State of the TBR – May 2024

Well what can I say, it’s about the same as last month and has wiggled around the shelves a bit. I took six print books off the shelf and read them (one of them a Three Investigators Mystery), and I have started one more (a review book). I didn’t take any of the oldest books off the TBR and read four more of my TBR Project books (27 read and reviewed, 114 to go). I set an intention to read Patrick Hutchinson’s “Everyone Against Racism” (reviewed here) and Christan Cooper’s “Better Living Through Birding” (to review) and did, so I’m pleased about that. The Liz and Emma Read Together books are in a separate pile (top shelf, to the left) because they don’t form part of the TBR project, and the book on the top left top is a review book.

I completed 15 books in April (two with reviews to be published). I am part-way through three more (including my current Reading With Emma Read and a read that will take all year). I read all but three of my April NetGalley books during April; one of the three was acquired in April, and my NetGalley review percentage remains at 91%. I read one ebook for Kaggsysbookishramblings and Stuck-in-a-Book‘s 1937 week, which I had bought earlier in the year.

Incomings

Only four print incomings, three from the Bookshop and one on subscription:

Huda Fahmy publishes the “Yes, I’m Hot in This” comic online and has a series of graphic novels. When I found out her story about a trip to the theme park, “Huda F Cares?” was out, a bit belatedly, I had to ask the Bookshop to order it in for me. “Free Loaves on Fridays” is an Unbound book I subscribed to a while ago which is about the care system in the UK as told by people involved. The Bookshop shared that they’d sold copies of Keith Boykin’s “Why Does Everything Have to be About Race” at someone else’s event and I asked them to put me aside a copy, as I want to have some up-to-date stuff as well as the BLM-inspired wellspring of publishing I’ve been reading recently, and while I was collecting it I spotted Clive Oppenheimer’s “Mountains of Fire: The Secret Lives of Volcanoes” and couldn’t resist it.

More NetGalley ships came in.

Joel Golby’s “Four Stars” (published April) is a non-fiction quest book in which he assigns stars/ratings to all his everyday experiences. Onyi Nwabineli’s “Allow Me To Introduce Myself” (May) is the tale of a girl who pushes back against her mumfluencer mother sharing every moment of her life on social media. I was offered Emily Houghton’s “Take a Chance on Me” (Aug) because I’d read and reviewed her “Before I Saw You” and this one’s an opposites-attract romcom with a travel twist. “Determination” by Tawseef Khan (June) is a novel set in an immigration lawyers’ office where the staff have all recently moved to the UK themselves and looked intriguing. Hooray – I got Abi Daré’s new one – “And So I Roar” (Aug) – I loved her “The Girl with the Louding Voice” and this is the continuing story of Adunni from that book which I hadn’t quite realised. Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar are well-known YA writers and their “Four Eids and a Funeral” (June) is a community novel and love story about saving the local Islamic centre. I’m a bit worried there’s a cat on the cover so fingers crossed nothing bad happens (the funeral is definitely a person’s). I read about P.J. Ellis’ “We Could Be Heroes” (June) in a NetGalley email and realised it’s partly set in Birmingham, so that had to be requested, right? And finally I will admit I hit the request button on Tessa Hicks Peterson and Hala Khouri (eds.) “Practicing Liberation” (July) while I was still looking at it: it’s about looking after yourself as a social justice campaigner, which I don’t feel I am massively, so not sure how relevant it will be but might be able to share its usefulness with others.

I also bought for Kindle Nathan Flear’s running book, “Puddings to Podiums” – well, I didn’t buy it as it was on a free promotion! The cover is a bit triggering around weight loss so I’ll have to see how I review it when the time comes

So that was 15 read and 13 coming in in April, which is a MASSIVE win, right?!

Currently reading

Zeinab Badawi’s “An African History of Africa” has turned out to be dense but readable and I have to take breaks between chapters so I don’t get it all mixed up. I will have my review in with Shiny New Books soon! Emma and I are about to start our new read, Raynor Winn’s third book, “Landlines”, as we’ve read the other two together. I’m also still reading my literary quotes for the year with Ali.

Coming up

I did well with setting my intention on my print books last month so am doing that again. Kehinde Andrews’ “The New Age of Empire” is the oldest book on the TBR. Michael Cunningham’s “Day” I bought on the day of publication so I’d beter get on and read it! Corinne Fowler’s “Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain”, which is for a Shiny review, looks like it will pair well with the first of these.

I have six NetGalley books published in May, but three April ones hanging around. A romance, a communty novel, a non-fiction about mental health, another community novel, essays in Indigenous Canada and a satirical novel about living your life on social media beckon! The April ones are Emily Henry’s “Funny Story”, Rachel Kong’s “Real Americans” and

I don’t think I have any reading challenges to do this month! With the ones I’m currently reading, I have one books to finish (Emma and I are just starting our new read), a review book to finish and one to read and review and nine others to read at a minimum, which might happen!

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How was your April reading? What are you reading this month? Are you doing any book challenges for the year or the month?

Book review – Patrick Hutchinson with Sophia Thakur – “Everyone Versus Racism”

In my State of the TBR – April post, I set the intention to read two books from my collection I saw as a good pair to read together – both written by Black men who were part of a viral social media storm in 2020, both for taking actions that made them stand out, but one in the UK and one in America, one straight and one gay – different enough but alike enough to be interesting. And I’ve managed it – my review of “Better Living Through Birding” by Christian Cooper will be out in a few days, and here’s Patrick Hutchinson’s powerful letter to his children and grandchildren. I bought this book in May 2022 after seeing it mentioned on Hayley from Rather Too Fond of Books’ blog and out of the four print books acquired that month and shared here, I’ve actually now read and reviewed three!

Patrick Hutchinson with Sophia Thakur – “Everyone Versus Racism: A Letter to Change the World”

(29 May 2022)

If I can promise anything, it is an honest reflection of what it has meant to exist in the twenty-first century – as a black person in a world that celebrates black suppression. As a black man in a world that seems to crave black men’s blood. As a black person who is certain that compassion is the only solution to the deadly tale of racism. I am not saying that we should forgive and forget. But I believe that in our fight to move forward, we must arm ourslves with as much empathy as we do energy. (pp. 1-2)

On 16 June 2020 there was a Black Lives Matter march in London, but also a planned counter-demonstration by the EDL (the English Defence League – a far-right organisation). After the protests became mixed and tense, an image came out of a Black guy carrying a White guy to safety. What we probably didn’t know until / unless we read the book was that that Black guy – Patrick Hutchinson, father of four and grandfather of four – had headed into London with five friends, all trained in martial arts, to protect the BLM marchers and try to ensure violence that could cause further division and the movement being brought into disrepute didn’t ensue.

They did their job, having already saved a car load of EDL demonstrators from being sat on or worse, they rescued a man from almost certain death who never got in contact to say thank you, and then Mr Hutchinson was afforded the opportunity to write a book, which he did with writer and poet Sophia Thakur, which was published in 2020. In some ways, it’s the autobiograpy of an ordinary man – but when before the outpouring of publishing of global majority people’s words and lives did we get to read about an ordinary, decent Black man’s life?

Written in the form of a letter to his descendents, he envisages a post-racism world but also runs us through the realities of life as a Black guy in Britain – stop and search, racism, health inequalities, Covid inequalities, carefully placed through his own history. But he’s also big on compassion, restraint and doing people a good turn, on how a baby’s smile can cheer a whole crowd of people. In an interesting echo of “Biracial”, he shares that his joint English-Jamaican identity gives him more of everything and he talks about the good in Black British culture, the supportive atmosphere of the barber’s, of community and family.

He shares about small social movements for good, from the theatre organisation offering cheap seats to the organisation he jointly set up with his friends, UTCAI (United to Change and Inspire) to help young people in his area of South London. Here’s where it sometimes doesn’t pay to read books a while after they were published or I bought them (though I partly do it with social justice books to keep sharing after the initial fuss and wellspring of publishing has died down): when I went to make a donation to UTCAI, noting it was because I’d read this book, the current team returned my donation, advising me that Mr Hutchinson was no longer associated with it. Of course I then returned my donation to them for being so incredibly decent!

Anyway, an inspirational and interesting book, showing the tangible good that can come from a viral social media post.

This is Book 27 in my 2024 TBR project – 114 to go!

Book review – Robin Ince – “Bibliomaniac”

Emma gave me this book for my birthday in 2023 and when I heard that Robin Ince was coming to do an event at the Kings Heath Music and Book Festival, organised by The Heath Bookshop among others, I picked it off the shelf to read. Come the event, last Thursday, I hadn’t quite finished it – as I wanted to take it to get it signed anyway, I sat there slightly self-consciously in the audience before he started and finished it off! Out of the seven books I received for that birthday, I’ve read and reviewed five, not bad! And of course it counts towards my TBR project, too.

Robin Ince – “Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain”

(21 January 2023, from Emma)

An excellent combination of a book about bookshops and a “quest” book, we read about Ince’s journey by public transport and the odd lift around over 100 bookshops in the UK in 100 days. There’s a section on each town and we also get to hear about the charity shops of the area and what he buys, and his increasingly heavy bags of books he drags around – very familiar from my trips to Hay, or, to be honest, my own high street on occasion.

I marked up references to the bookshops I knew, including The Edge of the World in Penzance, the Hospice charity shop in Stratford and The Cinema Bookshop in Hay. There appears to be a new one in my own town of origin! He does an event in Birmingham (and has a bit of a funny turn on the confusing roads) but has to do it at ThinkTank (which has a bookshop?!) because The Bookshop wasn’t open then, so it’s lovely he returned there for this event (he also bought a copy of this book in The Shop and a little pile in Oxfam Books, sadly none that I’d donated there myself!).

There were laughs – being in Stratford and getting trapped in inventing punning shop names; he apparently still gets tweets with ideas, years later – and poignant moments as he spends time with his elderly dad in lockdown: his dad passed last year and the event was on what would have been his birthday so there was sad stuff among the funny and science bits, although as he said we’re the better for talking about such things. A bit of a scattershot review, sorry, very entertaining and worthwhile as a guide to bookshops to find in various towns; his events are a blast of associations and chains of thought but he seems like a lovely chap and gave my friend a hug during his signing at the end when she got sad about lost dads.

This is Book 26 in my 2024 TBR project – 115 to go!

Book review – Basil Thomson – “The Milliners’ Hat Mystery”

It’s the first day of Kaggsysbookishramblings and Stuck-in-a-Book‘s 1937 Week and I very naughtily bought a book specially for the occasion, having claimed I was going to do all my challenges this year from the TBR. But it was from Dean Street Press so that’s supporting indie publishers, right?

Basil Thomson – “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery”

(2 January 2024, Kindle)

This is one of Thomson’s Inspector Richardson Mysteries, although Richardson himself only appears every now and again, while the work of the police procedural (I have now found out I had those mixed up with courtroom dramas!) is done by his underling, the urbane and educated Vincent.

It’s hard to talk about such books without giving away the plot, and I don’t read many crime mysteries so I can’t really comment on how it fits into the genre, however all the clues are there for you if you work it back, I think. I really liked the fact it was set between the UK and France, with a good few comments contrasting the two countries’ policing and legal systems, and Vincent’s relationship with his opposite number, m. Goron, is rather sweet as they enthusiastically rendezvous in both countries. His boss, M. Verneuil, is an interesting character, and then we find the suspects in the case, many of them neither French nor English, and a web of intrigue spanning officials and the eponymous milliner.

Although the characters are a little one-dimensional, I didn’t find the extreme sexism or racism that pops up in other books of the period, and I found the plot fine to understand: I’d definitely pick up others in the series (and I love their sweet shop covers!)

This was my only book for 1937 Week. You can find out more about Basil Thomson and the books republished by Dean Street Press here.

State of the TBR – April 2024

The piles have diminished! I have managed to get the first pile sitting normally on the shelf again with only a slightly smaller gap at the very bottom compared to last month. I took ten print books off the shelf and read them (three of them were Three Investigators Mysteries!), and I have started two more (one TBR project, one newer). I took the two oldest books off the TBR and read six more of my TBR Project books (23 read, 20 reviewed, 118 to go; will be reporting quarterly which means I should be reporting now and will do later!). The Liz and Emma Read Together books are in a separate pile (top shelf, to the left) because they don’t form part of the TBR project, and the books on the top left top are review books.

I completed 17 books in March (three with reviews to be published), reading 7 during a week’s holiday in Spain where we did little but sleep, eat, read and run / birdwatch. None of them were print review books and one was a book that I acquired in March. I am part-way through four more (including my current Reading With Emma Read and a read that will take all year). I read my remaining February NetGalley books and all of my March ones during March (I set one aside, “A Dirty Filthy Book” which was about Annie Besant – it was so long and detailed I had to skim it, and my NetGalley review percentage is at 91% due to all the books that came in (oops). I read one book for Reading Ireland Month and two for Reading Wales Month, one of which I bought during the month, undermining my own policy.

Incomings

I had a lot of lovely print incomings. Oh, this duvet cover has come around again rather than still being on, as I notice I photographed my books on it last month! Anyway, three from the Bookshop (two from an author event), two from a Bad Place, three from friends and two review copies for Shiny New Books

My best friend Emma read Sally Page’s “The Book of Beginnings” and enjoyed the story set in North London so sent me a copy. I was buying a Spanish phrasebook in a hurry to replace the one that has mysteriously disappeared and mistakenly thought I needed to buy more things to get faster delivery, so chose Darren Chetty et al. (eds) “Welsh (Plural)” (already read and reviewed) and Kenny Imafidion’s “That Peckham Boy”, never able to resist a story from the bit of South London I lived in for a bit in the 90s. Back to being Good at The Heath Bookshop, I went to a lovely event with Huma Qureshi and took the opportunity to pick up her memoir “How We Met” as well as her new novel, “Playing Games” (two sisters in London: one Emma might like, too). While I was there, I spotted Richard Askwith’s “The Race Against Time: Adventures in Late-Life Running” which I had to get really.

I was at Ali’s and she’d confusingly been sent this non-fiction book about Essex, “The Invention of Essex” by Tim Burrows – I had a hand in it so she happily passed it to me. While I was away, Steve Doswell popped a copy of his “Running: Me Running EU” running book through the letterbox – I edited this excellent memoir about his attempt to run in every EU country before Brexit was completed and we’re doing an event together at the Bookshop in June so I was thrilled to have a proper copy in my hand! Robert Ashton’s “Where are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay” is an Unbound book I subscribed to, looking at how old customs might be of use now.

Finally, two wonderful review copies for Shiny – Corinne Fowler’s “Our Island Stories” details country walks through colonial Britain (it will have a lovely cover which is why I’ve included the letter with it) and Zeinab Badawi’s “An African History of Africa” does what it says on the tin. Thank you to the publishers for those.

I have been incredibly unrestrained on NetGalley and all my ships came in at once. However their publishing dates are spread across a lot of months, fortunately.

I was offered Emily Kerr’s “The Typo” (published in May) by the publisher as I’d previously enjoyed three of her other books. Two strangers are brought together by a typo in an email address so I don’t even have to put my editor hat on while reading it! “Our Daughter Who Art In America” published by Mukana Press (April) is the publisher’s second anthology of African writing and I hope to find some new authors to read here. Thao Votang’s “Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine” (July) has such an enticing cover; it follows a Vietnamese American woman living in Texas as she gets perhaps too involved in her mother’s dating life.

Niigaan Sinclair is one of the country’s most influential thinkers on issues impacting Indigenous communities in Winnipeg and “Winipek: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre” (May) is a collection of his writings. I was offered Nikki May’s “This Motherless Land” (July) because I’d loved her “Wahala” – this one follows cousins who want different things from life between Lagos and England. I couldn’t resist the two sentences on Iqbal Hussain’s “Northern Boy” (June): “A Big Bollywood Dream. A Small-Town Chance.” It’s set in Blackburn, Pakistan and Australia. And I couldn’t resist the title of Damilare Kuku’s “Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow” (October) and the story of family secrets as its heroine comes of age and only wants a bottom enlargement is enticing, too. Ayaan Mohamud’s YA fiction “The Thread that Connects Us” has two young girls of Somali heritage hating each other at first sight when one moves to England as the other’s new stepsister, but will they need to work together?

I was offered “The World After Alice” by Lauren Aliza Green (August) and was tempted by the comparisons to Anne Tyler (the email said it was because I’d read Charmaine Wilkerson, too) in this book about a split family brought together for a wedding. I was also offered Christie Barlow’s “The Vintage Flower Van on Love Heart Lane” (May), 14th in the sweet series about a small Scottish town and of course a yes. And finally I won Nailah Blades Wylie’s “Joyful By Nature” which is about (American) women of colour embracing activities in nature, something I’m interested in supporting and promoting even if it’s US not UK-based. That’s out in May but I had a bit of trouble downloading it so I’m going to read it this month if I can!

So that was 17 read and 22 coming in in March, however I have read one of the print ones already and one I just need to reskim.

Currently reading

I’ve picked the next oldest book off the TBR, Remi Adekoya’s “Biracial Britain”, which was another Oxfam Books find published only a year or so ago – fascinating so far. And I decided to give myself an Easter Monday treat and start “Birmingham’s Public Art” (also, because it’s quite a wide book it was taking up two spaces on the bottom shelf of the TBR as it had to go through to the back!). I’m also still reading Hunter Davies on London parks with Emma and my literary quotes for the year with Ali.

Coming up

Ever since Christian Cooper’s “Better Living Through Birding” arrived from Cari (thank you!) I’ve wanted to pair it with British Patrick Hutchinson’s “Everyone Versus Racism”: two Black men who have used their moments of (unwanted) fame as a platform to promote understanding and unity. So I plan to read these two this month.

And I have eight NetGalley books published this month. “The Husbands” is a fantasy about a woman’s loft creating multiple husbands for her: which kind will she choose? “Sweetness in the Skin” has a young woman trying to leave Jamaica for France to join her aunt: will she succeed? “100 Words for Rain” and “Just Add Nature” are two National Trust publications with nice illustrations and fun text – I’ll probably review both alongside the Shells one from last month, and I’ve almost finished “Just Add Nature” already. “Our Daughter Who Art in America” will give me a good anthology of African writing. Libby Page’s “the Lifeline” is the sequel to “The Lido” which I read back in 2018! and Emily Henry’s “Funny Story” has an ex-partner-swap story which looks fun. Rachel Kong’s “Real Americans” is a Chinese American family epic (although I note it has YET another Rich White American Boy as the love interest).

I also have “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” by Basil Thomson to read for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1937 Week which runs 15-21 April. With the ones I’m currently reading, that’s three books to finish (Emma and I have two weeks to go on the current read), two review books to read and review and eleven others to read at a minimum, which might happen!

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How was your March reading? What are you reading this month? Are you doing any book challenges for the year or the month?

Book review – James Baldwin – “If Beale Street Could Talk”

Ali kindly loaned me this one after I’d read and loved Baldwin’s “Go Tell it on the Mountain“. I am not really reading my TBR in order at the moment, weirdly for me, but because this was a loan and I was going to see Ali and had an opportunity to return it, plus it’s relatively short, I picked it off the shelf. In fact it took almost no time to read because I could not put it down!

James Baldwin – “If Beale Street Could Talk”

(10 August 2023, loan)

And then, suddenly, half leaning, half sitting there, watching her – she was at the refrigerator, she looked critcally at a chicken and put it away, she was kind of humming under her breath, but the way you hum when your mind is concentrated on something, something painful, just about to come around the corner, just about to hit you – I suddenly had this feeling that she already knew, had known all along, had only been waiting for me to tell her. (p. 28)

Baldwin’s fifth novel and apparently the only one to feature a female main protagonist/narrator, we’re in a familiar world of Black American poverty, churchgoing and family, maybe less florid than “Mountain” and with less Biblical language but still so immersive and beautifully written, if heartbreaking.

Narrated by Tish, 19 and pregnant, her boyfriend in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, we circle around the narrative, always returning to the prison visiting room with its glass division and telephones. Tish feels very authentic, her descriptions of her pregnancy familiar from other books / friends, the baby determined to survive at all costs.

Each member of Tish’s family works so hard to free Fonny, his own family apart from his father useless at best, poisonous at first (they are marvellous villains though and the set pieces where they encounter Tish’s mighty sister Ernestine are amazing). We see the effects of racism, especially in the police and justice system, and the way the odds are stacked against two childhood friends, now lovers. Is the ending a dream or reality? It’s impossible to tell, and that broke my heart.

This is Book 20 in my 2024 TBR project – 121 to go!

Book review – Horatio Clare – “Down to the Sea in Ships”

Paul from HalfMan HalfBook kindly sent me this book – I’d already read and thoroughly enjoyed Clare’s “Icebreaker” a few years ago (I obviously enjoyed the envelope he sent it in too, recording it for posterity when I received the book). There it sat on my TBR until I happily realised that Clare, having been raised on a South Wales farm, counted for Book Jotter’s challenge, Reading Wales! Hooray! So I picked it off the shelves and did a double challenge with it as I acquired it before the end of 2023 so it falls into my own 2024 TBR project.

Horatio Clare – “Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men”

(23 October 2023, gift)

Just beyond the horizon there is another world. It runs in parallel with ours but it obeys different laws, accords with a different time and is populated by a people who are like us, but wose lives are not like ours. Without them, what we call normality would not exist. Were it not for the labours of this race we coudl not work, rest, eat, dress, communicate, learn, play, live or even die as we do. For a little while, for some months over two years, it has been my privilege to explore the sea in the company of its people. (p. 2)

Clare made an arrangement with the huge shipping company Maersk to do voyages as a writer in residence on two of their boats, one south across the Pacfic with a huge, modern container ship, one north across the Atlantic in a smaller ship. I enjoyed the first voyage a little more than the second, as the second dwells a bit on the two world wars and the convoys, which had its interest but I preferred the day-to-day stuff.

The details of daily life were fascinating and Clare tried to get in everywhere and chat to everyone to see what was going on. He definitely covers the negatives (accidents, unfair pay, bullying) as well as the positives, and really gets the individual personalities across. I particularly liked the bizarre lists of what the containers contain – not told at the time to avoid theft, he got these from manifests months later and puts together narratives of where products are going around the world, making a point about global supply chains without labouring it, as he does about waste in the seas, too.

He talks about the kind of masculinity that’s engendered in the male workers (he encounters I think only one woman, who manages to create a sort of sisterliness for them): “Paradoxically, the isolation of seafarers from the fullness of the world, and the confines of the world they must fill, seem to make of them men in full” (p. 61). There’s a small update on some of the men at the end, when he’s back on land, his own life about to change dramatically.

You can read HalfMan HalfBook’s review here.

This was Book 2 for Reading Wales 2024.

This is Book 19 in my 2024 TBR project – 122 to go!

Book review – Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanan Issa and Iestyn Tyne (eds) – “Welsh (Plural)”

I have been making an effort for the past few years to only do reading challenges using books already on my TBR. This has meant that in the Marches of most years I’ve either read a book for Reading Ireland Month or a book for Reading Wales. Well, this year I’ve already done my Reading Ireland Month book and I’d resigned myself to not having a Reading Wales one for Book Jotter’s challenge until the need to buy a Spanish phrasebook in a hurry led to a hasty purchase off my wishlist from an unmentionable retailer (sorry, Proper Bookshop!) and a read for Reading Wales. Of course, then I discovered that Horatio Clare counts anyway and I had one of his on my TBR but there you go. I took this one on holiday with me and had intended to start it on the plane home but got chatting to an interesting fellow-passenger instead, so it’s followed me around during the week after our holiday, and a very rewarding read it’s proved to be, too. Oh, and it’s published by the excellent indie publisher, Repeater Books.

Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanan Issa, Iestyn Tyne (eds) – “Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales”

(8 March 2024)

… we found ourselves returning to questions of what we mean by Welshness, Welsh identities and Welsh culture. What do these phrases mean to a Cardiffian, or a West Walian; those living in Wales, the Welsh diaspora, those newly arrived in Wales; those with ties across the border, across the sea? What do they mean to the Muslim, agnositc, lapsed Catholic, just-there-for-the-singing nonconformist The Welsh speaker, Welsh learner, non-Welsh speaker? In order to explore these questions collectively we sought a diversity of perspectives for this book. (Editors’ Introduction, p. 3)

A wonderfully varied collection of pieces by writers of all types and backgrounds, some known to me, many not. There are essays, experimental pieces, complex sociological works, memoir, poetry and a choose-your-own adventure among the 19 works in the book. Cerys Hafana’s “A Tradition of Change” looks at Welsh music and folklore traditions through an outsider’s lens, picking out and unpicking flexibilities and inflexibilities, imposed binaries. Darren Chetty takes a good, hard look at his local “Black Boy” pub and its changing sign, interrogating other pubs with the same name. In Kandace Siobhan Waalker’s piece we see what it’s like to be Black in the Welsh countryside – “We transpose, we self-graft. The braider in our front room. Cookouts in the orchard, barely twenty degrees. Ackee under apple trees” (p. 65).

Gary Raymond’s “Being a Welsh Novelist: A Choose Your Destiny Adventure Game” really is just that, but cleverly with some paragraphs you can never reach by taking the pre-set routes, only by going off-piste (or knowing the right people) and Grug Muse’s “Datganoli / Devolution” shows communities undermining closures, with banks and schools stripped out of small towns being repurposed by committees as spaces for people. Two interesting pieces, Joe Dunthorne’s “We Bleed Red” and Andy Welch’s “Rhyl Talk” look at the diaspora: a non-Welsh-speaker who sounds English in a Welsh pub in London and a North Walian trying to explain that his accent is acceptably Welsh (I wonder if this one has changed with the popularity of “Welcome to Wrexham” on TV with its noticeable North Wales voices). Marvin Thompson’s “On Writing a Modern Welsh Horror” deconstructs the writing of his own poems about slavery and colonialism in a fascinating way.

Changing curricula, moving away to become more accepted as Welsh in Scotland, being a hijabi Welsh woman and failing to write an essay are more clever and deep approaches in the book, along with pieces about particular towns (Merthyr, Swansea) and just such a wide range of subjects, styles and experiences it’s impossible to cover in one review. I urge you to rush off and secure yourselves a copy (from an indie bookshop, bookshop.org or direct from the publisher, of course!).

This was Book 1 for Reading Wales 2024.

Book review – Anita Roy and Pippa Marland (eds) – “Gifts of Gravity and Light”

I received this in one of Bookish Beck’s lovely book parcels in 2021 and of the eleven books I acquired in the month, I’ve discarded one and read and reviewed nine, which feels like progress. I have earlier acquired books than this on the TBR but I wanted something to take on holiday and it was the first paperback on there.

Anita Roy and Pippa Marland (eds) – “Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the 21st Century”

(11 December 2021, gift)

I’m not sure this is exactly an almanac in the traditional sense, but it is an enticing and enjoyable collection of essays on outdoors and nature by non-traditional (i.e. not White Straight Male) nature writers. There’s a Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo sharing her own experiences of open spaces and nature and then a range of fairly new voices, though all have been published elsewhere or, at the time of publication, had books on the go. For example, Michael Malay shares something that became part of his lovely book, “Late Light” and Luke Turner his “Men at War” (on the wishlist).

Alys Fowler’s there with a great piece on mud and tantalising glimpses of her work secretly reconstructing paths in a park that must be local to me, and unknown to me names whose work I greatly enjoyed, such as Jay Griffith’s piece on walking and its constraints by society and landowners, and Testament’s ruminations on a life outdoors in poetry and prose. There are links between the pieces – climate change and particularly the Covid lockdowns – but they are also nicely varied, with many looking at dual locations or experiences in other ways.

You can find Bookish Beck’s original review here.

This is Book 18 in my 2024 TBR project – just 123 to go!

Book review – Mike Berners-Lee – “How Bad are Bananas?”

I picked this one up from my friend Sian at a BookCrossing meetup in November – although I’m no longer as avid a BookCrosser as I was, I still go to meetups and catch, register and release books. I took this one on holiday with me as I thought it was an ideal book to share. It’s also covered one more on my TBR project!

Mike Berners-Lee – “How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything”

(1 November 2023, BookCrossing)

“What about this cheese … It’s organic, that must be better … isn’t it? Or is it? … Lettuce must be harmless, right? … Should we have come here by bus?” (p. xi)

This book apparently started as an article that never got written, where the author was asked a load of questions about food and its carbon footprint that he couldn’t answer. He went away and did a lot of research, studied supermarkets and his own university employer (and a local small brewery) and put together this book. He basically goes from the smallest carbon footprints of things (a text message / walking through a door) to the largest (burning all the fossil fuel in the world / having a war) explaining how it’s worked out and the range if there is one (e.g. between walking through a normal household door in summer and big electric doors opening onto a large stairwell on a cold and windy day).

Of course there’s humour and there are also some surprises and reverses (like in “Not the End of the World“) and I noted some interesting points (it’s better to drive than to get the train for an intercity journey if there are four of you in the car because trains are so heavy because of safety concerns which has an effect on their carbon footprint; if you’re going to stop eating meat you should also consider having less cheese; it’s better to buy tomatoes from Spain that have been grown outside and shipped than out-of-season ones grown in heated conditions in the UK; Crocs are among the lowest-carbon shoes). As with the previously mentioned book, the tolls of farming and flying are high.

This book is a little elderly – I checked the publication date when I noted a piece on replacing CRT televisions with 25″ flat screens, and there’s a pang when you read about how videoconferencing will never completely replace face-to-face meetings: there is indeed an updated 2020 edition that includes Twitter, the Cloud, Bitcoin, electric bikes and cars, and space tourism. There’s a good list of seasonal veg and fruit in the UK and it’s a useful and entertaining book.

Books 15 and 16 have been weeded, so this is Book 17 in my 2024 TBR project – just 124 to go!