2.5 out of 5 stars

The sound of waves against a stony beach is quite soothing, but sitting on a beach like that is not the most comfortable unless you have a chair. The beach that I remember the most is the one at Norman’s Bay in Sussex; the stones there are multi-coloured from a pale grey to a fawn brown. But if you were to pick up a pebble from the beach, what stories could it tell you?

In this book, Zalasiewicz will take us on through the story of this single pebbles journey from the origins of the universe, the creation of our planet and the movement of the tectonic plates that have shifted the sediments from the surface and sea beds deep into the heart of the planet,

We will learn how the pebble is just not a piece of rock, smoothed by the relentless waves. Rather it is a tiny time machine that if you know how and where to look, it can reveal secrets on how it was made, the remnants of the creatures contained within and how it came to be in that place where it was found.

Mostly this is ok, but I did have several issues with it. I liked the concept of following the timeline of the pebble that he found from the beginnings to that moment of collection, but I thought that taking it right back to the moment of the big bang was a little too far. Even though parts of it were interesting, I did find that it veered too much into academic prose fairly often. One for those that are really into their geology!

3 out of 5 stars

We visit Wiltshire, the county north of us, on a regular basis as my brother in law lives there. Like Dorset is full of ancient monuments scattered across the landscape, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. And like Dorset, it is very picturesque.

In this photobook, published after his death from cancer, Steve Day’s wife has chosen the very best images that he took from his collection of around 20,000 photos.

There are some stunning images in here of the landscapes across the county. I particularly liked the images of the chalk downlands taken throughout the year some lit by the soft autumn sun or those with the dusting of frost. It would have been nice to have an image per page as on some they had split them across the binding and it lessened the impact of the photo.

4 out of 5 stars

As I sit writing this review, in front of my computer screen is a collection of pebbles and other stones that have been collected from a number of local beaches and some from holidays. I have a couple of pikes of the pink Jersey granite and some Sicilian marble as well as fossils from Seatown Beach on the other side of Dorset.

Seatown Beach is at the very far end of the tombolo beach that is Chesil. It is this beach that Christopher Stocks begins the book with and it is a beach that he knows well as he has a house alongside it. The section of the beach that he is lives near is the eastern end where the pebbles are at their largest and he can hear them being made as they are churned around in the waves.

The book will take us from this wonderful beach the beach that Derek Jarman on the bleak Dungeness headland, the old Iron age hill fort of maiden Castle and even to the Natural History Museum and a rogue hand grenade.

Stocks’ prose is conversational and relaxed. He has picked his subjects well and has found lots of interesting anecdotes and has managed to get the balance of providing enough information about the geology of the pebbles that you are likely to find on the beach without making it read like an academic tome. However, what makes this short book so special is Angie Lewin’s beautiful artwork throughout the book. I had got this from the library, but as I like it so much I think I am going to get a copy of my own. You can find her artwork here.

3 out of 5 stars

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

I cannot recall how many programmes I have seen on or about the Victorians, their successes and flaws are well documented and we still live with glimpses of their buildings and the social norms that they imposed on our society. I didn’t know much about the people of the Georgian age though, and this book intends to make people more aware of them.

Peel has chosen twelve people to show Georgian Society. Rather than pick from the aristocracy and political elite, though a couple of them do feature, we have and wide range of people. Some are well known, or in Lord Byron’s case that is more infamy, and there are others that had faded into obscurity. He uses that to show how open and permissive the society was compared to the stuffy and secretive Victorians.

I did have a few favourites from the people he featured. Anne Bonny and Mary read were pirates showed the men how to do cause havoc in the Caribbean properly. Tipu Sultan was a name that I hadn’t come across before. He was famous for keeping the entire British Empire at bay for many years.

Being an engineer, I had heard of James Watt so knew most of the story of his success in steam engines. And of course, there is Dorset’s own Mary Anning. Even though she didn’t get credit for it at the time, it was her work in finding at cataloguing the fossils that she found on the cliff of Lyme Regis that created the science of planetology. We mustn’t forget that she was poor and uneducated and still could hold her own against the learned gentlemen of Oxford University.

Overall this is a reasonable book. Peal has managed to make the history of the Georgian period relatively accessible as he explores it through the lives of twelve people. It is not a serious history book, so if you are expecting detailed analysis and scholarly prose then this might not be the book for you. It is an easy and entertaining read and he does helpfully provide a list of further reading, should you want to explore this period in history more.

4 out of 5 stars

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

In 1999 Ruth Pavey bought her tiny patch of Somerset and it has been a place of refuge for her. It was scrubland initially, and she has replanted it and knows almost every tree in there. This book is a year in the life of her woodland. Even though it is a tiny oasis in the modern factory-farmed countryside until recently it had harboured a wide variety of life. But one day she notices that there are not as many rabbits around as there used to be, in fact, she can’t remember when she saw the last one.

She sets about trying to work out what had happened to the population of rabbits and this makes her think about the wider effect that the climate crisis is having. She gets help from experts to look for and list the species that they find in the woods. It makes for quite an interesting list of plants and birds, but she knows that there are not as many there used to be.

Over the course of a year, she has a constant stream of family and friends visiting. Some are there to help with the maintenance and other tasks and there are picnics and an evening of moth trapping and planting of trees for the longevity of the wood. She wants to know who owned the woodland originally and the search for the Sugg family takes her to local history experts in the area teasing details out from the records. But mostly this is about having wood of her own to spend time in alongside the natural world.

I thought that this was a really lovely follow up to her first book, A Wood of One’s Own. The wood is no longer new to her and after two decades of owning it, she is realising that it still needs as much care and attention as it did when she first bought it. Her prose is gentle and reflects how much she loves spending time here. But in amongst the gentle breezes that rustle the leaves in her wood is a mirror on the wider world and how even a place like this that has not been drenched in chemicals can be affected by the wider ecological catastrophe that is happening. It really makes me want to own a little patch of woodland I can call my own.

4 out of 5 stars

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

The birth of a child is supposed to be a joyous moment, the reality is often different though, especially with a first child, as mother and father cope with the new arrival and the new responsibilities that it brings. After giving birth to her first child, at first Tanya Shadrick was ok, but a few days after she began bleeding. The carpet and her dress darkened with blood. They run for help and the ambulance arrived in minutes. She was hurriedly strapped to the bed and raced to the hospital.

Her placenta had torn an artery and she was bleeding to death. The consultant left them alone for a moment to say goodbye; until that point the reality of how bad it was hit them. She didn’t know if she would ever see them again…

She did.

This book is the story of her life. She writes about growing up in her childhood and her absent father and the inner turmoil that that causes. We hear about her time at university where she meets her husband Nye and the quiet modest life that they chose to live and the decision to have a child. It was that pivot point of nearly losing everything that galvanised her into taking the opportunities that she never thought a working-class upbringing would offer.

Shadrick decided to make a ‘mile of writing’ written in her local swimming pool, This handwritten art was telling the stories of the swimmers who used the pool and in the end gave her a fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. She made a friend with a lady called Lynne Roper who had begun swimming outdoors in 2011 while recovering from a double mastectomy. She wrote about this but then was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Shadrick not only edited her words into a cohesive whole but started a publishing company to print it as no one else was interested.

This is a searingly honest book of a woman who tries to come to terms with the things that happened in her childhood and whilst she doesn’t necessarily try to make sense of them, there is a sense in the book of release from those burdens. The prose feels like an intimate conversation with a friend, she is entrusting us, the reader, with those details that you would never normally ever know outside the context of a relationship. Following that time when she nearly lost her life because of the haemorrhaging, she has used it to build her own inner strength. But it has not been an easy path, making the choices that she has, has not always met with approval from her friends or family. But it has given her a new life in art and a courage to speak for herself and other women. This might not be everyone’s choice of book, but I would recommend reading it as you might discover something about yourself that you never knew you were capable of.

I am changing the way I do the monthly review for two or three months just to see if how it goes and this takes less time that it was taking me before. I am going to add in the books that I have been sent for review, bought or got from the library. I am also going to include the top three genres and publishers. So let me know what you think below.

So, February as ever, came and went in no time at all. It always seems much shorter than 28 days, but i did manage to get a grand total of fifteen books read, the target was 16.

Books Read

The Nutmeg’s Curse – Amitav Ghosh

Storyland – Amy Jeffs

Meet the Georgians – Robert Peal

Deeper Into The Wood – Ruth Pavey

The Book Of Pebbles – Christopher Stocks

Wiltshire Moods – Steve Day

The Rose of Temperaments – Various

Tell Me Who We Were Before Life Made Us – Ed. Maz Hedgehog

The Planet in a Pebble – Jan Zalasiewicz

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Universe – Andrew Newsam

The Suburbanist – Geoff Nicholson

Bengal Lancer – Francis Yeats-Brown

The Almost Nearly Perfect People – Michael Booth

 

I had two books of the month:

Orchard – Benedict MacDonald & Nicholas Gates

This is an evocative and well written book about the life in an orchard in Hereford

A Natural History Of The Future – Rob Dunn

This is an essential read about the problems we are causing on out planet. It is a bit grim so might not suit everyone at the moment

 

Top Genres

Natural History – 9

Travel – 7

History – 4

 

Top Publishers

William Collins – Five Books

John Murray – Two Books

Plus 26 other publishers with one book each!

 

Review Copies Received

Hope & Fear  – Ronald H. Fritze

The Year The World Went Mad – Mark Woolhouse

 

Library Books

Bewilderment – Richard Powers

A Curious Absence of Chickens – Sophie Grigson

A Song for a new Day – Sarah Pinsker

The This  – Adam Roberts

 

Books Bought

In England – Don McCullen

Dorset 1900 – 1999: The Twentieth Century in Photographs – David Burnett

The Most Beautiful Walk In the World – John Baxter

The Islandman – Tomas O’Crohan

Banksy: The Man Behind The Wall – Will Elsworth Jones

Hitler’s British Traitors – Tim Tate

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

A Chateau of One’s Own: Restoration Misadventures in France – Sam Juneau

Watching – Harry Lovelock

Discover Dorset: Portland – Stuart Morris

A Shepherd’s Delight – Larry Skeats

Islands Of The Trade Winds – Dr Mary Gillham

Acts of Desperation – Megan Nolan

Here Comes The Miracle – Anna Beecher

My Darling From The Lions – Rachel Long

Islands OF Abandonment – Cal Flynn

Open Water – Caleb Azumah Nelson

Document Your Culture: A Manual – Emma Warren

350 Miles: An Essex Journey – Jason Orton & Ken Worpole

Strangers: Essays on The Human and Non-Human – Rebecca Tamás

Small Bodies of Water – Nina Mingya Powles (Now signed!)

Fifty Sounds – Polly Barton (Now signed!)

The Wars of the Interior – Joseph Zarate

And Artist At Home And Abroad – David Weston

The Dorset Weather Book – Mark Ching & Ian Currie

Seaside Surrealism: Paul Nash In Swanage – Pennie Denton

France On Two Wheels – Adam Ruck

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WWII’s Most Dangerous Spy – Sonia Purnell

Guide to the West Dorset Countryside Paperback – Chris Jesty

Peace Work – Spike Milligan

Goodbye Soldier – Spike Milligan

Where Have All the Bullets Gone?– Spike Milligan

Mussolini: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan

Monty: My part In His Victory – Spike Milligan

Rommel? Gunner Who? – Spike Milligan

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan

Slow Trains To Venice – Tom Chesshyre

Livia – Lawrence Durrell

Tyneham – Lilian Bond

Small Island By Little Train – Chris Arnot

Letters From Skokolm – R.M. Lockley

Ireland’s Green Larder – Margaret Hickey

The Lost Gardens Of Heligan – Tim Smit

Magnus Of Stonewyld – Kit Berry

The New Wild – Fred Pearce

Coasting – Elise Downing

The Trigger – Tim Butcher

It’s a Hill, Get Over It: Fell Running’s History and Characters – Steve Chilton

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up – Tom Philips

A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution – Travis Elborough

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud – Ana Sampson

At My Table – Nigella Lawson

Soul Music – Terry Pratchett (Signed)

Leylines of Wessex – Roger Crisp

Wimborne Minster 1992 Portrait of a Town – Alan R. Bennett

 

4.5 out of 5 stars

It was almost a point of no relevance, but at the beginning of this sorry tale, a lamp fell onto the floor. It happened in a dwelling on the Island of Banda and rather it is seen for what it actually was, a mishap of no real significance, it was the start of the clearance of the islands. Sonak, a Dutchman, was there to remove the people from their homes and to take the nutmeg from them. The crash of the lamps as it hit the floor was thought to be an attack on that place and they begin shooting at random.

It is this moment that Ghosh thinks was the beginning of the present climate crisis as well as the current imperialism that still dominates the world. This relentless greed has driven countries and companies to eradicate people and places for the resources that were once theirs. That same philosophy where the earth is seen as a source of materials and therefore a source of money is still prevalent today, just look at the way that oil companies work in ensuring that their income streams are not restricted by local people who want to live in a safe environment.

Gosh uses lots of examples to demonstrate this point and show how these inequalities are deeply rooted in our present western culture. He also looks at how indigenous people use the resources available to them in a sustainable way and how this Traditional Ecological Knowledge (or TEK) is showing how these people used the planet in ways that could keep going indefinitely. This indigenous knowledge has gone from most western cultures and with that we have lost the ability to learn the stories of the land. Seeing the planetary crisis through the eyes of a shaman is quite startling.

Yes I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn the songs

This is not an easy book to like as it subject and content make for fairly grim reading. That said, Ghosh has written an important book about the roots of our present dilemmas, climate change and geopolitical power that can be traced back to the Isles of Banda. I tend to agree with his conclusions, that seeing the planet purely as a source of resources to be exploited to the nth degree has led us to this point. These vested interests are keeping us in this cycle of destruction, but as he hints at the end of the book in his conclusions, there is a glimmer of hope.

And another month passes and it is time again to post my frankly ridiculous TBR. So without further ado, I am aiming to read around 18 of these:

 

Reading Through The Year

A Poem for Every Night of the Year – Allie Esiri

Word Perfect – Susie Dent

 

Finishing Off (Still!)

Lotharingia – Simon Winder

Opened Ground Poems 1966 – 1996 Seamus Heaney

Wintering – Katherine May

Ice Rivers – Jemma L. Wadham

Moneyland – Oliver Bullough

Concretopia – John Grindrod

No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy – Mark Hodkinson

Wild Fell – Lee Schofield

 

Review Copies

Hurricane Lizards And Plastic Squid – Thor Hanson

Isles at the Edge of the Sea – Jonny Muir

The Good Life: Up the Yukon Without a Paddle – Dorian Amos

Shalimar – Davina Quinlivan

Who Are We Now? -Jason Cowley

The Year the World Went Mad – Mark Woolhouse

Astral Travel Elizabeth Baines

Britain Alone – Philip Stephens

We Own This City – Justin Fenton

Spaceworlds – Ed. Mike Ashley

The Power of Geography – Tim Marshall

The Four Horsemen – Emily Mayhew

The Spy Who Was Left Out In The Cold – Tim Tate

The Devil You Know – Gwen Adshead, Eileen Horne

Letters from Egypt – Lucie Duff Gordon

Crawling Horror – Ed. Daisy Butcher & Janette Leaf

The Valleys of the Assassins – Freya Stark

The Cruel Way – Ella Maillart

Above the Law – Adrian Bleese

Cornish Horrors – Ed. Joan Passey

Somebody Else – Charles Nicholl

Scenes from Prehistoric Life – Francis Pryor

The Turkish Embassy Letters – Mary Wortley Montagu

Black Lion – Sicelo Mbatha

The Babel Message – Keith Kahn-Harris

The Heath – Hunter Davies

 

Library

Looking for Transwonderland – Noo Saro-Wiwa

Putin’s People – Catherine Belton

Forecast – Joe Shute

The Nanny State Made Me – Stuart Maconie

The Great North Road – Steve Silk

 

Poetry

The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse – Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes

 

Books to Clear

Our Game – John Le Carré

The Tailor of Panama- John Le Carré

Year of the Golden Ape – Colin Forbes

Dreaming in Code – Scott Rosenberg

 

Challenge Books

Hebrides – Peter May & David Wilson

The Wood That Made London – C.J. Schuler

English Pastoral – James Rebanks

Wild Silence Raynor Winn

 

Photobook

Hebrides – Peter May & David Wilson (also a challenge book!)

So, er, that is it. Inevitably there will be library books that have to be read as others have reserved them. Either way, I win!

Any in that list that you like the look of?

4 out of 5 stars

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

I haven’t been reading poetry for very long so each book that I pick up from all manner of poets is a discovery of what is possible. A lot of the poems that I have read this year have varied from the classics like Heaney to more up to date material from contemporary poets. For me the joy of poetry is the way that the author can extract the most amount of meaning from the fewest words; I try to read each poem as it stands too rather than having to extract the meaning from every word.

They have all followed similar patterns too, but then I picked up Slate Petals. This is unlike any other poetry collection that I have read before. There are poems that are images, I Leave Torn is a series of images of torn letters rearranged into a neat shape, Marionette Noir a.m. is a musical notation and Noir of Orion is the constellations arranged in a series of different forms.

There are regular forms and stanza too, but Etherin uses form, structure and layout in a quite unique way, for example, those that have been typeset to mimic the subject matter of the poem. I particularly liked the poems within poems that used subtly different font colours. If you want a poetry collection that will challenge everything that you thought possible this is a good place to start.

Three Favourite Poems
Winter Solstice
Early Sun
Oblivion