Read in '26

October - March.

Say what you may, but I really do find the theories of Graham Hancock to be of utmost importance and interest for the whole of humankind, even though the man tends to accelerate a bit too fast every now and then and some of his theories and ideas are occasionally mislead. Some of the mysteries regarding especially the water erosion of the Sphinx, many inexplicable details of the pyramids (such as their peculiar alignment with certain constellations thousands of years before their supposed date of building, their exact positioning regarding the cardinal directions in relation to the technology available at the time, their complete lack of internal decorations, their extremely confusing internal architecture, the sheer size of some of the blocks utilised especially in the internal chambers, and the fact that not a single pyramid built afterwards is even near the brilliance of these early ones, the minuscule circumstantial evidence that actually attributes the pyramids to Khufu and Khafre etc.), the fact that arctic frost in Siberia is filled with tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of mammoths who all died basically at the same time and died fast, which the academia attributes to human hunters, plus various other extremely weird phenomena around the globe, certainly seem to indicate that there is something in our ancient history which the Great Narrative just has not properly explained, and refuses to do so as we speak by avoiding the uncomfortably complicated questions that naturally arise from these observations.

This is Hancock's first book from the time when he was still of the opinion that the displacement of the earth's crust was what caused the rapid deterioration of the polar ice caps and the consequent flooding, which various myths around the globe report over and over again. This theory has since been pretty safely proved to be false, but during the past decade or so he has found another explanation to the sudden change in climate, which occured about 12 000 years ago, and this one certainly seems plausible, and he has also quite a lot of geological evidence to back it up. He finds the explanation to these immense changes to lie in a cloud of comets, which hit the polar ice and caused it to melt extremely rapidly. I highly recommend anybody interested in these questions to pick up this book or the Magicians of the Gods from 2015, or to listen to any of his episodes in the Joe Rogan Experience, which I personally find to be an excellent platform for open discussion about practically any kind of subject, even though I know parts of the current political climate would much rather just silence this nasty bald man with his weird friends and disturbing opinions.

March.

Another one about the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Malmi and Järvelä document the battle of Tampere from March 20th to April 7th and they do it chronologically, using actual eyewitness accounts from both sides. At the start of each chapter, they briefly detail the events of that day, which helps a lot in understanding the whole. This one has also quite a lot of gory details about the whole massacre, including kids doing a version of the good ol' classic where one needs to jump over objects without touching the ground, but instead of pillows or chairs, they are using the bodies of men and horses. What a nice little image, don't you think.

November - March.

A brick of a historical reportage that reads like a novel. Professor Ylikangas details exclusively the arch of unfortunate events that lead to the brutal Finnish Civil War of 1918 between the working-class, socialistic Reds and the republican, bourgeoise Whites. It is a fucking bloodbath on every side with little actual winners, after all the dust has settled. The book caused quite of a controversy back in the early 90s when it was published, because mainstream historians and the public opinion was really not so keen to talk about all the nasty and depressing things that the Whites did after they won the war, such as thousands of unreported executions, depraved and miserly starvation camps for prisoners of war and unfortunate civilians etc. Nowadays you can speak of these things pretty openly, but man did it take a couple of generations to pass until we arrived to this point.

I am starting to roll guided tours about the battle of Tampere in a month or so, hook me up if you're around and are interested.