Thoughts on books and reading, book recommendations, writer profiles and litereary trivia
In Xanadu is William Dalrymple's first book. It’s an account of a journey in which he retraced, as near as possible, the path that was taken by Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Shangdu in China, the legendary summer home of Kubla Khan which, thanks to Coleridge, we all know as Xanadu. This journey took him …
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The point at the heart of this book, is that our brains are not designed to be in a constant state of stimulation. Multitasking means not only that we don't do any of the tasks that we're engaged in well, but also that we push our brains well out of their comfort zone. Our brains …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: Auto Pilot by Andrew Smart"
This is an important book. It's the story of one truly remarkable woman, but it's also the story of the women’s movement, and the fight for gender equality both in the field of sports, and in the world at large. It's an account of an athlete coming to terms with her sexuality, in a very …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: All in: An Autobiography by Billie Jean King"
This book, as it says in the title, is a diary, a day-to-day record of one year in a bookshop written by the owner Shaun Bythell who runs a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown which is Scotland’s book town. His shop is called, very simply, The Bookshop. He has a hundred thousand books, some of which …
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This is a lovely book about life and the best way to live it. It is philosophy in the original, and in my opinion, best sense of the word. Eric Weiner is not a philosopher, he's a journalist. He, like the rest of us, is trying to make sense of life, trying to find meaning, …
Continue reading "Book Recommendation: The Socrates Express by Eric Weiner"
The full title of this book is The Way home: Tales from a Life Without Technology, and that is essentially what it is, the record of a year of the writer’s life that he lived without any of the conveniences of modern life; no electricity, no running water, no plumbing, no computer, internet, smart phone …
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Food writing is one of my favourite genres, and few writers today, are as good at it, as Michael Pollan. He’s written several books about the production of food and the eating of it, but like he says in the introduction to Cooked, he hadn’t thought much about the middle part of this chain, the …
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between the pages 