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This Is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev

17/12/2019 / Paul / 0 Comments

3.5 out of 5 stars

The nations of the world always seem to be at war, if it is not a hot war, then it is a cold war, but now we seem to be in a virtual war. But how do you find the people who are behind the denial of service attacks, who are responsible for trolling those that decide to make a stand against the common views and the physical locations of the bot farms that have sprung up.

What is truth in this modern age of fake news and disinformation? It is like we are living in a reimagined version of 1984, and Pomerantsev is well placed to see what is happening. Originally from the Soviet Union, he was deported with his dissident parents, Igor and Lina and ended up living in the UK. The time that they spent there and the ‘truth’ that they were fed on a daily basis under that regime showed him just what a state could do to manipulate everything that we saw and heard. The Russians are now doing to the rest of the world what they have inflicted on their population for decades.

A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. – Terry Pratchett

We may have the world at our fingertips thanks to Google, but how do you know what you are reading is true or not? The institutions that we once could trust have become sullied by accusations of fake news. Social media has become the echo chamber where people amplify these untruths and anyone attempting to make a stand against this is often drowned out in the noise generated by the trolls. To stand out in these places people take more and more extreme views. Truth is manipulated and twisted in ways that you could not imagine.

I thought his first book was slightly better written than this one, but that really does not underline the impact that this book should have on the wider discussions on political discourse and social media influence. The Bot and Troll farms that he mentions are just terrifying, not only in what they are doing at the moment but also their potential to disrupt the very foundation of our democracies. The West may have won the cold war but will it win the virtual war in cyberspace…

My Anticipated Books of 2020

15/12/2019 / Paul / 9 Comments

I have been through all of the 2020 publishers catalogues that could lay my hands on and have extracted all the books that I really like the look of. Most are non-fiction, as you have probably come to expect by now, but there are a smattering of fiction and sci-fi in there.

Allen Lane

The Future of Food: How Digital Technology Will Change the Way We Feed the Planet by Caleb Harper

Rivers of Power: How a Natural Force Raised Kingdoms, Destroyed Civilizations, and Shapes Our World by Laurence C. Smith

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones

The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price

English Pastoral An Inheritance by James Rebanks

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Arrow

Threads by William Henry Searle

Bloomsbury

Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale by Adam Minter

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Village by Lamorna Ash

Nothing Ordinary: A Still Life by Josie George

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

Last Train to Hilversum: A journey in search of the magic of radio by Charlie Connelly

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma by David Eimer

Tangier: From the Romans to The Rolling Stones by Richard Hamilton

Wanderland by Jini Reddy

On the Trail of Wolves by Philippa Forrester

His Imperial Majesty: A Natural History of the Purple Emperor Butterfly by Matthew Oates

Tracking The Highland Tiger: In Search of Scottish Wildcats by Marianne Taylor

Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots by Kate Devlin

Canongate

Rootbound: Rewilding a Life by Alice Vincent

Department of Mind-Blowing Theories by Tom Gauld

Island Dreams: The Mapping of an Obsession by Gavin Francis

Elliott & Thompson

Cabinet of Calm: Soothing Words for Troubled Times by Paul Anthony Jones

We’re Living Through The Breakdown: And Here’s What We Can Do About It by Tatton Spiller

It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? by Adam Roberts

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

Under the Stars: A Journey into Light by Matt Gaw

Cauld Blasts and Clishmaclavers: A Treasury of 1,000 Scottish Words by Robin A. Crawford

Faber & Faber

The Accidental Countryside by Stephen Moss

Thinking Again by Jan Morris

The Magicians by Marcus Chown

The Remarkable Life of Numbers by Derrick Niederman

Gollancz

Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds

Hamish Hamilton

Bad Island by Stanley Donwood

Harvill Secker

Italian Life by Tim Parks

Head of Zeus

We, Robots by Simon Ings (ed.)

Trains, Planes, Ships and Automobiles: The Golden Age 1919–1939 by James Hamilton-Paterson

Money for Nothing: The South Sea Bubble and the Invention of Modern Capitalism by Thomas Levenson

Democracy on Leave: How Dark Money, Lobbying and Data Are Destroying Politics by Peter Geoghegan

The Colour of Sky After Rain: China in My Time by Tessa Keswick

The Book Of Kells by Victoria Whitworth

Headline

A Good Neighbourhood by Therese Anne Fowler

John Murray

The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain by Andrew Ziminski

Rag and Bone: A Family History of What We’ve Thrown Away by Lisa Woollett

The Last Whalers: The Life of an Endangered Tribe in a Land Left Behind by Doug Bock Clark

Jonathan Cape

Greenery by Tim Dee

The Martian’s Regress by J. O. Morgan

Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

Last Harvest: The Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Foods by Dan Saladino

Little Toller

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Michael Joseph

A History of Britain In 12 Maps by Philip Parker

Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

OneWorld

The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes

How to Predict Everything: The Formula Transforming What We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of a Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky

Particular

Lev’s Violin: An Italian Adventure by Helena Attlee

Penguin

Agency by William Gibson

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us by Jonathan Aldred

Picador

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Economists’ Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

A Place For Everything: The Story of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders

Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way by Michael Bond

Profile

Something Doesn’t Add Up: Surviving Statistics in a Post-Truth World by Paul Goodwin

More: The 10,000 Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

Preserved Railways: Journeys Along the Resurrected Lines by Andrew Martin

Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go by Emily Cockayne

I Saw the Dog: How Language Works by Alexandra Aikhenvald

X+Y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender by Eugenia Cheng

Pushkin Press

Those Who Forget by Geraldine Schwarz

Rider

Wintering: How I Learned To Flourish When Life Became Frozen by Katherine May

Sandstone Press

Marram: Memories of Sea and Spider Silk by Leonie Charlton

Along the Amber Route: St Petersburg to Venice by C.J. Schuller

Tinder Press

American Dirt by Jeanie Cummins

Tor

Invisible Sun by Charles Stross

Transworld

Taking on Gravity: A Guide to Inventing the Impossible by Richard Browning

I Am An Island by Tamsin Calidas

Two Roads

Tall Tales and Wee Stories by Billy Connolly

W&N

Walking the Great North Line: From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to Discover the Mysteries of Our Ancient Past by Robert Twigger

Pluses and Minuses: How Maths Makes Practical Problems Simpler by Stefan Buijsman

Any that you’ve heard of?

What takes your fancy?

More importantly, are there any that I might have missed?

Dark Skies by Tiffany Francis

14/12/2019 / Paul / 0 Comments

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.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

11/12/2019 / Paul / 0 Comments

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.

Time and Place by Alexandra Harris

07/12/2019 / Paul / 0 Comments

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.

100 Things I Meant To Tell You by Arthur Smith

05/12/2019 / Paul / 0 Comments

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!

November 2019 Review

03/12/2019 / Paul / 2 Comments

I am sure it was only last Tuesday that I did my October review. But another month has gone by and my daughter is playing Christmas music and there is one month left of 2019… I join in with the Good Reads challenge each year and set it to the same amount each time, 190. I normally finish with a day or so to spare. This year I finished a month, yes a whole month early. So I am taking December off. Only joking, still way too much to read, but I should crack the 200 books read barrier for the first time. Anyway, I am here to tell you about the books I read in November. I read 17 books by the end of the month and had some really great reads too.

Three bookish delight to begin with. First up is the latest from the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Shaun Bythell. In Confessions Of A Bookseller we have another year of his tale of battling against staff, Amazon and customers. I have a lot of books at home, and Tom Mole is another book addict. So much so that he actually teaches about it. The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words is his eulogy to these slices of tree that some of us are addicted to. The final one is another book addict, but about 18 Bookshops in the UK and America. Anne Scott has written a beautiful book on her favourite shops.

Sharing food with friends and other is one of those things that you can do that will remain in people memories for a long time. Priya Basil asks questions about hospitality and its opposite, hostility in Be My Guest and how we need to focus on helping and providing for others.

Arthur Smith has one of those voices that sticks with you and I could hear it as I read his new book, 100 Things I Meant To Tell You. Often very funny and occasionally sad, this is a book full of wisdom and insight. Some of which you might even be able to use…

Maxim Griffin is worth following on Twitter. He has a unique way of creating art and I love his pictures. He came together with Gary Budden to produce The White Heron Beneath the Reactor, which is a slim psychogeography book about the spit of land off Dungeness.

Spending a year immersing yourself in the countryside and collecting herbs is not everyone’s idea of fun, but in Copsford, Walter Murray tells of the year that he spent doing just that, whilst living in an almost derelict house. Some wonderful moments in here.

I have had a review copy of Chasing the Ghost by Peter Marren for far too long. This is his story of searching for all the Wild Flowers of Britain and he had 50 left to see including the rare, Ghost Orchid. Well written as I have come to expect from Peter Marren and well worth reading. Kind of a natural history book as well as an adventure book, the new book by Tiffany Francis, Dark Skies: A Journey Into The Wild Night is a series of stories about venturing out when it is dark and not taking the torch.

Two poetry books this month, the first was the latest Alice Oswald, called Nobody and is a book length poem inspired by a minor character in the Odyssey. The second was called, Miles of Sky Above Us, Miles of Earth Below and is a take on modern life by Steve Denehan.

Fake news, trolling, denial of service attacks and bot farms are all things that we didn’t know about a decade ago. And now they are here, disrupting our democracy and causing all sorts of problems. Most of them are based in Russia or have strong Russian links, and Peter Pomerantsev is very well placed to write about what is happening in This Is Not Propaganda. Genuinely terrifying stuff.

I have been fascinated by the night sky for a long time now and more so since my daughter took it as a GCSE. The Art Of Urban Astronomy is a beautifully produced beginners guide to the night sky.

I really enjoyed the first in this series, so was delighted to receive Peter F. Hamilton’s new book, Salvation Lost from the publisher. In this, it is discovered that the worst threat ever to face mankind from the supposedly benign Olyix. They plan to harvest humanity, carry us to their god at the end of the universe. I liked it but thought it was a bit slower-paced than the first one.

I only read Cider with Rosie a few years ago and rapidly went on to read the sequels, including As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Loved them, so when I was offered a copy of the travel adventurer, Alastair Humphreys’ book I thought I’d did one off the shelf that I won a few years ago, As I Walked Out Through Spain In Search Of Laurie Lee. They are both very different journeys and in their own way eulogies to the original book.

My book of the month though was, Ness. This dystopian future is unlike anything I have ever read before. I won’t say any more than that. Amazing book from Robert Macfarlane and stunning artwork from Stanley Donwood all the way through.

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

02/12/2019 / Paul / 4 Comments

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.

December 2019 TBR

30/11/2019 / Paul / 6 Comments

As we hurtle towards the end of the year, I look back at all the books that I’d thought I’d get to and largely failed to do so. So many book but so little time. This month is a case of catching up on a couple of challenges that I have been doing and still have books to read for and trying to work my way through what is an ever-increasing review TBR!

Award Winner Challenge

The idea behind this was to choose books that were winners or long and shortlisted for a variety of types of literary prizes. The ones that I have left to read by the end of the year are:

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

Our Endless Numbered Days – Clare Fuller

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead

In the Days of Rain – Rebecca Stott

Blood on the Page – Thomas Harding

#20BooksOfSummer

Two left to go on this, (still!!!), even British it is almost winter…

Blue Mind: How Water Makes You Happier, More Connected and Better at What You Do by Wallace J. Nichols

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water – The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century by Fred Pearce

Library Books

Messy – Tim Harford

The Gentle Art of Tramping – Stephen Graham

Superheavy: Making And Breaking The Periodic Table – Kit Chapman

The Edge Of The World: A Cultural History Of The North Sea And The Transformation Of Europe – Michael Pye

Winter Themed

The Library of Ice – Nancy Campbell

The Nature Of Winter – Jim Crumley

Father Christmas’s Fake Beard – Terry Pratchett

Review Books

Time and Place – Alexandra Harris

The Many Lives of Carbon – Dag Olav Hessen, Tr. Kerri Pierce

Spinning Silver – Naomi Novrik

Stealing With The Eyes – Will Buckingham

The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers by Moritz Thomsen

The Book of Puka-Puka: A Lone Trader in the South Pacific by Robert Dean Frisbie

Irreplaceable: The Fight To Save Our Wild Places by Julian Hoffman

Incandescent – Ann Levin

The House of Islam – Ed Husain

Blue Mind – Wallace J. Nichols

When the Rivers Run Dry – Fred Pearce

Wintering – Stephen Rutt

The Glass Woman – Caroline Lea

Vickery’s Folk Flora – Roy Vickery

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

Own Books / Wishful thinking

The Art of Life Admin – Elizabeth Emens (To be read after Messy!)

The Wee Free Men – Terry Pratchett

Any there that you have read, or perhaps take your fancy (I know that some have been on previous TBRs!)

Miles of Sky Above Us, Miles of Earth Below by Steve Denehan

29/11/2019 / Paul / 0 Comments

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Miles of Sky Above Us, Miles of Earth Below by Steve Denehan and published by Cajun Mutt Press.

About the Book

Steve Denehan is an extraordinary poet. In this debut collection, he writes about ordinary everyday events in his life and does so in a way that will resonate with the reader. His poetry brings unforgettable impact into small spaces, reveals the fabric of solitude in epic proportions, and tells stories of the moments where life truly exists.

About the Author

Steve Denehan lives in Kildare, Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin. He has been twice shortlisted for the Anthony Cronin International Poetry Prize in the Wexford Literary Festival. Also nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poet amongst other prizes.

My Review

This collection by Steve Denehan is very much rooted in the everyday and the mundane. But in amongst the most ordinary is where he finds the gaps where light floods in and inspires him to write these poems. There is nothing esoteric in here, rather these are poems about real-world situations, casual Fridays, birdsong, cookies and the struggle of writing and finding the words that he knows are there.

I remain calm

I try to remain calm

But the words are there inside my fingertips

Eager to be born

trapped

Family ties are a big theme too. He reminisces about his childhood, spends time with his dad and looks forward to his daughters future. It is a small book about the big things in life, that we can’t always see until too late. His poems are easy to read, feel grounded in our world and soar with joy and bleed with pain.

I buy old library books

Because they are cheap

Because they come with extras

History

Stories beyond the books themselves

I have read more poetry this year than ever before having set myself a challenge of reading at least one poetry book a month. Some of the collections have been really good, other I have struggled with for a variety of reasons, but nonetheless, I have still enjoyed them. I feel a real connection to the poetry that Denehan writes. It is very accessible whilst still having a depth that comes from having lived.

Three Favourite Poems

Hate

Everything is Invisible

Columbia

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour