[Falling Down]

 

I’ll send you a pic of some SUP’ers on the grand-union canal during the period it gets covered in duckweed.  Dave texted me back saying “wave garden”.

[dunnyg]

I have used this thread over the years for recommendations, so here is a bit of karmic payback, hopefully it is of use to someone! Some of the less well known (to me) books I've read. If anyone is interested i'll do some more in a bit!

Harlot's ghost - Norman Mailer

Fictional memoir of a CIA man during the early cold war. The story line is fascinating and explores major events of the cold war from a personal point of view. I re-read this because I couldn't remember the ending. For me it gives an insight into 2 things, the upper echelons of WASP US society during the early cold war period, and the day to day life of CIA operations during the period. I found some of the characters a little insufferable, and some of the psychology theory chat seems like it is trying to be profound but isn't, but maybe that is the point? Either way, the complex story line kept me engaged enough to finish it (it is a bit of a beast!). There was supposed to be a sequel, but Norman never wrote it. I really wish he had!


The tragedy of liberation/Mao's great famine/Cultural revolution - Frank Dikotter

A trilogy setting out the history of the formation of the modern chinese state. I don't know much about China, so was interested where it came from. These books are chocker with well researched information. Unfortunately they are a bit dry for me, I think I prefer historical fiction/biography, but definitely something to read if you are interested in the period and enjoy reading more straight history books.

The first Circle - Solzhenitsy

Set in a Russian Gulag, over a few days. Introduces you to a cast of characters and their lives. I'm not selling it here, but this was really very good. Explores Stalinist Russia in all its brutality, and is relatively easy reading. Its a long'n again, but it is a good'n. Really highly recommend this, as well as the more famous gulag archipleago by the same author. Both are a graphic insight into a world that existed not that long ago, or far away. Mental.

The secret diaries of Miss Anne Lister - edited by Helena Whitbread

Diaries of an impressive woman from the 17th century, landowner, lesbian and Halifax resident. Whilst the text is historically important, it is pretty hard going to read stright. For those familiar with Halifax it is amazing to hear someone talking about streets and places you know. Whilst interesting for a while, as I mentioned wit the Dikotter trilogy, straight up "history books" aren't my bag, so I lost interest about 1/4 of the way through. I think there is a novel of her life based on the diaries, which I would be interested in reading though

10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world - Elif Shafak

A book of two halves. Set in Turkey based on a female lead, unfolding the life story of a character, often through the eyes of her friends. I thought the second half was a bit weak relative to the first, but the first half is so beautifully written. I've spent a little time in Turkey, but the prose really brought the whole book to life. Interesting perspectives from a culture I know little about, interesting stories told with captivating descriptions.

[spidermonkey09]

Horizon paperback is out, I'm planning on buying it later. Totally agree Lopez is superior to MacFarlane but no doubt RF is the UK main popular exponent as far as nature writing is concerned and I was just trying to locate Lopez within that genre for people. I also really like his stuff although he does make it easy to take the piss out of him sometimes.

Thought it worth mentioning that I finished reading Horizon yesterday and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Probably even better than Arctic Dreams because it describes such a wide array of landscapes. I really enjoyed the chapter on Galapagos but my favourite was his account of various trips to Australia, particularly Tasmania, which really resonated with me from my own time there. The writing is superb and although it comes with the proviso that this is not a book you can drift through, or I couldn't anyway (ie, it demands reading) it's really rewarding and I would recommend to anyone who has enjoyed MacFarlane or any other nature/travel writing. There is a good amount that reminds me of Bruce Chatwin in Lopez so if you liked The Songlines/ In Patagonia this will be right up your street.

Long rambling post but thought it worth flagging as Lopez is the best in the business at this style of writing and is getting on now so this may well be his final book. I'm very glad he's snuck it in under the crossbar!

[Johnny Brown]

^This. About 3/4 of the way through and it is blowing my mind. Will post some more thoughts when I finish.

[slab_happy]

Given that most of the genre seems to consist of London based writer moves to the country and discovers nature, Person with actual outdoor experience moves to London could potentially be a hot new take!

Having moved from the Midlands to London for work (and now out of London again) my greatest nature hits from the capital were/are:

• The number of herons and wildfowl in Regent's Park
• Seeing bitterns at the wetland centre which was only a tube and a bus away
• The flocks of parakeets in Ealing and Hampstead Heath
• Grey wagtails around the water feature in our local park in Ealing
• The variety of wildfowl I could see on my commute by walking along the canal round little venice in winter including pochard and red-crested pochard
• The number of red kites you see over the M40 when driving out of London/back

My Peak district neighbours have been boggled to hear about my many close encounters with London foxes, which have included running into one in my house (it had come in through an upstairs window after apparently parkouring over some neighbouring walls and balconies). London foxes do not give a fuck.

I can recommend swimming in the Serpentine for encounters with blase wildfowl (and watching the swans intimidating the triathletes). Also for admiring the coots' strategy of building nests on the strings of buoys marking out the pool; buoyant enough to carry a nest, but impossible for land predators to walk out to it.

[Falling Down]

We have a few foxes near us and see them regularly darting up and down our street.  I'm enjoying the bees visiting the back yard.  Some of them are massive.

Just bought a copy of Horizon and am looking forward to it, thanks Spidermonkey for the reminder.  There's a link to a great interview Lopez did for Emergence further up this thread.

@dunnyg - Yeah, Harlot's Ghost is flippin' brilliant.  I think it might be the only Norman Mailer book I've read.

I've mostly been reading for my studies and just put down Irvin Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy which delves into the four "ultimate concerns of life" that we all have, namely death, freedom, isolation and meaningless.  It sounds grim but it's incredibly life affirming and brilliantly written.

David Keenan has been publishing a great weekly journal, 'Divers to Dive' each Sunday via The Social with artwork by Eleni Avram.  Here with loads of other goodies produced during lockdown.

[duncan]

I’ve just finished Jeff Smoot's Hangdog Days. It tells the story of US climbing in the 1980s and the battle between the sport climbers and the die-hard traddies by someone very much in the former camp. Don't be put off by the uninspiring cover (bizarre when there are so many fabulous photos from that era) with the inevitable, groan-inducing, John Long quote (just stop now). It starts slowly with a bit of 1970s scene-setting but gets into its stride when the author steps onto the pages. Mostly it's a series of portraits of the combatants in the bolt wars and especially the larger-than-life Todd Skinner. Smoot was an employee of "Todd Skinner Enterprises" for some of the time "a peon - one of Todd's marketing assistants, staff writers and photographers..." The stories are as outrageous as John Long's from the previous generation but there is a wry self-deprecation that isn't always the tone in climbing biography. The portraits of people I bumped into at the time: Carrigan, Moffatt, Bachar and Watts are spot on.

It ends wistfully. Alan Watts wrecked his body but seems comfortable with his choices. Hugh Herr is a star in academia. Bachar died soloing, inevitably. Skinner of course died in one of the all-time stupid climbing accidents. Paul Piana drives trucks for a coal mine. Smoot himself Chose Not To Climb and is now a bankruptcy and insolvency lawyer in Seattle. I imagine he's not short of work right now.

[sherlock]

A pretty good synopsis of a book about a time long,long ago. Or so it seems...
The author certainly doesn't like Geoff Weigand much, that's for damn sure....

[DaveC]

A pretty good synopsis of a book about a time long,long ago. Or so it seems...
The author certainly doesn't like Geoff Weigand much, that's for damn sure....

Neither did I. Very good climber but Rreally quite an unlikeable character as I recall him from Arapiles back in the mid-80s. Easy to piss him off, just call him Ralph! 

[DaveC]

I actually just did a whole best non-fiction of the last year or two thing but i got logged out and it disappeared!

That's annoying.

Oh well, it'll have to wait for another time now.

[Falling Down]

Niall Griffiths' Broken Ghost.  A new one from the author of Grits, Sheepshaggers (those two I've read) and several other novels set in Wales.  Three people on the edges of society witness a vision up in the hills during a comedown from a rave.  Their stories, separate but intertwined by poverty and bureaucracy unfold and recombine again.  Worthwhile and full of a righteous anger.

Max Porter - Lanny.  Bloody hell this is good.  Devoured it in one sitting.  Set in small village outside of London where Lanny, a young boy with a head full of dreams and magic lives with his parents. Mum is a retired actress turned crime novels and dad has a high pressure commuting job in the city. Lanny is friends with an older man, an artist.  The village holds from the old times and something remarkable happens. Very Alan Garner'ish and absolutely brilliant.

[andy popp]

Thanks FD. I normally run away from fantasy novels as fast I can, but I do really wish I'd read some Alan Garner.

I finished Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries a few days ago; a vast, complex novel about history and place. Also a brilliant study of totalitarianism, its origins and the mindsets it can create, under both the Nazis and the USA.

Now reading more more Naguib Mahfouz - Midaq Alley. He always delights me in ways I can't quite explain.

[Falling Down]

I think you'd like the Stone Book Quartet by Garner Andy. It's one of the best things I've ever read. Generations of a stonemason's family in Cheshire. 

Anniversaries sounds great.  I shall put it on the list.

[sherlock]

I've just finished the trilogy by Kent Haruf. Starting with Plainsong then continuing with Eventide and Benediction it documents small town life in a dusty Colorado setting.
Both quotidian and extraordinary, the writing will stay with me a long long time.
Beautiful, devastating and highly recommended.

[andy popp]

Thanks Sherlock. Haruf is one of those names I've been aware of without knowing anything about. That sounds right up my street.

[SA Chris]

Slightly less high brow, but really enjoying the anthology from 50 years of Climbing magazine.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vantage-Point-Years-Climbing-Stories/dp/1493048481

I also found Bill Bryson's Shakespeare an interesting and amusing read.

 

[jwi]

Racism : a short history / George M. Fredrickson

I picked up this book because I wanted to learn a bit about the origins of racism and its dependence on scientific thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Mostly because some public discourse is obviously and manifestly bonkers, like claims that everybody was a racist in the sixteenth century, and I figured that reading one book by an esteemed scholar of the field is worth about a hundred ill-informed newspaper articles or opinion pieces.


So.

It does what it says on the cover. This short book traces the history of racism in the west from its beginnings in the late middle ages and early renaissance to its hitherto apex in the overtly racist regimes of Nazi Germany, the American South and South Africa.

The book can be fairly short as it assumes that the reader has a working knowledge of European history, the history of the new world, some knowledge of South Africa's history and a decent overview of World history. It also has a quite narrow definition of racism, making it possible to remove lots of lamentable theories about ethnicity and culture from the curriculum and focus on the most horrible manifestations of racialized thought.

Fredrickson defines racism as an ideology that directly sustains (or proposes) a permanent, unbridgeable racial group hierarchy founded upon the laws of nature or decrees of God/gods/spirits/blood magic, and traces the history and justification both in scientific literature and in (mostly German) anti-rationalism.

I thought the book was excellent, on point and well referenced without it disturbing the reading too much. A well spent afternoon.

[seankenny]

Some books I've read lately, for various reasons somewhat less highbrow than previous posters.

One Day as a Tiger, John Porter.
The story of mountaineer Alex MacIntyre, who died in 1982 aged 28, hit by a stone on the south face of Annapurna. He certainly crammed a lot into those few years of life, not just hard routes in the Alps and Himalayas but also designing gear, shaping the BMC and forging links with Polish climbers. Porter was one of his climbing partners and this book is as much about the milieu of 70s and 80s British Alpinism as it is MacIntrye himself. It's all reasonably rock and roll as you'd expect, with some truly hair raising moments: a gem deal gone wrong in Afghanistan is one of the more frightening tales in the book. He captures how wild the Himalaya must have been in those days.

Porter plays it totally straight until the final few days of the Annapurna trip, when the paranormal and premonitions of fate loom large. MacIntyre is being pulled into a vortex he cannot escape from, it seems, or is this just Porter's hindsight speaking? Either way, I'm glad he waited 30 years to write the book as it gives it a heft of maturity and insight that most mountaineering books lack. Definitely one of the best of the genre.

I've read a trio of SF novels lately which isn't usually my thing but has been jolly fun.

Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson
Freya lives on a generation ship, two spinning rings of biomes consisting of all the different climatic zones of earth, that has been travelling through interstellar space for 170 years. The ship covers the years in which is finally approaches its target star system and their destination, a large moon called Aurora, which they plan to colonise and terraform. Needless to say, things start to go wrong, in fact they are going wrong from the start as putting a whole living world into a spaceship that's supposed to last for centuries is a recipe for ecological disaster. Then there is the small matter of the human inhabitants, who can rub along with mild discontent through the years in space (most people resent the strict but essential controls over fertility) but who suffer political ruptions when things at Aurora do not go according to plan.

The novel got me thinking about interstellar travel which is certainly an enjoyable way to occupy one's brain, the author is pessimistic about whether it's possible for us and I have to agree. Other stars are just too far away. On the negative side, it's quite badly written and the people are flimsy cut outs, sure it's a novel of ideas but I'd have liked a bit more on this.


The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
Genly Ai is a human envoy sent to Gethen to it to join a planetary federation. Gethen is a cold planet with a semi-permanent winter. Its people are human, but androgynous: every month they have "kemmer" and become either male or female, and able to have sex and reproduce. It's a very strange society, without war or rape, and Ai struggles to understand it as he goes about his mission of persuading Gethen to join an interplanetary federation. He works closely with Estraven, a minister in one of Gethen's governments, but finds himself betrayed. The setpiece climax of the novel is a long trek Ai and Estraven make across the ice cap as part of their mission to escape one of the hostile nations of Gethen.

This was really well written, atmospheric and interesting, lots of good ideas about masculinity and femininity, but the ideas don't overshadow the characters or the strange world. Very good.

Look to Windward, Iain M Banks

One of Banks' Culture novels, set in a far future society of incredible affluence who live in huge space habitats that are socialist paradises. Of course like all paradises it's a bit boring so the inhabitants always seem to be getting involved with less developed species in various misguided attempts at political philanthropy. In this case they have attempted to subvert the caste system of the Chelgrians, causing a civil war (it was published in 2001).

I've read a few of the Culture novels and they are enjoyable space opera romps through an overblown future in which Banks' expansive imagination has let itself completely off the hook. An excellent subplot involves a Culture antropologist living as part of the ecosystem of a huge floating  "dirigible behemoth" on a remote gas planet. Unfortunately I found the Chelgrians a bit ridiculous - basically people in lion suits - and the ending was a bit lacking.

 

[SA Chris]

I've read loads of the culture books, but really can't remember which ( a bit like Terry Pratchett).
All enjoyable, but Player of Games and Excession are the only ones that stand out for me as being particularly memorable.

[fatneck]

Just finished, and loved, The Silo trilogy (Wool, Shift and Dust). Final part wasn't quite the finish I'd hoped after the first two but enjoyable none the less! Sean's description above of Aurora reminded of them and I am going to get hold of a copy of this as sounds right up my street! Thanks...

[SA Chris]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peace-War-Omnibus-Forever-GOLLANCZ/dp/0575079193

while on the sci-fi vibe, i finished this recently.

Forever War and Forever Free are the first two parts, following the story of drafted soldiers who are sent to fight a war against an "alien threat" and the second novel trying to rebuild a life after the wars (echoes of Vietnam, the author was a vet). I really enjoyed most of it, although found the final section of the last novel slightly contrived.

Forever Peace is a separate novel, unrelated to the other tow, with wars fought my mind controlled machines remotely, but slips into a separate thread about much greater destruction. It's good, but not as good as the first two books.

[Stabbsy]

One Day as a Tiger, John Porter.
The story of mountaineer Alex MacIntyre, who died in 1982 aged 28, hit by a stone on the south face of Annapurna. He certainly crammed a lot into those few years of life, not just hard routes in the Alps and Himalayas but also designing gear, shaping the BMC and forging links with Polish climbers. Porter was one of his climbing partners and this book is as much about the milieu of 70s and 80s British Alpinism as it is MacIntrye himself. It's all reasonably rock and roll as you'd expect, with some truly hair raising moments: a gem deal gone wrong in Afghanistan is one of the more frightening tales in the book. He captures how wild the Himalaya must have been in those days.

Porter plays it totally straight until the final few days of the Annapurna trip, when the paranormal and premonitions of fate loom large. MacIntyre is being pulled into a vortex he cannot escape from, it seems, or is this just Porter's hindsight speaking? Either way, I'm glad he waited 30 years to write the book as it gives it a heft of maturity and insight that most mountaineering books lack. Definitely one of the best of the genre.

Read this last year and thought this was excellent. I'd agree it was one of the best in the genre - up there with Echoes (Nick Bullock).

On the Iain (M) Banks front, I didn't get on with the sci-fi on a previous attempt (Consider Phlebas), but I have just finished the last fiction book having saved it for a few years (The Quarry). Having really enjoyed the majority of the others, particularly Whit and The Crow Road, this one felt like he was on auto-pilot a bit. Still well written, but lacking the hook that the others usually had.

[teestub]

On the Iain (M) Banks front, I didn't get on with the sci-fi on a previous attempt (Consider Phlebas),

IMO Consider Phlebas is one of the weaker Culture books, if you are going to have another go at any point I’d recommend Player of Games, Use of Weapons or Surface Detail.

[Stabbsy]

On the Iain (M) Banks front, I didn't get on with the sci-fi on a previous attempt (Consider Phlebas),

IMO Consider Phlebas is one of the weaker Culture books, if you are going to have another go at any point I’d recommend Player of Games, Use of Weapons or Surface Detail.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll maybe try again at some point. I read and really enjoyed Transition which was an Iain (not M) Banks, but was definitely more on the sci-fi side. Might be a while though - arrival of daughter means I don't get through anywhere near as many books as I used to!

[jwi]

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin

This is a strong novel by what is in all likelihood the best science fiction writer from the US.