4 out of 5 stars

It is said that as we approach our fifties that this can be one of the most stressful parts of our lives. Our bodies are changing, the pressures of looking after sick parents can take their toll and often the demands of children and teenagers can be too much. Joanna Pocock was in this position, menopause had begun and she had recently lost her parents and she needed something to take her away from the humdrum life in London.

She has a fascination with radical environmental movements and was seeking a reconnection to nature. An opportunity presented itself and with her husband and daughter, she left London and headed to the America West and the state of Montana. Whilst there she finds those that have taken a back seat from society and who are trying in their own way to reconnect with the natural world. She attends an Ecosex conference, meets Native Americans as they perfect the skills their ancestors once had, talks with hunters who care little about the landscapes they are walking through and listens to others who are seeking to rewild those same landscapes.

I have witnessed that western light gathers in intensity and sharpness as it crosses the landscape towards me. The vastness, the inscrutability of so much space performs an act of initiation. It does things to you that cannot be undone.

She approached these people and places with very much an open mind and is prepared to listen to all that she is told. Using this it means that she can form her own opinion of what is going on and more importantly to see if there is another way that she can interact with the world around her. I thought it was really nicely written, she is non-judgemental about all of the people that she comes across, open to different perspectives and most of all curious. Most of all this is about the way that she is testing things out to see where her place in the world will be for the future.

4 out of 5 stars

People have always heard voices in their heads, but these voices in this dystopian future are deadly. They have forced people to kill themselves and the few people left that have either not heard the voices or have resisted them are all that are left in this hollowed-out society. Pilgrim is one of the few who has a voice within and has resisted the taunting and almost has a working relationship with it.

Lacey is a girl who misses her sister, and since her gran died, she has been very much alone. Somehow she has survived the anarchy that is all that is left of her society, She sets up a stall selling lemonade and the first person to stop for a drink is Pilgrim; he has been told to by his voice. Her price for the drink is not money, but rather a lift to the city where her sister lives.

He reluctantly agrees, and after she has shut the house up, they set off. A brief stop in a motel demonstrates the danger that they are into Lacey, but they do manage to acquire another companion, Alex. As they approach the city where Karey lives, they start to come across members of a lawless gang who are on the search for a person who managed to escape from them. She was another with a voice in her head and they are always on the lookout for other people with voices within. Pilgrim hasn’t mentioned anything to Lacey about his, so she doesn’t realise just how much danger they are in. The encounter with the gang splits the three up and they know that they have to get back together to survive this cruel world.

This is a very fast-paced dystopian science fiction book that grabs you and runs relentlessly towards the ending. It is a brutal future too, the violence in this world Todd has created does not stop and yet within it all, is this paternal relationship that is developing between Pilgrim and Lacey as they look out for each other. I had the odd thing that I wasn’t sure about, I still don’t understand what the Voices are and I don’t think we are supposed to know until much later on. It reminded me a little of Host by Stephanie Meyer, combined with large dollops of American Gods and Mad Max. Whilst the plot is self-contained in this book, there is enough, that is left open for the next in the series, Hunted.

4 out of 5 stars

My desk is a mess. I have a laptop, a second screen, keyboard, a task light and a lava lamp, a stationary rack and pencil holder, scrap paper and a pad to write on, as well as 18 books and various other items of detritus. To be honest, it could do with a bit of a tidy up. One day I will…

Most people want a tidy place to work in. Some businesses are really strict on this, enforcing numerous draconian rules as to what you can or can’t have on your desk, the number of personal photos allowed and so on. These businesses make look slick and have the impression of performing well, but they are soulless places and they are missing that extra spark that disorganization, improvisation and confusion can bring to the creative process.

In this highly entertaining book, Tim Harford argues that clean pristine working areas, rather we need a little mess and disorder in our work and home lives to get that creativity back that is ultimately enriching. He uses lots of examples of how people have not had the exact equipment that they wanted or had the usual preparation time for a particular thing, and it turned out to be one of the best performance or speeches of their life.

Being organised does get things done, but that spark of creativity that happens when things are not quite so is where the magic lies. I really liked this book, partly because I am not so tidy, and tend to have lots of things on the go at any one time, but also because I think on a fundamental level he is right. I particularly liked the story of a lab in America that managed to create all manner of things and the reason was because of the layout of the building and people with a variety of different interests and skills would pass each other, get talking and spark new ideas off. If you are a person who likes all their pencils lined up, then this might not be the book for you, but perhaps you should read it, you never know what might happen…

4 out of 5 stars

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

The Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia are remote, not particularly easy to get to and are often overlooked and ignored by outsiders and travellers. For Will Buckingham though, they seemed perfect, even more so when he found out about the sculptors who lived there. Cobbling together a research fund he became an anthropologist in training and started to make his way out there.

He had in mind finding three sculptors, Matias Fatruan, Abraham Amelwatin, and Damianus Masele. Each of them had a particular set of skills in their carving and to discover the cultural references that help define their art. It was a world that still had its roots deep in their past even though the modern world had tried to push and pull them in different directions. Their art is something that they saw cannot be taught to anyone as each sculpture is as much the work of the ancestors as it is the work of the craftsmen.

The title of the book comes from a conversation that he has with Fatruan. He accuses people like Buckingham, of being one of those that come and enquire about all aspects of their lives and culture, but who can never fully understand them because they do not have the same deep links with the ancestors that are all around them.

It is a culture that has been mostly suffocated by the catholic religion, but if you know where to look then you can still see glimpses of the earlier traditions still shining through. He is prepared to stay with the villagers and get to know the people at a much deeper level. This closeness to the villagers has its own problems, he gets very ill and is treated as a Tanimbarese would be by using herbal medicines and witchcraft. One of the things that he learnt from this trip, is that he does see just how much of a problem a visiting anthropologist can cause to a society. He learns as much about himself as he does about the three sculptors that he is visiting. He is a talented writer and this book is full of evocative descriptions of the villages that he is living in and the people that he meets on his day to day routines. Well worth reading if you want to discover a little more about this part of the planet.

5 out of 5 stars

Tiffany Aching is only 9-years old, but already she has a different sense of all that is happening around her. She is by the river when she sees two tiny blue men in kilts. They warn her that there is a ‘green heid’ or a monster in the river called Jenny Greenteeth. Unfazed by this, she sets a trap using her small brother, Wentworth and tempts the monster out of the water and cracks her with her frying pan.

She heads into town to top up her education from the teachers who travel around. It is here that she meets Miss Tick, a witch from up in the mountains. She sees that Tiffany has potential, but Miss Tick still can’t believe that witches can exist on the chalk. Miss Tick tells her that the tiny blue men are Nac Mac Feegles, a rough and ready fae people who speak with a strong accent. She returns home to discover that Wentworth has gone missing.

Not knowing what to do, she heads outside to contact the Nac Mac Feegles and see if they can help. They tell her that the Queen has taken him to Fairyland and that they will be happy to help her rescue him, but first, they need a new Kelda or leader. The Feegles check to see is she is capable of finding Fairyland and let her find the entrance. Soon after they have entered they are faced with several large wolves and these dream-like blobs called dromes. But Tiffany still has to face the Queen and at that point, there will be a reckoning.

This is the first of the Tiffany sub-series that I have read and  I thought it was just brilliant. Pratchett has taken elements of the witches from his past books and formed them into this new character who you can sense developing page by page. One of my favourite parts of the book was when Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany first meet. Weatherwax knows exactly what she is seeing in this young witch, she respects her place in the landscape and can already see what Tiffany will be capable of in time. It is amusing as I have come to expect from all of his books, full of subtle and not so subtle humour and the Nac Mac Feegles are just hilarious.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

Climate change is happening whether you like it or not, and various places are taking steps to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere. There are various ways of doing this, cutting coal, making more efficient vehicles, insulating home and lots of other methods of reducing energy consumption overall. One of the target areas has been lighting, moving away from the old incandescent lamps, changing first to compact fluorescent lamps (CFL’s) and with the advent of cost-effective LED lamps even greater energy and carbon saving can be achieved, often to the tune of 90% less energy used.

A perfect solution you’d think, but things are never as straight forward as you think. To start with CFLs use mercury in the way that they create light, so whilst being more efficient, they are often the cause of mercury pollution in the water table as they are not properly recycled. They often took ages to warm up; the joke being, that you had to turn them on as yeo went to bed to make sure they were bright enough in morning… LED seems to solve a lot of the problems, instant turn on, now as bright as the original lamps and are super-efficient. They have their drawbacks though, they use rare earth elements in their construction, which are often sourced from countries with less than stable governments and even though they last much longer than incandescent, the quality of the light is not as good and the light output degrades over time too.

Light is fundamental to our very ecosystem on the earth. It determines all sorts of natural events, in animals, plants and sea life. The advent of artificial light has meant that we have pushed our natural rhythms to the very limit and the long term implications of doing this are still only poorly understood. Anna Levin has had a fraught relationship with these new lighting technologies. After it became harder to get hold of incandescent lamps she switched to the fluorescent types but found they made her ill. The advent of LED lamps on the market helped her a little, but as a lot are poorly made, then there was not much improvement. She would end up trying to avoid anywhere that relied on these artificially created light sources as the ban on incandescent and halogen kicked in.

She soon discovered that she was not alone either, there were lots of people who were suffering all sorts of illnesses and effects from these lamps. There are those that have stockpiled the older style lamps to use for the years ahead. Further investigation revealed that the regulations that manufacturers had to comply with were pushed through with very little consultation and at a greater rate than manufacturers could adapt to the changes. This meant that factories in the EU lost out on business to the far east and often the quality wasn’t what was needed.

There is a certain irony that since these regulations were passed and the ban on incandescent lamps enforced, domestic energy consumption has risen since. The overall saving effect is zero according to the UK Department for the Environment. For example, the heat dissipated by conventional incandescent lamps is reduced, the missing warmth is compensated for by the central heating system, negating savings in energy and carbon overall. When pressed the EU says that it hasn’t looked at the savings that the changes in lighting have brought so far and also stated that it was ‘still premature to draw conclusions’ when they were asked just how much carbon dioxide had been saved…

Part of the reason that I know so much of what she is talking about in here is that when I don’t have my head in a book, in the real world I have been a development engineer in the lighting industry for the past 15 years.  I have even had the pleasure (not…) of reading the new Single Lighting Regulation that was published in December 2019. I have designed and developed various LED products and seen some of the benefits that these new technologies can bring. All the lamps I have at home are LED, but I have chosen branded flicker-free lamps that have a warm colour temperature. Having said that, there are certain applications where LED lighting is not the most appropriate nor efficient method of illumination.

I thought that this was a really well-researched book as Levin is spot on with the technical details in here. It is well written and argued too; she is saying that the various bans on incandescent lamps that have rippled around the world have never taken into account the quality of the light that the replacements have offered when compared to the older lamps. Those replacements are not as easy to recycle as the old incandescent lamps either. Part of what she is saying is that consumers have never been offered a choice with any of these technologies, unlike with other electronic items in the home you can choose to use a more or less energy-efficient product that meets particular standards. None of this detracts from the urgent crises of climate change, but this subject needs to have an open and transparent discussion because it feels like it has been steamrollered through but the powers that be.

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

Mazes and labyrinths have always fascinated me, not just because of the ability to get very lost in a contained area, but their form and function I find a thing of beauty. They have been fascinating others for millennia too.

Charlotte Higgins is another who is captivated by them and has been since a trip to Knossos as a child and this book is a wander around the mazes of her mind. More than that though it is a history of physical and literary mazes. Most have heard of the Minotaur and how he died at the hands of Theseus in his labyrinth and how he found his way out by following a red thread.

As well as ancient history, mazes and labyrinths have appeared in a variety of cultures, there are the turf mazes of which there were about sixty in England at one point as well as there being more in as Germany. There are very few of these mazes left now and they are extremely difficult to date. Churches sometimes have mazes and the most spectacular is the famous winding walk at Chartres Cathedral and it is steeped in mystery and myth.

Hedge mazes have been around since the Renaissance, but it is people like Adrian Fisher, internationally acclaimed maze designer, who have been bringing them back and putting a modern spin on it with the use of modern materials and deception with mirrors. One nice discovery in this book was finding that each underground station has a small labyrinth somewhere inside.

I really enjoyed Under Another Sky that Higgins had written about Roman Britain so was really looking forward to this. And there were parts of this book that I really liked, however, there were far too much on the classics for my liking. That said, it is a beautifully produced book, full of colour images and nice touches in the book in that it was bound with red thread and the bookmark included is a red ribbon.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Growing up on a sheep farm in Suffolk and learning to spin weave and knit, meant that Esther Rutter has had wool running through her fingers since childhood. She has been a knitter for years and has had a fascination in the history of wool and the part it has played in the history of the UK.

However, no one had written about it from the behind a pair of needles. Moving to Scotland a few years ago meant there was a career gap and she seized the opportunity to do some research in the knitters.

Little did she know that it would be a journey around all of the UK, from the southern Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, across to Wales and back to the fens before heading north to Scotland. Each place that she visits is the opportunity to start a new knitting project so you hear and see in the photos the garments that she made, from funeral socks to a pussy hat, gloves to a cricket jumper and even knits herself a yellow bikini. She has another go at spinning again, with her mum re-teaching her some of the skills that she had long forgotten and knits a gansey for her father that uses a good couple of kilos of wool.

I thought that this was a very interesting take on the cultural history of our country. It was the woollen trade that made our country rich at the time and those financial influence affected all aspects of peoples lives. As well as the history, the author is prepared to make the things that she is finding out about and talk to the people who are keeping this little bit of our culture alive. I am not a knitter, (my wife is though) and it is something that has never really appealed as a hobby. Rutter has a strong narrative in the and I found this to be a fascinating book nonetheless.