Author: Paul (Page 2 of 182)

4 out of 5 stars

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

The network of English footpaths is not only extensive, but it is a walked record of human history in these isles, going back thousands of years in some cases. I have walked along some of the holloways in West Dorset, and not only are they spectacular, but they are a record of human movement going back hundreds of years. And in the case of Shutes Lane and Hell Lane, it wouldn’t surprise me that they had their origins deep in the past.

Whilst paths are nowadays seen as second or third rate in this age of the motorcar, Taplin wants to rediscover their literary heritage. She draws on the works of John Clare, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, John Cooper Powys, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas and others. She is intending on trace the relationship of the literary path to the actual paths.

Both animals and man make paths. Where people have walked and not followed the neatly laid out and prescribed asphalt are called desire paths. Animals make similar routes across fields and through hedgerows, finding the most suitable routes to where they want to get to.

Paths that had been used for hundreds of years were taken from the commoners in the state-sanctioned theft of the commons by the landed gentry and the aristocracy (bastards), or as we are taught in history, the enclosure acts. Paths that anyone could and did walk along were now private property. The great and the good (such an inaccurate and misleading title) conspired to then ensure that the footpaths were blocked both legally and illegally.

The paths weren’t just a functional route for one place to another, they had a vital use for villagers to court and socialise after a days toil on the land. There were some landowners who were sympathetic to the plight of those wanting and demanding access, but a lot were concerned that they would mar it.

People have always enjoyed the right to walk through the English Countryside, and they have always done so for pleasure as well as business. In an age of greater material prosperity, our spiritual needs increase: we need the quietness and sweet variety that paths can offer.

Some paths had lots of traffic, others were scarcely used. Some Paths, as written in ‘Still Glides The Stream’ were the first stage in every journey, and others became important hubs at churches and pubs.

The distances that some folks had to walk were large; it wasn’t uncommon for people to walk six miles each way for school or to their place of employment. There was always a path that people travelled along on the final journey to the place they would be interred.

Walking out was seen as a part of courtship, and being seen together was part of a claim, a declaration of intentions. The gentry walked their private paths had the luxury of a carriage for other jaunts. Howitt says they may as well be born without legs… He felt they were missing out on ‘wild sounds and aspects of earth and heaven’.

The paths were public, so you would almost be seen by people who know you. But certain paths would allow some privacy, hence why you still find paths called Lovers Lane.

In a time without pervasive light pollution, paths could take on a more sinister feel. The echoes of folklore could be felt on a moonless night. Dark nights were perfect for those who wished to move around without the authorities’ gaze.

Walking can be a cure for the black dog, and a number of writers in this book have used it for that very purpose. Helen Thomas mentions in her autobiography (I have a copy of this that I really must read) that the act of walking, placing one foot in front of the other, is a balm for many people. This is being proved by modern science too.

Immersion in the natural world is good for our very soul. In the chapter, Sounds, Scents and Seeings, Taplin explores how her chosen writers revel in listening to the things they experience when walking. Taking the time to be in the natural world is important to all these writers.

To venture off the well-trodden path is often an act of trespass, which is ironic given that the chinless wonders had stolen it from the common people in the first place. Though they don’t seem to have a problem riding roughshod over various other landowners’ property in the pursuit of the fox.

Things changed after WW1, feudalism waned somewhat, and things changed in society, sadly, though, not always for the positive. Those in power were not particularly keen to give it up and to an extent, they still have that power. It has taken a further 100 years to get to this point, and it still isn’t over.

Is life a journey? This is the question that Taplin poses at the ned of her book and heads to the library to find references for it. I think it partly is, even though there are a vast number of curve balls that seem to have come my way on this path!

This is a lovely book about the pleasure of taking a walk along an English footpath. I liked the way that she has grouped the literary references together, and added her own take on the chosen writers’ thoughts. The way to keep these footpaths is to keep using them. It stops them from being blocked or falling into disrepair. Organisations like Slow Ways are doing a fantastic job of mapping and recording them. This is a very gentle read about the importance of keeping them alive.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Good Night Melancholy – Xia Jia
This story took a little while to get into, but once I had got my head around what she was trying to do, I thought it was really well done. The questions she poses about machine learning and the Turing Test are really quite poignant. Plus, there is a parallel story of Lindy, a modern robot who is there as a companion for the narrator and the way she explores the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.

Moonlight – Liu Cixin
A man takes three calls in one evening. Each caller knows exactly who he is because they are calling him from the future. In each call, his future self says that he is going to send him details of a technology that his future self says will change the world and give a greener future. I thought that this was a really neat time travel book that sounded utterly plausible.

Broken Stars – Tang Fei
This begins as a coming-of-age story of a girl at school who is undertaking exams. There is a pale woman in this girl’s life who has given her advice based on the stars. I won’t reveal any more but I thought this was quite a disturbing short story!

Submarines – Han Song
A strange story about a Chinese peasant class who live in small submarines on or in the Yangtze River. I did feel that this wasn’t over sci-fi in feel, more alternative history vibes.

Salinger and the Koreans -Han Song
This is a short story about the North Koreans inventing a device called the Quantum Reambiguator and taking over the world with it. When they have conquered America, they want to find the home of the reclusive author, JD Salinger, one of their heroes and turn up there unannounced… Quite an imaginative and amusing story.

Under A Dangling Sky – Cheng Jingbo
A haunting beautiful story about a woman who is searching for singing dolphins. To find them, she is listening though a strange hydrophone that a professor left her, but one day she hears something most unexpected…

What Has Passed Shall In Kinder Light Appear – Bao Shu
I liked this story a lot. It is a bit of a love story between two people who are caught up in world events. But the clever thing is that these events are real things that have taken place, but as the order is completely different, I found it to be a quite unexpected take on history.

The New Year Train – Hao Jinfang
A very very short story about being lost somewhere in the space time continuum. I almost inhaled it it was that short, but it is very good though.

The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales – Fei Dao
This is a strange story, it feel like an older type of Hans Christian Anderson story, but this one has a robot in it. This robot is commanded to travel the Kingdom and tell as many tall tales as possible so he can out bullshit the King. Really enjoyable story!

The Snow of Jinyang – Zhang Ran
Ancient Chinese culture mees steampunk meets and a time traveller from another dimension. What is there not to like about this combination? I thought it was really good too. There is not much character development; it is not really long enough for that, but there is plenty of intrigue and tension in the story.

The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe: Laba Porridge – Anna Wu
A strange story about a writer who wants to have the abilities from five different authors from Earth, a playwright, a poet, a science fiction author, a suspense writer and a classical scholar. However, absorbing their skills and abilities has a great cost. Quite strange and dramatic!

The First Emperor’s Games – Ma Boyong
A short but innovative story about the first emperor of China, who was an avid gamer. The games he plays are a pastiche of the actual things that he should be doing as an Emperor. I.e. the game Civilisation where conquering all the countries around you has a knock on effect. I thought it was very well done.

Reflection – Gu Shi
Another very short story about a clairvoyant. She has no memory of the past, rather, her memories are of events that are yet to happen. I thought there were a couple of flaws in the premise, but I did like it.

The Brain Box – Regina Kanyu Wang
An implant called the brainbox keeps the previous five minutes of all the thoughts you have just had. These can then be read and imparted into anyone else’s mind. If you know you’re going to die, what would go through your min,d and what would you actually want anyone else to know?
Zhao Lin’s thoughts were recorded, and Mr Fang is just about to learn what they were!
I thought it was an excellent story

Coming Of The Light – Chen Quifan
An interesting concept of blending the high-tech world with the Buddhist religion. A monk blesses a light in an app and then the people who use the app start to tell of cures and miracles. I didn’t feel the ending was that strong, but it was nicely written.

A History of Future Illnesses – Chen Quifan
An interesting collection of short stories about various maladies that have affected a future human race. They vary from a reliance of on iPads, fragmented personalities and the arrival of a second moon whose tidal forces affect humans and pople who can master team. Of all of the stories in here, it was this one that made me think the most.

Essays
The three essays at the end f the book add some context into the universe of Chinese scifi. I has ebbed and flowed for a while and almost disappeared at some points in the past. However, with two Chinese authors winning the Hugos in consecutive years, it is approaching the mainstream at warp 10.

I thought that this was a very interesting collection of stories. As usual, there were some stories that I liked more than others. It was good to read another cultures perspective on sci fi. Some of the themes and tropes that they write about were familiar, but there were lots in here that were refreshingly different. If you are scifi fan then I would highly recommend this as a good entry point for Chinese scifi.

5 out of 5 stars

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

Until the 1950s, agriculture had followed a similar pattern year after year. Some technologies had improved the way that the farmer worked the land, tractors for example, but mostly it was the same. But it all changed in the 1950s. This was the time that the first supermarkets began to open, and it was their rise in buying power that changed the farming landscape and made industrial farming a thing.

Gone was the attribute of flavour; instead, supermarket buyers wanted standardisation, robustness when being transported and cheap prices. It had taken 12,000 years, but the desire for flavour had gone, and since the 1950s, nutritional values in foods have declined dramatically as these policies have mostly taken over the food system. The ubiquitous availability of all foods all year round means that we have lost all notion of seasons.

Understanding our planet and remembering our connection to nature is essential if we are to see the seasons as a precursor to us.

Fubini set up his company, Natoora, after seeing a lady who walked into a food store one December demanding peaches and could not understand why they didn’t have any available. He specialised in providing top-quality fruit and veg to high-end restaurants with the emphasis on flavour. And with flavour, you get nutrients, animals instinctively know what minerals they are deficient in and will look to find a plant that has those, and will eat it until their internal balance is restored.

It is as much the locality as it is the variety that determines the flavour, hence the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). Fubini writes about oranges and olives that come from a specific area of Sicily that can trace their origins back to the 8th or 9th century bc. I learn about the Cuore Del Vesuvio, a tomato from Naples. The variety is actually a Cuore de Sorrento, but she renamed it as it is grown in a slightly different region. The tomato is a really old species, and the families that grow it keep the seed year on year. It is thin-skinned and scars easily, but the flavour is another level, hence why it is grown still. This is a tomato that has never seen hydroponics…

Consumers, even in Italy, sadly, see supermarket ‘perfection’ as a desirable quality. Food that can be moved around the modern transport system is durable; it has few other qualities. Innovation does not replace flavour; the best tomatoes make the best pizza; the oven almost doesn’t matter.

He delves into the biological magic that is the relationship between fungi, bacteria and plants. The key is healthy soil that has all the ingredients, as healthy soil equals healthy and nutritious plants. He finds a farm that still uses horses, and the spinach that they grow and he gets to eat was the finest spinach that he has ever had. It is the same with onions that he finds in a tiny 2km square plot. It is the particular makeup of the soils that gives the onions their incomparable flavours from this place in Italy. When people have tried to grow them elsewhere, they have never tasted the same.

He is very scathing of the modern organic system. Modern industrial farming has done its thing and it is sadly no guarantee of quality; unless you know the farmer or smallholder, we are being deceived. One way to get a better-tasting crop and to add flavour is to stress the plants as they are growing. A Sardinian farmer does this by watering his tomatoes with slightly salty water and his tomatoes are deeply flavoured and flawed.

Modern farming likes to add lots of water to crops as this increases the weight and dilutes the flavour. There are crops though, that like lots of water, one of which is watercress. He visits a farm just outside Chichester that farms it in the old way, using the water from the chalk of the South Downs. The water itself is delicious, and the crop it produces is equally wonderful.

The industrial farming method revels in uniformity, but by mimicking the way that crops grow in the wild brings many more benefits in terms of flavour and sustainability. The roots of agriculture go back thousands of years, and this new system meant that societies and civilisations could grow. People developed methods that, because they worked, are still in use today. In Mexico, it’s called Milpa, where they plant three different crops together because they benefit each other.

Immigrants to new countries often leave their native languages behind, but they do hang onto their food traditions. Our childhood memories of food are deeply ingrained in our hippocampus, and even though the industrial food system is decades old, there is still time to embed food memories in our families.

He visits a Sicilian radicchio grower and sees the care and attention they put into growing the best crop they can. This method though, has a cost and Fubini’s solution to this is that we have to pay more for the food. It will sustain these methods and keep that link to the natural world that a lot of food production is missing. With his company Natoora he targets chefs who want the best-tasting ingredients they can get.

So, how do we go from where we are at the moment to where we want to be? We are told to eat local, too, but is this the case? Fubini doesn’t think that this is exclusively the case and he expands on some of his theories and reasons as to why this is the case; it comes down to how the food is grown, not where. Changing the system will mean pushing back against big corporations with powerful vested interests and deep pockets to ensure that the law is on their side.

At its heart though, this is a book about a search for a white peach that came from the Campania region of Italy. He had not other clues other than that, but it would be the craziest search that he would embark on trying to find the farmer who grew them.

The current food system is geared towards bland uniform food. What Fubini wants to do is make the artisan producer able to compete with the mainstream producers and win every time on flavour. One way on improving the system is education, teaching kids what seasonal food is and why foods with flavour is better for you.

This is an excellent book and is well worth reading alongside Ultra-Processed People. In that, van Tulleken lays out how bad the modern food system is for us. In here, Fubini lays out a way for us to get much better and tastier food onto our plates. Well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

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

I travelled with Mrs Trivedi from Madras to Bangalore overnight on the mail train. ‘First class this time so you are not overwhelmed. It was my second night in India and I was already overwhelmed.

So begins Joe Roberts’ trip to India. He is trying to make his way through the crowd at the station and is drenched in sweat and being stared at by almost everyone. She tells him he will get used to it…

Through a guy in Woking, he had arranged to stay with this family in Bangalore, in the Bhagpur extension. It was a mix of buildings with a mass of people moving around, trying to sell things to anyone they could. Couple that with the noise and smell, and he was overwhelmed once again. He is greeted by a small party that evening. He hadn’t really thought about the places that he wanted to visit while he was here, but a lady attending the gathering, called Mrs Sen, had other ideas. He soon had a month’s worth of excursions!

It takes him a while to get used to the intensity of the place. He visits temples, spends an afternoon with a strange visitor to the household and takes an uncomfortable and slightly terrifying bus journey to Bangalore. The monsoon rains kept taking out the power, and he could get no further because of the flooding.

Each journey takes longer because of delays and problems, and people just don’t understand why he wants to see this country. He takes a jungle trip to Mysore and ends up being the only guest in a hotel. It is a bit less jungly than he was expecting, but he does get to see some wildlife. River Lodge is a strange place, too, and he ends up staying with a true Burra Sahib called Colonel Bridgewater.

Back with the Trivedi’s again, they are joined by a illustrious guest called Dr Lal. He is a sericulturist who worked previously with the UN. He has several surreal conversations with the gentleman. Then he is off to Hospet and sadly catches a stomach bug that takes some time to recover from. When he is better, he travels on to the city of Vijayanagar.

Roberts is invited to give a talk at a school, so he prepares something for the boys. It is well received, but really only want to know his height, weight and what Alton Towers is actually like. Next place he ends up in is Otty, and he stays in a closed hotel with no water and some very dodgy food. He manages to relocate hotels before going off on a horse trek.

For his next trip, he is joined by Mrs Trivedi, and they head to the north of India to meet with her family. The slow train he takes gives him time to watch the landscape change from dry to wet. Sleeping on the train is a bit of a challenge. They stay at Mrs Trivedi’s father-in-law’s, and it gives him time to visit the area. He goes to Benares and finds that the overwhelming feeling he had in India is turned up to 11 here.

He settles into a pattern of having a few days with the Trivedi’s before setting off to explore other parts of the country. Until now, he hasn’t seen any Westerners in the country, but bumps into three in Mysore. They are there for a holiday, and they have a very different outlook from him.

He finds Bhadra feels very French, but it is still very much India. There are a load of nuns on the same bus as him, and he enjoys mixing with the locals and absorbing the atmosphere of the place. He chooses not to hire a guide, preferring to discover and experience the place for himself, though it is almost unbearably hot.

An unpleasant memory of Rameshwaram is the taxi drivers trying to rip him off as he is a Westerner. The low-level illness that he has had for a while finally breaks into a full fever. He heads back to the Trivedi’s to find them ill too! When recovered, he heads to Trivandrum and comes across a most arrogant and rude Englishman, who gets drunk and has no idea how to behave at all. He feels that he has reached the point where he has outstayed his welcome at the Trivedi’s and it is time to head home.

This is a really lovely travel book about Southern India. Roberts is a curious and gentle traveller. He is endlessly fascinated by the things that he sees and the people that he meets, and gets a fuller experience of the country by not having a set agenda, preferring to go with the flow. He is fortunate to have generous hosts. If you have read other travel books on India, I would still recommend adding this to your reading list. Eland has selected this to be included in their legendary travel classics and with good reason.