Empire Games by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seventeen years ago the Monarch of the New British Empire was overthrown. Since then power has steadily transferred to the North American Commonwealth. They are on course to defeat the French and return democracy once again. However, the commissioner of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence tasked with monitoring the movement of people through the paratime links between the parallel worlds has been warning that the Americans are coming. No one believed Miriam Burgeson but as the leader’s health fails, the first American drones appear in the skies.

In another timeline and a different America, Rita has been identified as world-walker, an individual who can switch between the parallel worlds with ease. She is a feisty individual, not completely sure why a shadowy agency wants her but presented with precisely no choice in the matter. First, she must be trained, undergo surgery and be indoctrinated, but the time is cut shorter as the pressure grows on the US to find out what is happening in the world alongside theirs. The perils of first contact between the worlds is heightened as they both have nuclear capability and no one knows if this battle will go white hot once again.

This is a fast-paced mash-up of the spy and military genres set in a near future sci-fi world; or should that be worlds. There is plenty of drama in the plot, with the odd twist that enhances the storyline no end. Like all good sci-fi books, it manages to mess with your head whilst sounding eminently plausible, the various societies that Stross has created do take a while to get your head around too. It leaves many questions unanswered making the ending a little bit scrappy, but as it is the beginning of a series, I don’t mind that so much. Very much looking forward to the next one.

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Love,Madness,Fishing by Dexter Petley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dexter Petley was born on the borders of Kent and Sussex in the mid 1950’s. It was a tough upbringing in post-World War 2 Britain; people in the Weald scratched out a living picking hops and mending and making do. Failing the Eleven Plus meant that he didn’t go to grammar school but ended up at the local secondary modern school where they taught some of the children how to run a smallholding. Partly to escape from real life, Petley taught himself to fish and began a lifelong affair with the riverbank and countryside. He ended up making his own rods, floats and weights as there was not the cash to buy them new or second-hand.

This is an authentic, enchanting, but unsentimental memoir of growing up in Kent in the late sixties and early seventies. If you are looking for a memoir on fishing there is not so much in here; it is more an undercurrent to the whole book and something that he returns to again and again. It is full of colourful characters that add much to the narrative who Petley came across as he was growing up and learning the ropes of life. It is also a snapshot of a rural life as it underwent significant social changes as Britain moved from the Sixties to the Seventies. Occasionally dark and often gritty, this memoir is tempered by the crisp, fine writing.

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A Sky Full of Birds by Matt Merritt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Birds are one of the wild animals that we can see every day without even putting any effort in to look. Some are so ubiquitous, like the pigeon that we barely notice them. Others, like the robin, have a special place in our hearts, which is why it was voted our nation’s favourite bird. You will often hear the song of a blackbird, see starlings and sparrows charging about everywhere and if you are lucky, glimpse a kestrel as you race past on the motorway. However, if you are to pause a little longer, and look at little harder you might just see birds that you never thought you’d come across.

Merritt is advocating taking those few extra moments to really look at what is happening. Small birds flying around a larger one are probably mobbing a buzzard if there are agitated pigeons in a city the look for a streak of a Peregrine. A bird on a pyracantha when you’re putting your shopping in the back of the car could be a waxwing and not just a blackbird. But if you really want to see the magnificent murmurations of starlings, huge flocks of wading birds or hear the din from a rookery or the sweet note of a nightingale then this book would be a good place to start.

Merritt will captivate you with his infectious enthusiasm for our feathered friends. He has used his craft as a poet to make this a fluently written book. It is full of details and keen observations of his subject, but then you’d expect that as he is well qualified to write this too as he is editor of Bird Watching Magazine. Definitely, a book worth reading and will hopefully give people some pointers on where to look for these natural miracles.

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A Sweet, Wild Note: What We Hear When the Birds Sing by Richard Smyth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

Can you imagine a world without birdsong? The very thought makes me shudder, but in the noise created by modern city life, the warbling is relegated to a footnote in the modern din. Whilst you will hear more birdsong in the countryside, the wholesale devastation of birds and invertebrates by modern industrial farming mean that you do hear it as often as you once would have.

It is a tragedy of the modern age.

Thankfully you can still hear birdsong and at its best it is a wonderful natural musical background to our world. It has had a profound effect on artists, musicians and has influenced elements of our culture and sciences for hundreds of years. For Smyth though, it was a small part of his world, like an electronic gadget, but it was something that he really didn’t understand or have any concept of. He was not alone, lots of people have tried to fathom out the whys and wherefores of birdsong and have never really got to the bottom of it. Some of the songs are territorial, some are to attract mates and other songs just seem to be for the hell of it. What we hear is not what the birds hear

Realising how little he knows, Smyth sets out on a journey to discover how much, or little, everyone knows about this phenomena. On this he will discover the syrinx that allows them to sing two notes at once, the live recording of cellist, Beatrice Harrison, with a nightingale in a Surrey garden, how poets respond to the notes they are hearing and how birdsong made the soldiers on the battlefields of World War 1 feel homesick. It is quite a journey too; he meets birders, linguists, twitchers, data analysts and musicians. All of these add to his understanding of what happens, but the only way to gain the emotional response is to head into the nearest wood with an expert who can tell his warbler from his chiffchaff.

I finished reading this in the garden over the weekend with birdsong all around. Sadly, mostly it was the tuneless chirps from the sparrows, but in amongst that was songs from a bird that I didn’t recognise. The effortless writing in here makes for easy reading and he keeps your interest in the subject all the way through by mixing together history, science and personal anecdotes. All of this adds up to a book on birdsong that is well worth reading, and it has a stunning cover too. Like all good non-fiction books it answers lots of your questions, and hopefully it will inspire people to get outside to hear the music of the birds.

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The Abundance by Annie Dillard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anne Dillard is very different to most people. When they look at the world around them they only see a fraction of what is actually there, she relentlessly absorbs every detail of the place and experience. But her true skill lies in taking what she has seen and writing about it with tight, and sharp prose. In this new collection, Dillard writes about subjects as wide-ranging and diverse as solar eclipses, the family jokes, the bundle of energy that is the weasel, as well as essays on skin, tsunamis and about the Victorian expeditions to the North Pole.

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Her sense of fascination and wonder at the things she sees permeates the book with all the subjects she talks about, making this a wonderful thing to read. My favourite essay was the one titled ‘For The Time Being’, about that material that most do not consider, sand. In her unique way, we find out how many grains of sand are created every moment, how it flows with water down to the sea before transforming back to rock over countless millennia. We learn that the sharpest items are not always metal and that they took hundreds of small blows to form these exquisite stone implements. This is the second book of Dillard’s that I have read now and I am finding that I am liking her writing more and more. Her penetrating gaze at the world around is brilliantly complemented by her precise prose. Whilst I realise that some of these have been published before, this is a fine introduction to her work who hasn’t read anything of her work before.

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Pathlands: 21 Tranquil Walks Among the Villages of Britain by Peter Owen Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

We are so fortunate in this country to have an intricate lattice of paths and bridleways that criss-cross our land, and Jones has collected together here 21 walks from the Scottish borders to deep in the West Country that make the most of these. They are all off the regular walking routes and he has chosen them specially to highlight the varied land and seascapes that we have in our country. As he walks, he talks to us about the things that he sees, when he gets lost and about the people he meets.

This is a books of walks, as much as it is a book on walking in the countryside, moving at the pace where you actually interact with nature rather than zoom past in a metal and glass cocoon. There is nothing revelatory in this book, rather Jones writes in a contemplative way, one man with a profound love for all aspects of the countryside. Good stuff.

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Island Home: A Landscape Memoir by Tim Winton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As Tim Winton said, ‘I grew up on the world’s largest island.’ This ‘island’, Australia, or continent as most people think of it, has had humans living there for thousands of years. These original people had over these millennia to come to an incredibly in-depth understanding of their landscape and how to tread lightly on it. It was a similar relationship to his locality that inspired Tim Winton as a child. Growing up in Karrinyup amongst the coastal landscape of beaches, rock pools and swamps meant for a fantastic childhood, but also the very soul of the land percolated into his very being and became the well of inspiration for his writing.

His experiences growing up also gave him a passionate desire to see the wildest places of his nation saved for future generations. For the past 200 years, the European immigrants have taken much from the land and the native Aboriginals, and have left it polluted and devastated. Winton has spent time in the UK and other places, but the bond with this hard and frequently dangerous landscape have had a lasting impression on him. This is an enjoyable book to read as Winton is such a talented author and it is a good companion volume to Land’s Edge, which I think is even better than this.

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Swimming with Seals by Victoria Whitworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

Wild swimming seems to be in vogue at the moment. I read Floating by Joe Minihane last month and have Turning by Jessica J. Lee to read and I am hoping to get my hands on a copy of Swell very soon. Victoria Whitworth’s book has slotted nicely in the middle of this aquatic series of memoirs that all can trace their source to the fantastic book that is Waterlog. As her marriage begins to crumble and she begins to suffer health problems that middle age brings on, she seeks company with others in the Orkney Polar Bears, a swimming club that aims to swim in the sea often as possible.

In high summer, an Orkney afternoon lasts forever

Enjoying the experience Whitworth starts to go swimming alone, finding that being in the water for the briefest of periods helps calm her and cleanse her mind from all the other stuff going on. Her swims are written about, in brief, punctuation marks taken from the Facebook group cataloguing the weather, temperatures, the tides, the swell of the sea and how often she is joined by the curious seals and other animals and birds. In between these posts she takes us through her personal history, an earlier life in Kenya and the relationships that she had with her parents and her contemplations on love, life and death. Deeply embedded in the book are woven the things that make Orkney so special, the layers of ancient history and myth, the incessant wind and Gulf Stream that stops the island from freezing during the winter and the way that the natural world is a intrinsic part of living there.

Inhale the air straight from the Arctic, sharp as a whetted blade

Her writing is such that you gasp too, as she enters the sea to swim. Sea swimming though is a very different experience to wild water swimming; the water can be much colder and waves that have travelled all the way across the Atlantic can arrive with some force on the shore making some dips a challenge, to say the least. This is an eloquent celebration of swimming in the cold waters of Orkney and a fascinating memoir. I would have liked more about the landscape and natural world of these special islands, and it has pushed this up my list of places that I really want to visit.

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