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Category: Book Musings (Page 29 of 31)

Monthly Muse

03/03/2017 / / 0 Comments
Monthy Muse
I know February is a shorter month, but that went past in a flash! This is what I had managed to read:
























Four were outstanding; Good Omens, The Apple Orchard A Tale of Trees and The Rule of the Land. All very different books that show how rich and varied our publishing industry is. Pete Brown writes with such wit and aplomb about these little parcels of land that have such an autumn bounty. Garret Carr teases out the stories from a troubled border, and Good Omens is an insane romp at the possible end of the world. I really enjoyed Hidden Histories too; it is a guide on the lumps and bumps that appear in fields all-around the country, and how to interpret what they mean.
Wellcome Prize
This is a prize that focuses on a common theme centred on medicine or health issues. But rather than just a non-fiction remit, it encompasses a wide range of fiction genres too, including science fiction. This year’s longlist was:
How to Survive a Plague by David France
Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal trans. Jessica Moore
The Golden Age by Joan London
Cure by Jo Marchant
The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
I had agreed to read and review for nb Magazine the seven non-fiction books on the list; thankfully I had already read two of them and had others at home. The library came up trumps once again, and I managed to get hold of the three missing books very quickly. So far they have all been good. I am halfway through the penultimate one, but so far my favourite is I Contain Multitudes.

World From My Armchair Challenge
So far I have read eight books towards this, helped by some of the books from the Stanford Dolman shortlists. Countries ‘visited’ so far are Bhutan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Iran, Ireland, Peru and the USA and I have crossed the Pacific Ocean in the company of Sarah Outen. It is good to see another people’s perspective. I am currently reading the new book by Reza Pakravan, Kapp to Cape which will add another country in this month. On target to do my 45 or so this year.

I have been trying to catch up on the review copies that publishers have kindly sent me, and failing mostly. So I am aiming to make serious roads into my backlog in March. Oh, and I am off to the London Book Fair on the 16th. Looking forward to it; it is going to be good to meet some people that I have corresponded with over the past year.

Monthy Muse

31/01/2017 / / 2 Comments
A New Year always offers new possibilities with regards to books, and this year was no exception with the release of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year shortlist. They have expanded the scope of the whole awards and the Stanford Dolman is the premier prize with six other shortlists highlighting different aspects of travel writing.

Specsavers Fiction (with a sense of place)
Wanderlust Adventure Travel Book of the Year
National Book Tokens Children’s Travel Book of the Year
Food and Travel magazine Food and Travel Book of the Year
Destinations Show Illustrated Travel Book of the Year
London Book Fair Innovation in Travel Publishing
Having promised to read them for Nudge I found that there were six books on there that I hadn’t read (!) and a couple I hadn’t heard of either. I had read some from the Wanderlust prize though so started with the ones on there. The ten books I ended up reading were all good, but there were some outstanding ones too; in particular Deep South for the Dolman and my money is on that one to win. The Wanderlust prizes is a little harder to pick. I really liked Climbing Days by Dan Richards and was fortunate to meet him last October. Bravest, or most foolhardy prize, should go to Mike Martin and his battle to drive a Landrover across the Congo. but I think that Sarah Outen may just pip them all with her account of circumnavigating the world by bike, kayak and rowing boat.
Faber were kind enough to send me a review copy of The Disappearance of Emile Zola. It is a fascinating story of his flight from Paris after writing a letter criticising the Government and the military after the Dreyfus affair. It was a fascinating story of Emile Zola and his enforced stay in London, Weybridge and Addlestone. Strangely enough, I walked past a hotel where he stayed a day or so before I started the book. Nicholas Brealey kindly sent me the Evolutionary Ride by Lois Pryce of her motorcycle trip around Iran. An excellent travel book, and a bold trip around a country that has strict Muslim ideology and a liberal sector of the population. Great stuff.
No real duffers this month, but was not overly enamoured with the Sparrow; shame really, as the first book was excellent. Managed to finish 18 books, so overall a good month of reading.

Received eight books last week and a few in the first couple of weeks of January. As I was finishing the shortlists for the deadline I am so behind with my review copies!! My TBR in February has scared me a little.

2017 Reading Intentions

03/01/2017 / / 0 Comments

Some of my aims for 2017

I have decided to set myself something that I am calling The World from My Armchair Challenge. My intention for this challenge is to read a travel or non-fiction book from every country, ocean and a number of the seas around the world. I have taken the list of countries from the UN (192) and each sea and ocean bringing the total to 212 books! Not all in one year I hasten to add.

I have a number of Terry Pratchett books from his Discworld series that I have not yet read, so want to finish those next year.

Will still be working my way through the Summersdale travel catalogue, and also discovered the Stanford Travel Writing awards

Will be reading the longlist from the the Wainwright Prize again, as this is something that I am now doing for Nudge / nb Magazine

Not reading as much Sci Fi as i would like to. Managed one from the Arthur C Clarke Award. I have sorted out the books I have at home and intend to read those in 2017, as I didn’t in 2016; including steampunk!

My Good Reads Challenge is set at 190. Same as last year. It is a fair amount of books, but I know that is well within my capability to achieve.

Books for Blokes

01/01/2017 / / 0 Comments
This list started as an idea for my local library. They have a toddler session at the weekends, and it is mostly dads that bring the children along. The children end up taking out lots of books, but rarely the dads; hopefully some from this list they will find appealing and might make them read more.

Science Fiction & Fantasy
The Girl with all the Gifts – M R Carey
The City and The City – China Miéville
Railsea – China Miéville
Perdido Street Station – China Miéville
Blue Remembered Earth – Alastair Renyolds
On the Steel Breeze – Alastair Renyolds
Poseidon’s Wake – Alastair Renyolds
Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
American Gods – Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch
Pashazade – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Effendi – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Felaheen – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Redrobe – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Principles of Angels – Jaine Fenn
Consorts of Heaven – Jaine Fenn
Uprooted – Naomi Novik
A Darker Shade of Magic – V.E.Schwab
The Bone Season – Samantha Shannon
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – Claire North
The Shining Girls – Lauren Beurkes


Fiction
The Girl on the Landing  – Paul Torday
Clay – Melissa Harrison
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Crow Road – Iain Banks
The Business – Iain Banks
The Travelers – Chris Pavone
Reamde – Neal Stephenson
At hawthorn Time – Melissa Harrison
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Trinity Six – Charles  Cumming
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – John le Carre
The Night Manager – John le Carre
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John le Carre
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
1984 – George Orwell
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
Last Night in Montreal – Emily St. John Mandel
Oryx and Crake – Magaret Attwood
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


Adventure
Long Way Round – Charley Borman and Ewan McGregor
Long Way Down – Charley Borman and Ewan McGregor
Walking the Nile – Levison Wood
Dare to Do – Sarah Outen
Walking the Himalayas – Levison Wood
Call of the Wild – Guy Grieve
Walking the Amazon – Ed Stafford
Arctic – Bruce Parry
Explore Everything: Place-Hacking The City From Tunnels To Skyscrapers – Bradley L. Garrett
Revolutionary Ride – Lois Pryce


Military
SBS: The Inside Story of the Special Boat Service – John Parker
Empire of the Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World – James Hamilton-Paterson
Spies in the Sky: The Secret Battle for Aerial Intelligence During World War II – Taylor Downing
Vulcan 607 – Roland White
Phoenix Squadron – Rowland White
Agent Zigzag – Ben Macintyre
Empire of the Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World – James Hamilton-Paterson


Travel
French Revolutions – Tim Moore
The Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor
Between the Woods and the Water – Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos – Patrick Leigh Fermor
McCarthy’s Bar – Pete McCarthy
Tequila Oil – Hugh Thomson
This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland – Gretel Ehrlich
Round Ireland with a Fridge – Tony Hawkes
Bearback: The World Overland – Pat Gerrod
Shadow of the Silk Road – Colin Thubron
The Tent, the Bucket and Me – Emma Kennedy
Canoeing the Congo: First Source to Sea Descent of the Congo River – Phil Harwood
Drive Over lemons – Chris Stewart
Love of Country – Madeline Bunting
Climbing Days – Dan Richards
Boundless – Kathleen Winter
Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways by Helen Babbs
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica – Sarah Wheeler


Natural History
The Wild Places – Robert Macfarlane
Waterlog – Roger Deakin
Edgelands – Paul Farley
Crow Country – Mark Cocker
Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature – Chris Yates
Sightlines – Kathleen Jamie
Findings – Kathleen Jamie
Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach – Jean Sprackland
The Outrun – Amy Liptrot
To the River: A Journey Beneath The Surface – Oliva Liang


Humour
Are You Dave Gorman? – Dave Gorman
Fatherhood – Marcus Berkmann
Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life – Nina Stibb


Biography
Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
Patrick Leigh Fermor – Artemis Cooper
The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman


Sport
Rain Men: The Madness of Cricket – Marcus Berkmann
Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers – Amol Rajan
Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski
Popular Science
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot
Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body – Jo Marchant
Bringing Down The House – Ben Mezrich
For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker – Victoria Coren
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean – Susan Casey
Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt
The Secret Lives of Colour – Kassia St Clair 
The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
The Big Short – Michael Lewis
Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England – Sarah Wise
Bad Science – Ben Goldacre
Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics – Alex Bellos

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine – Michael Lewis

My Books of the Year

26/12/2016 / / 2 Comments
Where do I start? Bar the odd exception, I have enjoyed what I have read this year. The misses have either been books that have been languishing on my shelves at home for way too long or have been monthly reads for my book club. So what was the best of 2016.
I really hadn’t read much fiction this year, it was around 25% of my total.  My favourite though had to be Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams First read this decades ago, and picked it up again and fwll in love with the humour, wry observations and the geek references that have permeated themselves into the culture. Other fiction that really made an impression was my first book by the talented V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic. Dark imaginative and really good. Will be reading her others in 2017. Finished the latest in the Rivers of London series, The Hanging Tree by the larger than life Ben Aaronovitch. Peter Grant is back in London, and still in trouble, another good solid read and can’t wait (but I’ll no doubt have to) for the next one in the series. One that was also very good was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Will read the second at some point though I understand that we might have to wait a while longer for the third…
Those of you that know me will know that I read a lot of natural history books. Three that I read this year and thought were excellent were The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel, The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks and Arboreal: A Collection of Words from the Woods edited by Adrian Cooper. All of these should have a place on your bookshelf at home. They are all beautifully written, poignant and relevant to our point in time. Other notable natural history include Winter: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons edited by Melissa Harrison a wonderful seasonal collection and The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy is really good too; and is a reminder of how much we have lost with the advent of modern farming.
Travel writing is one of my passions, there is a whole world out there that we can discover in between the covers of a book. Some really good ones that I have been fortunate enough to read are An Octopus in My Ouzo by Jennifer Barclay, a moving account of the trials and tribulations of life and following on from Falling in Honey. Another worth of note is Climbing Days by Dan Richards, it is a tribute to his great aunt Dorothy Pilley who was a female climber in the 1920’s. He undertakes some of her famous climbs in Europe including ascending the mighty Dent Blanche in the Alps. Really enjoyable book, and I actually had the privilege to meet him in October this year. The publisher Summersdale specialise in quirky travel books, and one of them was It’s on the Meter by Paul Archer & Johno Ellison which describe the slightly (ok very) mad journey that they took around the world in a London taxi. Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker is very readable too, as he describes his stratospheric job piloting the huge 747’s round the world.
I have managed this year to read the longlist for the Wainwright Prize, as well as the shortlists for the Royal Society and Ballie Gifford prizes. I find these prizes a great ways of discovering new books and new authors, the only problem is my TBR gets ever longer. Three of note from those prizes include Weatherland, a beautiful book by Alexandra Harris on the artistic response to our ever changing weather. The Most Perfect Thing by Tim Birkhead is a fascinating scientific account of just what makes a egg and how they turn into our feathered friends. For more general non-fiction, East West Street was a person journey to the city of Lviv, the birth place of Philippe Sands grandfather as well as the men who created the phrases ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’, two statement that sadly we still have to use in this modern world.
Almost there. One of my favourite artists is Andy Goldsworthy who creates the most amazing transient natural art. Managed to get hold of a copy of his book Wood from the library; it is fantastic. If you haven’t seen his work; spend some time on the interweb looking for it. Another that I found a little gem is Snow by Marcus Sedgwick. It is about his favourite winter substance with a carefully woven narrative on experience and folklore. Finally any book by Neil Gaiman is a treat, none more so than The View from the Cheap Seats, a collection of essays, speeches and other non-fiction. A brilliant collection and possibly the best way of having an insight into the mind of the master storyteller.

Can I pick just one? No. All of what I have read this year has added a rich seam to my reading journey so far. Bring on 2017.

New Challenge

18/11/2016 / / 2 Comments
Those of you that know me know I read a fair amount of travel books. I am considering a huge challenge to read a travel book set in every country in the world called:
The World from My Armchair
What do people think of the name?

nb 90

21/10/2016 / / 0 Comments

The new issue of newbooks magazine is out , and I have two articles in it. It is well worth reading for those of you who haven’t come across it before.


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