Halfman, Halfbook

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Taking a journey across a country on a well-known or well-travelled road is a classic travel trope. Route 66 in America is one of the famous ones, and a lesser-known one in the UK is the Run To The Sun where lots of people in camper vans head down the A303 in the vain hope that they will find the sun out when they get there.

Taking a road trip around Wales is not something that I even knew about, let alone though possible. But this is the road around Wales is the road that Jones has chosen to ride his scooter along. It is a good choice of road too, it crosses the entire country, winds its way through industrial landscapes, skirts mountains and passes through numerous towns and villages.

Jones thinks that it will be the best way to discover just how is in the 21st century. There is one element of jeopardy though, will his scooter, which he has christened, Gwendoline, make it?

He begins the journey in Cardiff, the capital of the country for almost no time at all. There is a juxtaposition between the shiny new parts of the city and older, more run-down parts near the docks. It doesn’t take much to see the poverty that still exists in certain areas. He ends up taking a photo of a couple celebrating their engagement in Ynysangharad Park at the bandstand for a reason that he isn’t expecting at all!

He moves onto the Rhonda Valley, a place that has changed dramatically. The trees were cleared initially for livestock and industry and the population growth was huge. The residents still there are now being offered free trees to plant in their little bit against climate change. He finds in all the places he travels through that there is lots of community spirit. He does note that in a lot of places, that hope and optimism have often moved on though.

Many places he passes through are a bit jaded and run down and he is often disappointed in little ways. However there are high points of his trip too, watching red kites being fed is spectacular if bloody, and the monument at Aberfan to remember those lost in the disaster leaves him utterly lost for words.

The north of Wales is spectacular and he even runs out of superlatives when describing the scenery. Though trying to look at the countryside whilst riding means he has to try and avoid tractors. However, the thing that gives him an even bigger shock is the price of tea and Welsh Cake! Leaving Snowdonia means that the journey is almost at an end. As the road follows the River Conwy the road twists less as it reaches the coast.

I really liked this, Jones is an engaging writer. While he is Welsh by birth, he has travelled enough around the world to give him an outsider’s perspective on his home country. If you want to read a modern view of this tiny county and the challenges that it faces, then you can’t go wrong with this.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Even though we call this place Earth, it is like us, around 70% water. The TV programme, Blue Planet was right. Water is a strange substance too, we rely on it utterly for life and we would only last a few days without anything to drink. And yet too much of it can kill us. Science is slowly learning that we water in many more ways, rather than just consuming it. Scientists are learning that being nearby, in, on or even underwater can have remarkable benefits for our health and wellbeing

This is the first time that I had read this book, and what Nichols was writing resonate with me, As well as Woodlands, one of the places that I can feel calm is next to water, be it a gently babbling stream, or sitting by the sea with a bag of chips listening to the waves against the pebbles on West Bay beach. Just bliss. And that is what this book is about, aptly captured in the title of the first chapter, Why Do We Love Water so much?

And why do we?

Nichols sets about to explaining the latest understanding what the effect of being in the presence of water has on our mind and mental health.

Even though the science of the brain has advanced tremendously in the past two decades, we are still metaphorically dipping our toes on the very edge of this ocean of knowledge. We understand a lot, but there are still so many unanswered questions. Even though we don’t understand the processes all the time, they can see the effect that near water has on the brain chemistry and the way that we respond can be monitored.

He details just how the brain senses and understands the colour blue and how it is calming when compared to other colours in the spectrum. Fitting blue lights in Japanese train stations reduced crime and stopped all suicide attempts. Scientists can now measure the amount of catecholamines in the body when immersed in water and have proven that the reduction in this chemical is similar to the amount found during relaxation and stress. There is a small in near Santa Crus which has utilitarian rooms that are right next to the ocean. Artists and others use these to clear the cobwebs from their minds and reset their creative abilities. I particularly liked his use of giving blue marbles away which represent where we live, when you look through it, it feels like you are beneath the water with the light being split, and as a reminder to be grateful for all we have. He has given away one million blue marbles now.

Nichols moves between real-life examples and onto the science as they understand it at the moment. He has an engaging writing style and I understood most of the time what he was talking about, with only the odd moment of misunderstanding on my part. I thought the whole subject of how the mind reacts to water to be endlessly fascinating and the book was full of moments where it really made sense. If you are curious about why we still have an aquatic blue mind, I think that you will find this absorbing too.

Imagine being in charge of and responsible for the biggest country on the planet. You have the ability to obliterate life many times over at short notice. The weight on your shoulders would be immense. Some rise to this challenge. Others don’t.

In all of this daily pressure, Obama wanted to see a daily snapshot from the people that live in the country that he loved. His postroom was under the commands of a lady called Fiona, and between her and her staff, they would deliver him ten letters a day from people from all over America.

These people would write to him for all types of reasons. Some were writing to say thank you for something, some were asking for help and others were expressing an opinion. Others were writing to criticise something about his or his policies. The letters were selected by Fiona to give an unfiltered cross-section of feelings from the American public in each daily selection.

A selection of the letters that he received have been reproduced in this book. There are neatly typed ones on headed paper, hand written notes from children and hurriedly scribbled messages. Some of the letters would be passed to the relevant departments with a note to address that particular issue from the writers or to examine the policy that had caused the angst. They have also included some of the replies that he sent back to the authors.

The author of the book talks to some of those people that were lucky enough to receive a reply from Obama finding out about the wider story that prompted them to write in the first place. She finds out that those who did get a reply treasured them, even some of the cynical Republicans.

I read this book in between the 2024 election and the inauguration of the most recent incumbent to the position, (or should that be encumbrance?) and the difference between the two men could not be more stark. Obama is full of compassion and empathy for his fellow citizens, curious about why they have written and eager to help where he could. Sadly some of those that wrote were beyond his help. It does make for painful reading at times.

Throughout the book, Laskas fills in the gaps, gives details of how the system worked and interviews the team that got those ten letters in front of the president.

I really liked this and it is one of those books that I wish that I had read much earlier, but it got buried in a pile… If you want a reminder of what a president who is there to serve his people is like, then read this.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

The majority of these stories were written as people began to explore the frozen extremes of our planet. The adventurers who risked everything to discover what was at these latitudes bought the daring exploits back and the writers of the day explored the terror of the unknowns in their own way. There are six stories set in each of the North and South Poles and there is something for everyone in here

North
The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon written by James Hogg
I wasn’t that enamoured with this story. It wasn’t very horrific, just very melodramatic. I thought it was fairly unplausible as the main character tames a polar bear. The writing is a bit laboured and not overly clear. It is almost the length of a novella too.

The Moonstone Mass by Harriet Prescott Spofford
This is an unsettling story set in the Arctic. There are strange happenings. The compass stops working and the characters have a feeling of disconnect to the world as the battle against characters that causes them utter horror.

The Captain of the Polestar by Arthur Conan Doyle
A whaling ship in the far north is hoping to harpoon some whales soon to pay their way. They don’t see any whales, but the men keep reporting a ghostly apparition that ends up spooking the captain of the ship. I think I preferred the Conan Doyle story that I read in Cornish Horrors

Skule Skerry by John Buchan
I thought that this was a very atmospheric and dramatic story of a man on an island who is there to spot migrating birds. After being pummelled by a storm, he is on the ragged edge of survival when he glimpses something that shocks him to his core.

The Third Interne Idwal Jones
A very very short story about three assistants who had died. The guy who survived was sure they had been murdered but there was no proof. Apart from the voices…

Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard by Aviaq Johnston
A modern story about a shadow glimpsed in a blizzard. It is very well-written and genuinely terrifying!

South
A Secret of the South Pole Hamilton Drummond
A ghost ship that has sailed all around the sea is discovered. The crew are all dead and the thing that still killed them is still on there…

In Amundsen’s Tent by John Martin Leahy
I thought this story was the closest to horror in this book. There is a severed head and a diary documenting the last days of the team as they encounter something that inhabits this Antarctic landscape.

Creatures of the Light by Sophie Wenzel Ellis
A very strange tale that is based on eugenics. Someone is hoping to create a god-like people to repopulate the earth. Strange and always disturbing as most things about this subject are.

Bride of the Antarctic by Mordred Weir
A classic creepy ghost story. Very short and very well written.

Ghost by Henry Kuttner
A modern haunting from an old but dangerous ghost that has been brought back by modern science. But is it manifesting? One character heads to the Antarctic to perform an exorcism with the hope of ridding the station of the ghost. An interesting story and premise for a plot

The Polar Vortex by Malcolm M Ferguson
I really was struck on this story. It is a cross between a scientific diary and a man reaching the very edge of his sanity.

The stories included within can vary in quality, but the thing I like most about this series is that it brings to my attention writers who I have genuinely never heard of or read. If you are collecting these and haven’t got a copy of this, get it!

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Ligeia – Edgar Allan Poe
I wasn’t overly impressed with Poe’s story. It did feel very gothic and had a certain atmosphere, but I felt that the plot was missing a certain something

My Father’s Secret – Anon
I thought that this was a very chilling story and was very Victorian in style and content.

Cruel Coppinger – R. S. Hawker
I liked this short story a lot. It was everything that I expected from a Cornish smuggling tale.

Colonel Benyon’s Entanglement – Mary Elizabeth Braddon
I really didn’t get along with this story at all. Not a lot happens and the plot is a bit vague, until one key scene towards the end of the story.

The Phantom Hare – M. H.
I liked this story. There is a good mix of jeopardy in the plot along with a good dollop of folklore. The plot is not particularly complex, so much so that I even guessed the outcome!

Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House – Clara Venn
Who doesn’t love a Christmas ghost story? It is full of swirling mist and noisy ghosts, and I liked this one.

In the Mist – Mary E. Penn
This was another favourite of mine from the collection. There is tragedy and peril and a conclusion that I really wasn’t expecting.

The Baronet’s Craze – Mrs. H. L. Cox
This is a well-thought through story of the grief a father is going through as he mourns the loss of a daughter.

The Coming of Abel Behenna – Bram Stoker
A strange tale of competitive love lost and gained and the duplicity of some men.

The Roll-Call of the Reef – Arthur Quiller-Couch
A story of shipwrecks in a storm and how teo survivors make an unlikely friendship

The Haunted Spinney – Elliott O’Donnell
This has wind howling through the trees. The night is dark and oppressive and then a scream is heard. It isn’t long before a body is found. No one knows who has committed the murder, but perhaps the ghost hunter can find the culprit.

A Ghostly Visitation: A True Incident – E. M. Bray
I though that this was a reasonable ghost story set in a house with a mostly benevolent spirit.

The Screaming Skull – F. Marion Crawford
I though that this story was super creepy. It is full of unnerving moments as the main character tries to understand the screams he hears at night.

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot – Arthur Conan Doyle
I hadn’t read any Doyle before this short story (I know…) and I actually quite liked it. I can see where the character traits of Holmes in the TV series come from. It did feel that he worked the plotline back from the conclusion though.

The Mask – F. Tennyson Jesse
A story of illicit love and affairs, coupled with murder and further double-crossing. It felt the most Cornish of the stories in the collection, but the accents took a bit of getting used to.

It is not a bad book overall, like with any collection of stories, there were some I liked and others I felt indifferent about. I didn’t feel that there was much horror in the stories within. The Cornish links felt tenuous at times in some of the stories, but other had very strong links. If you are collecting the series then you probably need to get this.

5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

If you are a regular reader of my reviews on my blog or Good Reads, then you’ll know I like spending time in the woodlands. They are cool at the height of summer, stark and still beautiful in the depths of winter, and listening to the susurration of the leaves in the wind in the autumn is as calming for me as hearing the sound of waves of the burbling of a stream.

A wood or coppice can provide in a multitude of ways, food, fuel and timber for structures, poles for barriers for us. But they are a habitat that can support thousands of other creatures, in particular ancient woodlands. They are also home to the entities that inhabit our imaginations and folklore and that liminal space in between.

Menmuir also has a thing about woodlands in the same way that he was attracted to the water as I read about in The Draw Of The Sea. This book does a similar thing to that previous book, he uses it to explore how other people use woodlands in their lives to nourish their souls, provide an income, as a source of materials for the beautiful things they are making and for those that are seeking the otherworldly.

He begins at the trees that his father planted nine years before, in a small village in Wales. He planted them so he could create something that would outlast him, would offer his descendants shade and be his small contribution to address the dramatic loss of biodiversity that we are seeing. Menmuir watches his father and son, who is virtually the same age as the wood, collecting oak galls. He would be finding the gall in pockets and around the house for ages after.

Death is one of the few taboos left in our society, probably because we think if we ignore it, it won’t happen to us and it might go away. Spoiler alert; it won’t… People now have more choice as to what happened to them after death and more are choosing to be interred in a woodland cemetery. The thought of my body benefiting an oak is quite appealing. He goes to visit Ele and Anthony who live in a 27-acre woodland in Cornwall. The day they moved there they buried a lady and another soon followed and before long they were custodians of a natural graveyard. He then heads over to meet Jessie who makes willow caskets and learns of the stories behind their creation and how people make their own and those for their spouses.

He attends a festival of bodgers. These are people who carve wooden spoons and other simple items. He visits a couple of boat builders, one in Cornwall and another in Glasgow. He is lucky enough to visit Japan to see the work of the traditional woodworkers in Takavana and visit a sacred forest.

The spiritual links that people forge with woodlands are well covered in this book. He participates in wassailing, visits the Sycamore Gap before those bastards cut it down, takes a walk through a fictional wood in Shropshire and travels a long way back in time in an ancient yew grove.

Like his previous book about the sea, Menmuir is seeking people whose stories are intertwined with woodlands. He is an engaging writer whose fascination with the things people have to tell him and a desire to learn from others makes this a brilliant book. It is a gentle story too, he writes like he has all the time in the world to discover a new thing about woodlands. I thought it was excellent and can highly recommend it.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Winter is a season people love and hate. Some love the cold bright days and the twinkling of lights in what seems to be an increasingly longer Christmas period. For others this is the worst time of the year, the days are short and grey, the lack of sunlight opening out to depression in the form of SAD.

Personally, I like all of the seasons for different reasons, but do hate what feels like the relentless grey that we sometimes get over the winter. Helen Moat is one of those who hates winter, the relentless gloom causes her severe anxiety. This book is her journey over three winters to see if she can overcome it.

Normally her anxiety builds from October; the long days of summer are over, the heat is fading and soon the clocks will change once again. This October is stranger than most. It is 2020 and I am sure we can remember what happened that year… She has managed to escape with her husband to Wales in their campervan where the lockdown and contact rules dictate who can do what and when. The weather causes them to cut short their break, something they come to regret as the further lockdowns that happen later in the year mean they can’t get away again.

But this year is different, this is the year she wants to break her fear of this season. It is a journey that will take her to Lapland and Japan, finding out how other cultures deal with the season of winter.

Moat learns that the people in the far north rarely suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) even though their day can be as short as six hours long. She is fortunate to get a trip out there as a freelance travel journalist. The -20C temperature will take a bit of getting used to…

She brings back to the UK what she has learnt over there, light from candles and a wood burner helps with the ambience as she learns to celebrate the small things; hot soups, cakes and getting outside into the natural world and adopting the Scandinavian policy of ‘bunkering down’. She uses the dark nights to slow down and reflect and consider how it was starting to work for her.

Mot reached her third winter. The summer had been great and she loved the time she spent with friends on patios drinking wine and watching the bats swoop by. In September her and her husband head to France. She was trying to postpone winter by trying to find the later summer sun, but she knew that she had to face the physical and figurative darkness.

Moat is fortunate enough to get a commission to write about Japanese food, Not only was she going to a place that she had always dreamed of visiting, Japan. Moat has always strived for perfection in her life, but it would be here that she would learn about the Japanese beauty of imperfection – Wabi-Sabi.

Being there is unsettling and alien. Only having three words in Japanese meant that communication was mostly laughing and gestures. She learns so much about the culture, their respect and awe for the natural world, but it also teaches her that all things must change and each season is treated with equal weight. She would bring home mental skills that would help her cope with winter at home.

I thought that this was really good. It is a journey in many senses, but it is mostly about her understanding and coming to terms with winter. She comes to understand why the winter is so hard to cope with and explains the methods she has found to mitigate her worries. Her trips abroad were fascinating and I felt that I had learnt a little more about the places she went to. If you have a thing about the darkest part of the year then I would really recommend reading this. It is worth reading in conjunction with Wintering by Katherine May too.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Who doesn’t love a quiz? A well-written one has something for everyone, easy questions to give a little confidence to participants, harder questions for stretch people and the occasional tough question to sort the experts out. Up until now, I hadn’t read Prisoners of Geography, so before starting working my way through this, I read that book. It was eye-opening, but also a reminder of just how fast things can change in geopolitics!

Anyway, to the quiz book. There are about 300 questions, puzzles and word games in total to answer. These have been divided into nine sections below and these are my scores:

Americas – 33 right

Asia – 40 right

Europe – 50 right

Africa – 37 right

Middle East – 33 right

Latin America – 52 right

Oceania – 27 right

The Poles – 43 right

Space – 29 right

Some of them were fiendishly difficult, but thankfully some of these questions are fairly straightforward so most people should be able to score some marks. I did well in some regions and poorly in others. The story of my school life! I did think that I should have done better in America, but then I remembered just how little Americans know about the rest of the world, so didn’t feel too bad then.

I did surprise myself with some of the answers I got right though. Advantage of having read a lot of non-fiction over the years. It would have been nice to know what the total number of marks available per section was, but then I would know just how badly I performed! It was a great bit of fun though.