto Bolaño called “more disturbing than any novel by [Carson] McCullers.” By the end, like Dick himself, you will be left wondering what is real, what is fiction, and just what the price is for divine inspiration.

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Alone in Berlin (alternate title: Every Man Dies Alone)
by Hans Fallada (1947)

Radiohead Connection:
”Got any good book tips for us?”

“Oh! Hans Fallada, you know that book? Alone in Berlin? Hans Fallada, man, that book is genius, absolutely genius. It’s all about this couple during the second World War in Berlin who started leaving postcards, anti-Hitler postcards everywhere. It was written straight after the War and you get this total sense of, the idea of being in a country, where the morons have taken over, the bullies, the selfish gits, you know. Everybody that normally… middle-management, suddenly are in charge, they’re beating you up. And how a country can fall so quickly for, you know, be tricked into it, the bad thing. So yeah, amazing book. I think it’s like a bestseller, amazingly, after how many years? So I’m reading another one of his…” - Thom Yorke (x)

Description:
Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man’s determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule.

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels’ necks.

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Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
by Ian MacDonald (1995)

Radiohead Connection:
“Elsewhere, Radiohead’s ‘vocal science’ bypassed state of the art digitalia for antiquarian technology and the sort of ad hoc boffinry redolent of John Lennon and George Martin’s techniques at Abbey Road during the late Beatles era (Yorke confesses that Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald’s book detailing the recording of every Beatles song, was ‘my bedside reading all through the sessions for the [Kid A and Amnesiac]’).” (x)

Description:
This “Bible of the Beatles” captures the iconic band’s magical and mysterious journey from adorable teenagers to revered cultural emissaries. In this fully updated version, each of their 241 tracks is assessed chronologically from their first amateur recordings in 1957 to their final “reunion” recording in 1995. It also incorporates new information from the Anthology series and recent interviews with Paul McCartney. This comprehensive guide offers fascinating details about the Beatles’ lives, music, and era, never losing sight of what made the band so important, unique, and enjoyable.

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