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.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

What makes a good bookshop? Well having books is a good start. To be serious though, a well-curated selection of different genres that are drawn from mainstream and back catalogues and staff that are readers and know and love books. But what makes a good bookshop a great bookshop? That requires a little something extra, be it the selection of books, the bookseller or just the location of the shop.

From her first bookshelf that was originally an orange box and the happy memories of going with her brother to the bookshop each Saturday where he bought a Penguin paperback, Anne Scott has always had a thing about bookshops. In this beautifully produced volume, she has picked 18 of her favourite bookshops that she has developed a relationship with over her years.

They are mostly based in the around the UK, though one American one and another Irish one have snuck in, each has been chosen for a variety of reasons. Some because they were the places she discovered poets that other bookshops never even considered stocking, others have that quiet calm as if they were cathedrals to the written word. There are bookshops where the books were placed on easels, with pages opened out to show the art within and a London bookshop that sells children’s books, has ivy curling around the door and a secret garden within.

Sometimes, as here, a Bookshop may be defined forever in a life by a single found book.

I must be honest and say that I had only come across one of these bookshops, the rest were a mystery to me. But what a mystery though, Scott writes about these places in a dreamy evocative way, linking back to memories of discovering books and authors that would play a part in her life. It did make me think though about what bookshops would I include if I was choosing 18 that had made an impression on me as a reader. I really missed having page numbers, but I get why they did it, as each essay about the bookshop is short enough to read in a few minutes. If you have a thing about bookshops then I can recommend this as a book to lose yourself in.

4 out of 5 stars

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

I am a book addict. There I have said it. They seem to consume my life at the moment. I have read more than ever this year, so much so that I am going to finish my Good Reads Challenge a month early this year. I spend lots of time in bookshops and charity shops looking for new things to read and the bargains. I have 12 bookcases around the home, all full to overflowing and ever-increasing tsundoku (piles of books) that my long-suffering wife is now commenting about…

Like Tom, I always look at the books when I visit someone’s home, even if I have been there many times before. Your library is a rare glimpse into your very soul. Shockingly, I have even been to houses where there are no books. NO BOOKS! (Yes this is a real thing). They feel empty and barren. There is much more to a physical book than thin slices of a tree with random marks on. I don’t know quite what it is about books that makes them so appealing. Perhaps it is the heft that you get from a quality hardback, or the detail that goes into binding them or for the price of a couple of coffees you can have an entertaining few hours venturing into another world that someone has created or that you can learn something about our amazing world and the people in it. For me, though I find their presence in my home reassuring, that I can access knowledge and experiences from other people by taking a book off the shelf.

Tom Mole is another fellow obsessive book collector. (It’s not hoarding if it’s books) He works at the University of Edinburgh and is Professor of English Literature and Book History, so he is perfectly placed to write this book about books. Beginning with clay tablets and papyrus he takes us all the way through the scrolls to the codex format that we see all around us today. You will learn about binding errors, how we can become utterly absorbed in the magic that is reading, how some people manage to read their books and leave them utterly pristine and others who pass them on (or horror of horrors back) most foxed and often slightly badgered too. There is a certain amount of pleasure in owning a signed book, even more so if it is dedicated.

Some people develop relationships with their copies of favourite books, scribbling notes, folding the corners of the pages down, leaving splatters from cooking and adding their own unique and distinctive embellishments. There is a chapter on how books can affect people’s lives and two on the future direction and technology of books? Is it kindles? Or apps on a phone? The physical object is resilient to the ravages of time there are books around that are hundreds of years old that can still be read, whereas if you have a novel on a 5 1/4″ floppy disk then you will be extremely lucky if you can ever read that again.

It is a well-researched book stuffed full of interesting anecdotes and facts and Mole has done a great job in not making this feel like a slightly stuffy academic paper. The chapters are short and can be dipped into in no particular order and I liked the brief interludes. If you have the remotest interest in reading or books then I can highly recommend this book. Great stuff.