4 out of 5 stars

After his mother died when he was fairly young, Arnold Thomas Fanning had his first experience of depression. It didn’t last for long, but the seeds were sown. Fast forward to a decade later and Fanning was an up and coming playwright with lots of opportunities opening up. But at the same time, he was starting to suffer from delusions about his abilities and this rapidly became mania.

He had just given up a good job to give himself the time to write full time, but things weren’t going well. He was back living with his father who he had a difficult relationship with and he had just left an artist residency in disgrace. Very soon after that he had a total mental breakdown and was admitted into a secure unit where they began to treat him. After release he, went home with a bag of drugs, but there was to be much worse to come.

From there he descended further and further into his mental maelstrom. This book is his raw and brutally honest account of someone going through depression and all sorts of mental anguish. When it was happening he managed to alienate almost all his friends and family, ended up in several institutes and was prescribed a cocktail of drugs that they hoped would help him recover. It did reach the point where he stared into the abyss as he came very close to suicide, but he didn’t quite have the courage to do it that day. Might have been cowardice, but it saved his life that day.

The account is compiled from records and from what others have recounted to him, some of the episodes he has not been able to remember because of the illness. It doesn’t make for any less terrifying reading though. The fact that he has been able to get through his mental illness with a lot of help and write this book is a testament to his strength of character.

Mental health is important, if you are feeling depressed or anxious, then speak to someone who can help. This may be a family member, or you might be better speaking to an independent expert who will be able to help you. Do not ignore it.

4 out of 5 stars

During her final year at Columbia University, where she majored in art history, our unnamed protagonist lost both her parents. The inheritance that they left her means that she is financially stable, but she is utterly emotionally exhausted. She is in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and struggles to hold a job down for any length of time. She is not treated particularly nicely by her boyfriend and has a best friend who she has a difficult relationship with. To try and fill the enormous hole in her life she turns to a psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle to help. This doctor is hoping to help her with her insomnia and is more than happy to keep prescribing all manner of stronger and stronger sleeping and anti-anxiety medications. Having been fired from her latest job in a gallery she decides to ramp up the drugs and see if she can spend the next year mostly sleeping in her apartment.

Moshfegh has made this compelling read from what seems on the face of it a hollow premise of someone spending a year in a drug-filled sleep. Even though the two characters are not particularly likeable, I did feel that I had to admire the tenacity of the main character as she pursues the desire to alienate herself from the world rather than face the reality of her parent’s deaths and the swirl of modern life. Her friend, Reva, is as infuriating as she is funny, and she injects a necessary spark of humour into the plot. I liked this and I can’t really say why, but I think it is the writing that lifts this to a black comedic tragedy.

4.5 out of 5 stars

It is a regular commuter village sixty odd miles from the capital. All sorts of mixed housing, a pub and a church and people trying to go about their lives as normally as possible. In this village is a young lad called Lanny, who is not quite the same as other children his age. He seems to have a close affinity to the natural world, spending most of his time outdoors. His mother thinks the world of his, seeing his funnies little ways as a charming thing whereas his father struggles to deal with him. Lanny’s creative side is channelled by a neighbour called Pete who is an artist who sees the potential that he has.

Then there is Dead Papa Toothwort. In this place, he is as old as time.

He is the very essence of the land that the village sits in, he feels it every time they cut the soil to build, and watches as the village celebrates him by dressing up and the pictures that they try to recreate. He has seen the death of thousands of living beings. He is known as the Green Man now, but there is nothing benign about him. He listens to the words the people say in the village, they wash over him like rain, but he has heard Lanny’s songs and it has awoken something in him.

Then one day, Lanny disappears…

And I am not going to say any more than that, as I think you all should read it and make your own minds up. The book is split into three parts, the first is a whimsical introduction to the main characters. The second is as fast-paced as anything that I have ever read and the final part is dramatic, surreal and shocking. It is a story deeply rooted in the folklore of the landscape as well as brushing the edges of folk horror. I liked Porter’s first, Grief is a Thing with Feathers, but in my mind, this book is better than that. It has a much stronger plot, vivid characters and a dark undercurrent that pulls it all together. Great stuff.

3.5 out of 5 Stars

It has been one of the key trade routes for over 2000 years now with a history going back before the Roman Empire. However, it was in the 1800s that the rise of Germany nationalism meant that the Rhine grew in significance in that country and was seen as a source of German Strength. I had always considered the Rhine purely a German River, and that is probably why. Until reading this book I hadn’t even thought any more about it. It turns out that it also flows past and through a number of other European countries. Starting in his new home country of the Netherlands, Coates will take us on an 800-mile ride and run from the mouth at Hoeck van Holland where it flows into the North Sea all the way to the source in the Alps.

This river now has 50 million people living along its length and as he passes through notable cities then we are told some of their histories with a little on what he thinks of the place at the time. It is full of relevant snippets of information, for example, I didn’t know that Basle had a port and access to the sea via the Rhine and there is actually a Swiss merchant navy!

I did wonder when reading it that if he had undertaken the journey in stages. Sometimes he seems to have his dog with him and other times not, as well as switching between running and cycling. It did feel a bit disjointed because of this. He does occasionally come up with the odd amusing moment, but he is no Bill Bryson. It is a reasonable blend of travel, history and personal experience and a reminder that sometimes you don’t need to travel far to discover things.

4 out of 5 stars

Seven months and having travelled 45,000 miles by trains all over the world, Monisha Rajesh and her fiancé were almost home enjoying the luxury of the Orient Express. Jem was flicking through her notebook looking at the places they had been and the railways that they had travelled on. Beginning at the Eurostar terminal they were across to the continent in record time, ready for their onward journey to Moscow. This was to be their longest journey, an epic eleven-day journey across the vastness that is Siberia before it neatly dropped them off in China.

They travel back and forth across the world, travelling through America, Canada, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and even a ventured into North Korea to see the public face of the dystopian state. The quality of the trains varied enormously too, the cool precise efficiency of the Japanese Bullet trains that whisked them across the country to the Vietnamese trains that left a lot to be desired with the quality and reliability. On each of the journeys, they engage with their fellow passengers teasing out stories from those travelling with them, sharing food and experiences and always hoping to make the connections to their next train. In some of the countries, she goes into a lot of detail, highlighting the political situation in Tibet or expanding on newsworthy stories to add depth to the narrative.

Part of the reason for travelling by train is that there is more opportunity to interact with the people around you, something that you don’t get travelling by car or even in a bus and I’m beginning to think that this is the way to travel. It is not always super fast, though some of the high-speed trains have made serious inroads into flying times, the main point of trains is to take the time to see the countries that you are passing through and absorb the culture in the places that you stop. A lot of the time in the book we only have fleeting glimpses from the train window of some of the countries they pass through. Thought that this was a shame, but it probably would have made the book twice as long. I really enjoyed this, she writes well and mixes the conversations and the places well to portray the ambience of that moment. I thought it was better than her previous book too. A refreshing take on the world that isn’t from someone who isn’t from a conventional background and who is prepared to engage and interact with the people who she meets, rather than merely observe. If there was one flaw though it is missing a map of her journeys and it would have been nice to have a list of the trains that she travelled on too.

2 out of 5 stars

Alec Pryor finds a man, Cyril, that he picks up at a fairground and manages to persuade him to come home for the night. He offers payment and Cyril refuses to accept, but Pryor realises that £3 has been taken. He contacts him and Cyril returns to the home, where they have a row. A few days later he comes home to find that £10 has been taken and contacts him again, Cyril thinks it might be a friend of his. Pryor goes to the police with the story and they fingerprint the house and it turns out to be this associate. He is picked up by the police and when he is questioned tells them of the liaison between Alec and Cyril. Alec Pryor is charged with gross indecency.

He is forced to agree to a series of injections that are a chemical castration, the cure of the time, for homosexuality. As these hormones start to change his body from a lean runner into something that feels unreal, he begins to dream of past and present events. Some are relieved with the stark emotions from the time, others have a more surreal horror to them. Other dreams are about the future of AI and how that will overlap with human consciousness. Interwoven with the dreams and the correspondence he has with June, a lady he almost married, but chose not to as he didn’t want a marriage just for show.

Even though the protagonist is called Alec, this is a pseudonym for the brilliant mathematician and code breaker, Alan Turing. There were parts of this book that I liked, for example, the letters back and forwards between Alec and June, but the dreamlike states in the second part of the book are as complex as they are confusing a lot of the time. I did struggle with it, and at times I really couldn’t get along with it. That said, Eaves is obviously a writer of some talent and I think it will be worth exploring some of his other work. May even give this a re-read at some point.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Fig leaves are really not practical, hence why humanity has been making and using woven cloth for thousands and thousands of years for clothing, shelter and many other things. But before you can make cloth, you need to spin, a technique that uses the much shorter elements of the material that you are using and makes it into longer chains that become useable threads. These threads are then woven together by hand, or simple loom, or now days by industrial machines that can create metres of cloth with hundreds of threads that can all be individually controlled to create patterns.

Beginning with the very origins of weaving, we then head to Egypt where we learn that as much as the  Pharaohs liked their gold, it was the linen cloth that was really considered important. China is the next country to feature about how the silks that they made became so sought after and drove a number of economies along the Silk Road. Wool is the next material, and to find that Viking ship sails were made from wool was quite a revelation. I imagined a saggy jumper hanging from the mast, but it wasn’t like that. Wool was also a huge source of income for England at the time, considered so important that the Woolsack became the reminder in Parliament how we have relied on this material for our prosperity.

There are chapters on the modern materials and fabrics that allow mankind to reach some of the most extreme places on our planet as well as occasionally off it in space. How materials can be used to help athletes perform at a much better level and the future of fabrics as they look back at the natural world for inspiration for the next big thing. Though it is worth remembering, for all the technological advances made, there are still instances where a handspun thread can be much fine than one off a machine.

It was a really interesting book on humanities relationship and dependence with cloth, how it has permeated our languages and people have made and lost fortunes from it. I didn’t think this second book was quite as good as her first, The Secret Lives of Colour. There seemed to be a lot of time spent on certain things and glossed over others and I did spot the odd error too. Stunning cover and not a bad read overall.

3.5 out of 5 stars

If you have been following me for a while, then you’ll know I read a lot of travel books. These are the conventional sort, a person heads off to another location in the world with the intention of discovering something from an unexplored corner or to experience another culture. They often discover as much about themselves in the process though. But there are little journeys that barely make it from the lesser pages of the newspapers or stories from the lower depths of the internet that rarely get heard about.

 Jo Tinsley and David Bramwell have found these tiny personal odysseys and brought them together in this collection. You can read about the man who claim to have sailed around the world, whilst only going as far as the Atlantic, those that set off with the intention of finding the centre of the earth, POW’s who were helped in their escape by an unexpected source and complete cadavers and body parts that have kept moving long after you’d expect them to stop.

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

We do live in a strange world, and this great little collection goes some way to proving that the truth is often much stranger than fiction. Some of these tales are quite amusing and others are little tragedies but they are all fascinating in their own right. It fits in really well with The Mysterium and I am looking forward to the third book, The Odditorium , very soon.