Category: Review (Page 65 of 133)

4.5 out of 5 stars

This short, sweet and amusing collection of children stories from the master that is Terry Pratchett all have a Christmas or winter theme. There are some great little stories too, some are quite funny, some a little subversive and all have that bottomless depth from his imagination.

Not quite as good as his adult books, which have a darker and subtler humour, but huge fun none the less. These do show the vast scope of his imagination though and there are certain details in here that were developed much more in the Discworld series.

Great fun, easy to read and gives children that little opening into the magical worlds that he has created. Have passed it onto my son to read now.

4 out of 5 stars

Most people know the carol, Twelve Days of Christmas with it’s rather exuberant and expensive gift list from one lover to another. Six of the gifts given are birds, from the partridge at the beginning of the song, to the swans, midway through. However, Stephen Moss wondered if the other gifts were also birds and set about researching into the possible species that could represent the remaining gifts.

For example, for the present of Five Gold Rings, he has discovered that the Yellowhammer has an old Scottish folk-name of ‘yoldring’. It is this and similar corruptions to our language that have meant that he has been able to take an educated guess as to what the other birds might have been in the song. So for twelve drummers drumming he has chosen woodpeckers and for ten lords a-leaping, cranes were chosen.

This is another well-written book from one of our top nature writers in the country. I liked the way that he has used a little artistic licence to pick a suitable bird for the non-avian related gifts in the song. The logic behind these choices is clearly explained and the way that he uses anecdotes from folklore and history to expand on his chosen bird for each line in the song. A great little book which would suit anyone with an interest in nature or wants a Christmas themed book with a little more depth.

3.5 out of 5 stars

America has its hobos, and the UK has always had its tramps; men who walked the lanes and roads of our country. Graham sees these as vagabonds and outlaws. What he considers as tramping is a gentle and meditative style of walking that you take as much time as you need to enjoy the walk and you are  friend of society, a seeker of the unexpected and someone who travels light.

Know how to meet your fellow wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of nature and to be active to its wildness and its rigour. Tramping brings one to reality

If you are considering taking to the lanes of the UK, then Graham has lots of advice for you. There are chapters on what boots to wear, carrying money, lighting a fire, drying off after rain, what to carry in a knapsack, the tobacco to take and that the book to take when walking should be one that you are just on the cusp of making your own.

From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life

It is a book very much of its time, but then it was first published in 1927. Some of the advice isn’t relevant now, but as you read it you can find gems that still are relevant to walking and enjoying the outside world today. Things like, enjoy the time taken and not concern yourself with the distance covered, tramping is about earning happiness not money and the less you spend the more you will experience.  I thought it was a charming little book and I really love the endpapers too which are reproductions of his notebooks. Mostly it is a reminder that it is often the journey that matters more than the destination.

3.5 out of 5 stars

People are changed by events, some that are of their own making, some that are because of things that are happening around them. Back in the summer of 2012, Paul has been suffering from the fall out from his personal circumstances. He decides that he needs to get away and reset himself.

One of his heroes was the writer, Laurie Lee, who back in 1935 set out on a journey from England to Spain. He landed in Vigo and then walked across the centre of the country before turning right and heading South to the Mediterranean. His arrival in the country was just before the Civil war started and at the end of his walk, he was evacuated by a British Navy Ship. Lee was soon to be back, though, to fight in the civil war.

This was a book that he loved as a young man, so it seemed fitting to follow in the footsteps of his literary hero, find the places he stayed, and the bars he frequented. But mostly to walk those same paths and discover modern Spain for himself. But this journey is more than that, it is time to reflect on his personal life and face his own internal demons that threaten to overwhelm him and to mull over the walk that Lee undertook and the fairly unconventional life that he had.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is a book that weaves its subtle magic on you, revealing the pleasures and the pain of a country that was just about to descend into civil war. This book, that was written for the Laurie Lee centenary year, is his own eulogy and pilgrimage to the man. Murphy is not the only person to undertake a walk from a literary hero from the 1930s. Nick Hunt followed in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor in Walking the Woods and the Water, and whilst this is quite as good as that one, I thought it is still worth reading for an insight into modern Spain and a celebration of Lee’s seminal book.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The nations of the world always seem to be at war, if it is not a hot war, then it is a cold war, but now we seem to be in a virtual war. But how do you find the people who are behind the denial of service attacks, who are responsible for trolling those that decide to make a stand against the common views and the physical locations of the bot farms that have sprung up.

What is truth in this modern age of fake news and disinformation? It is like we are living in a reimagined version of 1984, and Pomerantsev is well placed to see what is happening. Originally from the Soviet Union, he was deported with his dissident parents, Igor and Lina and ended up living in the UK. The time that they spent there and the ‘truth’ that they were fed on a daily basis under that regime showed him just what a state could do to manipulate everything that we saw and heard. The Russians are now doing to the rest of the world what they have inflicted on their population for decades.

A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. – Terry Pratchett

We may have the world at our fingertips thanks to Google, but how do you know what you are reading is true or not? The institutions that we once could trust have become sullied by accusations of fake news. Social media has become the echo chamber where people amplify these untruths and anyone attempting to make a stand against this is often drowned out in the noise generated by the trolls. To stand out in these places people take more and more extreme views. Truth is manipulated and twisted in ways that you could not imagine.

I thought his first book was slightly better written than this one, but that really does not underline the impact that this book should have on the wider discussions on political discourse and social media influence. The Bot and Troll farms that he mentions are just terrifying, not only in what they are doing at the moment but also their potential to disrupt the very foundation of our democracies. The West may have won the cold war but will it win the virtual war in cyberspace…

3.5 out of 5 stars

As I write this we and not far off the Winter Solstice, that day in the year when the night is at its longest in the northern hemisphere. It is also the day when the world pivots once again and the days will imperceptibly get longer from that day onwards. Unless you are living on the very fringes of Northern Europe, where your day’s and nights are pretty much six months long our entire genetic makeup is used to the sequence of day and night. Some hate the night, drawing on the connotations that it is a time when dark forces move and others love the way that the absence of light changes the perception f the world around us.

Tiffany Francis is one of those that revel in the night and this book is about her experiences in various nocturnal adventures that she undertook alone or with friends and her partner. The journey takes her to the far north of Europe where she experiences the polar night in Norway and watches the aurora dance in the sky. She floats down a river in the company of eels and goes birdwatching, or more accurately bird listening. This is not just about the real, there are chapters on Ghosts and the Wickerman, which while there weren’t scary, did convey that unease that you sometimes get.

The final chapter in the book is about sunrises, a reminder that the dark is just a temporary phase, a part of the natural cycle and there is no need to be afraid of it. I thought that this was an enjoyable book about various mini-adventures under the cover of darkness. Her writing is unpretentious and clear, but most of all she is enthusiastic about her subject and this comes through in every chapter of the book.

4 out of 5 stars

Until the age of eight, Peggy had had a lovely childhood. She spends the summer camping with her father, playing some of her favourite records and listening to her musician mother play the grand piano. This was not going to last though as her father had other ideas for their future. He was convinced that the world as they knew it was about to end, and he had been preparing for this for a long while.

One day, he takes Peggy from their London home and he makes the trip to a remote Bavarian forest to a remote hut that is to become their new home. Thinking it is an adventure, Peggy is happy to go along; they start stockpiling for the coming winter and decide to make a piano keyboard so she can still practice. He forbids her from going over the river and tells her that the world she once knew and loved was gone.

Her life would never be the same again.

I wasn’t really aware of this book until the author followed me on Twitter one day. Found a copy of this book a little later, stuck it on a shelf where it got buried and didn’t think any more about it. When I realised that she was coming to my local literary festival I dug it out and had the privilege of meeting her for the first time.

When I finally got around to picking this up last week, I hadn’t even read the blurb on this, so had no idea which direction it was going to go in. The narrative concentrates on her time in the forest with her father as they have a subsistence level of existence, collecting wood and foraging, and trying to grow a few crops. Every now and again there are flashbacks to the life that she once knew and was slowing fading from her memory. It had elements of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, Room by Emma Donoghue and Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson, all combined into a surreal story that has warm moments but is ultimately quite chilling.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

We are ruled by time, from the accurate time that GPS relies on to the less accurate timescales that the trains seem to run to. Slicing the year into even portions in the hope that we can get a handle on it has been a thing that we humans have done for years. It works too, if you were going to attend an event on a particular day at a specific time, then it helps if everyone uses the same system, so you can all be there together at the same time.

But how has humanity divided these portions of time up? It depends on the culture, but most seem to have decided on days, months and years with a whole variety of different starting times. To communicate this official time to their local populations, artists designed all manner of different almanacks and calendars to help people determine the time of year.

In this book, Alexandra Harris explores all sorts of different interpretations of time and how people back in time divided it up. There is a whole world of calendars out there, but she has concentrated on calendars from England specifically. She has included examples of psalters, standing stones, perpetual calendars and even an Anglo Saxon woodcut. Some of these show significant dates or events that were expected to be undertaken at that particular time of year.

This is another beautifully produced little book from Little Toller, that diverges a little from their usual output of classic and contemporary natural history books. It does touch on rural life as Harris looks at the that artists tried to limit time onto a single beautiful page. She has also asked four modern artists, Jo Sweeting, Kurt Jackson and Jem Southam and Alison Turnball to devise their own interpretation on dividing time in the modern age. Their results are very different and all beautiful. But there is more to this book than just that, it made me think about how I see time now compared to a few years ago. I am still tied to the regular clock and calendar, I have a job after all. But I now have a greater sense of the seasons as a time period than I did at the age of 18, I now see time as it passes the solstices and equinoxes. You cannot beat a book that makes you think.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

I first came across Arthur Smith on the much-missed (by me at least) Excess Baggage. This was Radio 4’s half-hour slot on travel where he was a warm and generous host. It seems that he has been around forever though, comedy on stage and the radio, writing books and plays, and most famously appearing on Grumpy Old Men, where he fitted the archetypical profile perfectly. He is very much a London Boy, and is the self-titled Night Mayor of Balham, as he doesn’t want to do days.

His life experience of all of these wide-ranging things he has done has been distilled down into this book of 100 Things That He Meant to Tell You. In here are poems, anecdotes, articles and snippets from his life. There is the odd rant about modern life, stories from his father, who was a policeman and memories of time spent with his mum as her dementia took over.

It is a bittersweet collection. There are some genuine laugh out loud moments within, so much so, that I was getting strange looks from my family when reading it. But there are other pieces that make you stop and put the book down for a moment and think. Especially the moments that he shares about his mum and dad.  This book is just like Smith himself, what you see is what you get, warts and gravelly voice come included. Yes he is a little grumpy at times, but he is not vindictive with it, rather he is as happy to accept his flaws as he is the flaws in other people. If you have read, My Name is Daphne Fairfax, then you’ll love this; whatever you do though, try to avoid looking inside the rear flap!

4 out of 5 stars

It sounds perfect, a mile of bookshelves, 100,000 books to choose from, open fires, a bookshop cat and when you have selected your purchases then you can take a walk down to the sea to sit and read them. This place can be found in Scotland’s book town, Wigtown, and if you were a visitor you’d hope that the proprietor, Shawn Bythell would be pleased to see every customer who walked in the door. Well, he is, sometimes, but he often isn’t…

“Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?”

Inundated with requests from customers that range from the regular requests for a particular copy of a book, people wanting to take selfies with the kindle to the slightly strange and often the outright bizarre requests from customers who really are not engaging their brains before opening their mouths. He also has to battle with those that think nothing of selecting a number of books off the shelf, coming up to the counter and then offering a paltry sum for the books that they want. No one would think of doing that in any other shop, so why should he be different.

He is still buying collections of books, from people who think that their value is far and above what he is prepared to pay. And every now and again he finds a gem of a book in those collections, however, I never cease to be amazed just how many he takes to be pulped. He lists the book via Amazon and Abe books, and while I can see that if a book listed will get snapped up, he frequently gets a book in the day after someone has asked for it…

Amazon is the bane of his life. The Monsoon system that they have to use to sell through Amazon seems not to work most of the time. They don’t get the orders, so, therefore, have no way of knowing what to ship and the customer rightly complains that they haven’t had the book yet. It makes the shop look bad, even though they are not at fault in any way and Amazon berates them and holds onto their money for longer.

On top of all that he has to cope with belligerent staff, one of whom has a unique way of stacking the books on the shelves and around the shop and he is assisted by an Italian lady who is working for free but gets board and lodgings. His home fills up with people during the festival, bits of the wall fall off the building and he has a few hangovers to cope with. I thought that this was a really good follow up to his first book, Diary of a Bookseller. It is hilarious at times and occasionally quite melancholy. He is not afraid to talk about the problems facing those in the new and second-hand book trade and the massive problems caused by Amazon. I liked the way that he shows his daily takings and the books ordered online compared to those found. So go missing because of customers and others because of erratic filing… Somehow through all of this he manages to only be slightly sarcastic some of the time, exasperated most of the time and I have this sneaky feeling that he wouldn’t be anywhere else.