20 Books of Summer 2024 – the big announcement: the process and the pile

Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). The idea is simple: choose 10, 15 or 20 books to read and review between 1 June and 1 September, swap out and in as many as you want to and it doesn’t matter if you don’t complete as long as you enjoy yourself.

Choosing my books

While I usually go with selecting “the oldest 20 books on my TBR”, I do change that sometimes. For example, I often pick some Virago or other reclaimed-women-author presses to fit in with All Virago / All August challenge, in 2021, I went for a diversity / social justice theme for at least June and July, and in 2023 I picked 20 books I’d bought from The Heath Bookshop! But this year, I was a bit stuck. Just the first 20 again? Every xth book working through the years? I didn’t have 20 books left from 2023 that I’d bought from the Bookshop and I knew I wanted to choose books that would count towards my 2024 TBR Project. Well, what’s the point of having another person in the house if you can’t ask them to set you a challenge (even if he once challenged me to only read 52 books in a year …)? So I called Matthew and told him I needed his intelligence and problem-solving skills and left him to it …

I only had two stipulations: I wanted him to pick from books I’d acquired up until the end of 2023 (hence the front row of the bottom shelf sitting on the floor in front of him so he could see the back row), and no Dean Street Press books as I wanted to save them for Dean Street Press December. None of my Emma and my Reading Together books and of course no NetGalley books (invisible anyway, right??) and review books. How did he choose them? “Completely at random based on my own personal thought process: some of it based on spine, some on title, some on ‘juxtapositions’,” and one on a book he wants to read on Audible alongside me.

He accidentally chose 21 books so gave me right of veto on one – I picked one on exercise in menopause which I’m unlikely to read through in one go. Then – THEN – he did a terrible thing, given how I like to read my TBR in acquisition order, and MIXED THEM UP into a random order! I’m going to trust the process, though, and dig out the next book in his order each time.

The Pile

Planned for June:

Ruth Ozeki – The Book of Form and Emptiness – her latest novel, passed to me by Ali. Matthew wants to read this, too, hence its appearance at the top of the pile (Winner of the Women’s Prize)

Helen Taylor – Why Women Read Fiction – based on a study and interviews with women, why do we read fiction?

Alice Mallison – The Book Borrower – a novel about sharing books which Matthew bought me from the San Diego Public Library library sale.

Taj McCoy – Savvy Sheldon Feels Good as Hell – a novel that was recommended by a fellow-blogger featuring a plus-size Black woman negotiating love (I’m pleased I have two novels in a row here I can hopefully pick off quickly)

Ben Waddington and Janet Hart – 111 Places in Birmingham That You Shouldn’t Miss – fairly self-explanatory

Hilary Mantel – Eight Months on Ghazzah Street – fictionalised autobiography of expat life, another one passed to me by Ali

Bob Mortimer – And Away – and actual, though probably tweaked amusingly, autobiography from the hilarious writer

Planned for July:

Susie Dent – Dent’s Modern Tribes – book on the slang and jargon used by different groups of people from football managers to train ticket inspectors

Joe Lycett – Parsnips, Buttered – the son of Kings Heath’s observations and life hacks

Dara McAnulty – Diary of a Young Naturalist – Wainwright Prize winner on life as a young nature lover living with autism

Paul Theroux – On the Plain of Snakes – vintage travel writer travels to Mexico

Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche – Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World – discussions of language and translation

Katherine May – The Electricity of Every Living Thing – a woman walks to find herself

Sophie Pavelle – Forget me Not – a low-carbon voyage looking at lost or vanishing species affected by climate change (Winner of the People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction)

Planned for August:

Rob Beckett – A Class Act – autobiography of the comedian and discussions of class

Drew Haden Taylor (ed.) – Me Tomorrow – Indigenous views on the future

Vanessa Nakate – A Bigger Picture – climate change activism as a worldwide pursuit by a young Ugandan woman

Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George – This is the Canon – decolonising your reading

Kgshak Akec – Hopeless Kingdom – a novel that geos from Sudan to Geelong via Cairo and Sydney (Winner of the 2020 Dorothy Hewett Award)

Lars Mytting – The Bell in the Lake – bought for me because of the similar themes to Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

There are 6 works of fiction and 14 non-fiction, which is probably representative of my TBR as a whole although my reading tilts to slightly more fiction thanks to NetGalley. Ten are by women, eight by men and two by a mix. Four are on nature and four are autobiographies; four are prize-winners. Ten were gifts and ten I bought myself. There are 6 books by people from Global Majority / Indigenous communities, which is less than my usual balance and the balance on my TBR.

Are you doing 10 / 15 / 20 Books of Summer / Winter this year? Do you think you’ll complete? I’m not entirely sure myself …

State of the TBR – September 2023

This month my TBR has stayed about the same compared to last month! I took eleven books off the TBR to read (a few quite slender) and only acquired four more, but my oldest book hasn’t moved. Having completed my 20 Books of Summer I know I can read print books off the TBR at a decent rate so will try to continue that especially as September is a month in which I have no reading challenges!

I completed 18 books in August (two with reviews to be published), including the rest of my 20 Books of Summer, three books for Women in Translation Month and one for All Virago / All August, and am part-way through two more (including my current Reading With Emma Read). I got through all of my NetGalley books published in August and two older ones, and my review percentage is 92%.

Incomings

I’ve acquired 6 print books from publishers, friends and The Works this month:

Steve Chilton’s “Voices from the Hills” (published 15 September), which Vertebrate Publishing kindly sent me, celebrates the history of women hill and fell runners (something I’d never do but very much admire). The lovely folk at British Library Publishing have sent me the latest Women Writers book, “Introduction to Sally” (14 September) by firm favourite Elizabeth von Arnim. I went up to see Heaven-Ali (with more books than I came home with!) and she passed me Amryl Johnson’s “Sequins for a Ragged Hem” which is in the reprint series curated by Bernadine Evaristo, and loaned me James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk”. I’ve been wanting to get Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” for a while and found a copy in The Works for a fiver, with another pound off from my loyalty card, and Sian persuaded me to pick up Rosemary Tonks’ “The Bloater”, a republished book from the 1960s, at our BookCrossing meetup. ETA: Oh, I should have added Esme Young’s “Behind the Seams” which I ordered and picked up on 2 August then read at the end of the month!

I won just three NetGalley books again this month and bought one for Kindle on Amazon which was only 99p:

I was offered “Blessings” by Chukwuebuka Ibeh by the publisher because I’d liked Caleb Azumah Nelson’s novels: published in February 2024, it’s the story of a gay young man coming of age in Nigeria. Sally Percy’s “21st Century Business Icons” (Sept) looks at today’s business leaders and hooray, Christie Barlow has another Loveheart Lane novel, “A Winter Wedding at Starcross Manor” (Sept) which the publisher kindly offered me via NetGalley. Having just read “The Queue” by Alexandra Hemingsley from NetGalley (review to come) I was amused to find Swéta Rana’s novel “Queuing for the Queen” on the same broad lines and had to snap it up.

So that was 18 read and 10 (oops, 11) coming in in August which is a nice win for once!

Currently reading

I’m reading Hunter Davies’ “The Heath” with Emma, and very lovely it is too so far, and I’m part-way through “A Winter Wedding at Starcross Manor” by Christie Barlow on my Kindle.

Coming up

I don’t have any book challenges on the go this month but I do have some review books and one whose sequel I have on NetGalley published next month. I’m then hoping to read a combo of older books and recently purchased hardbacks, so have put these out for myself.

So this month I have my two review copies mentioned above. Then I have Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s new novel from NetGalley published in October so need to read the first in the series, “In Every Mirror She’s Black”. Alison M. Thompson’s “What’s Your Story?” about writing non-fiction. Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder’s (ed.) “Black British Lives Matter” and Nikesh Shukla’s (ed.) “Rife: Twenty-One Stories from Britain’s Youth” are the first three books on my print TBR and Paul Baker’s “Camp!” and Mike Gayle’s novel “A Song of Me and You” are hardbacks bought at The Heath Bookshop I want to read before they come out in paperback.

My NetGalley TBR for September again has only three books on it: I haven’t got ahead this month but hopefully I won’t need to. Maybe I’ll get some more of the older ones read, too!

You know about two of these already and Jo Woolf’s “Britain’s Landmarks and Legends” is about the stories embedded in our landscape, though I might need to read that on the NetGalley shelf app as it’s illustrated.

With the ones I’m currently reading, that’s one book to finish (the read with Emma will continue into October) and 11 to read, which does feel doable.

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How was your August reading? What are you reading this month? Have you read or picked up any of my selection? Did you get your 20 Books of Summer and Women in Translation books done?

Book review – Brian Bilston – “Days Like These”

And I’ve done my 20 Books of Summer challenge (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books)! I have read 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this in late November slightly in advance of a wonderful poetry reading event I attended which the bookshop put on at a local school – it was a funny event because I ran into lots of people I knew and then also met and took a photo of some women from the local WI who did not include the two friends of mine who run the WI! Of the seven paper books I bought or was given in November 2022, I have read five – not bad!

Brian Bilston – “Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems”

(24 November 2022, The Heath Bookshop)

It was nothing much to shout about.

Who would ever say

today was an extraordinary day?

– – –

Today was an extraordinary day.

Who would ever say

it was nothing much to shout about? (p. 106, from “Just An Ordinary Day”)

This book basically gives the reader a poem a day for every day of the year, and they’re all based on either a notable anniversary or a world/UK x day (e.g. World Cheese Day, etc.). I decided to read a month’s worth of poems once a week, usually on a Sunday, and that took me most of the three months of the challenge, which was a nice way to do it and stopped me rushing through them all in a frenzy. A lot of us know Bilston’s poems from his Facebook page and other people sharing them, and I did find a few familiar ones (actually the final two were old favourites!) but there was plenty to enjoy here, a lot of funny ones with puns, bits of concrete poetry that were amusing, but some full of pathos, especially those around climate change and ecology loss.

Some favourites drawn from the 366 – well, my birthday one was one about not liking to be hugged, which I totally approved of. The “Monopoly” poem for 6 March was very cleverly done as was the “An Ordinary Day” for 12 March, which can be read both forwards and backwards (see quote above) as could “Refugees” from 20 June. 23 April’s poem was of course a Shakespearean one, and 16 May’s “Look for the Light” moving. There are a few pop references (the Smiths, U2) which raise a smile, 6 June’s “Queuing for an Ice Cream” brought a tear to my eye, and “The Enchantress of Numbers” from 13 October about Ada Lovelace and “Some Siple Steps to Help Women Feel Safer” from 25 November a feminist smile. I post-it-noted the sad/moving ones – also 11 September and 11 November – but so many made me laugh or chuckle and read a bit out loud – a super collection I will return to and a great one to read in sections through the 20 Books project.

Now, this is STILL not exactly a Bookish Beck serendipity moment but of course I read one of these poems on the day which it commemorates – it would have been in July – as I did with “My Name is Leon” at the beginning of this 20 Books challenge.

This was Book 20 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge which means I am all done and completed the challenge a few days early! You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Kavita Bhanot (ed.) – “The Book of Birmingham”

I’m nearly at the end of my 20 Books of Summer challenge (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) – well, in fact, I’ve now finished reading all my books and just have one more left to review. I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I acquired this one in April this year, profiting from the unused bit of a book token Matthew had been given. I’d previously read the Reykjavik volume (there are over 20 in Comma Press’ series).

Kavita Bhanot (ed.) – “The Book of Birmingham: A City in Short Fiction”

(02 April 2023, From Matthew, from The Heath Bookshop)

It was Chacha-Ji who’d told Bina’s father about the new boy at the factory. Her uncle said, ‘He has just arrived and is not in a good home. Maybe there’s room for him here?’ (p. 15; “Seep” by Sharon Duggal)

Ten short stories with an introduction and a set of short contributor bios. Some of the writers are well-known to me, others new, as is usually the case with such things. In an anthology specifically about a city, and then about a city that you know, the question arises as to whether it’s representative of that city. I’d say yes in this case: it covers a wide time range, some in a single story, as in “Amir Aziz” by Bobby Nayyar, which covers the life of a poor immigrant man made good – but at what cost? and others looking at a notable moment in time, in two cases two of the uprisings that happened in Handsworth.

The stories look at race and racism, at how people live in the city, at the loss of heavy industry and of the way young people find each other and defy their parents, whatever the era, whether that’s the young women in Sharon Duggal’s “Seep” in a boarding house in the 1960s or the one in Jendella Benson’s “The Kindling”, set in more contemporary times.

There are other themes as well as those of uprisings and the loss of industry: the constant redevelopment of Birmingham city centre being one of them. The introduction does a great job of setting the stories in context and the cover design by David Eckersall features iconic buildings of the city (and beyond, as the University’s clock tower is on the front): I started the book on a bus ride into town so took the opportunity to photograph it with the Selfridges building that’s on the cover behind it.

This was Book 19 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Richard Mabey – “The Unofficial Countryside”

Just like that (well, with some concentrated reading before breakfast and around meals on this and the last book), my 20 Books of Summer challenge (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) is going well and almost done! I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this one in May this year after Little Toller tweeted about their own bookshop needing to hit a target: I ordered it from our bookshop but LT publish it, so a win-win there. I bought John Seymour’s “The Fat of the Land” in the same package but had to choose one to read for 20 Books; of the seven print books bought in May, unsuprisingly I’ve only read and reviewed two so far.

Richard Mabey – “The Unofficial Countryside”

(04 May 2023, The Heath Bookshop)

That homely canalside stroll was as good an antidote to the workday blues as some real and solitary countryside would have been. And better in some ways, for I had beaten off the urban stresses in their own territory and on their own terms. Yet how rarely we look to this kind of landscape for some contact with natural things. (p. 18)

Little Toller have been doing a great job of reissuing classic texts on the countryside and nature: they’re lovely objects as well, with smooth covers, new cover images, French flaps and new introductions (the one here provided by Iain Sinclair, rather lovely as he explains his introduction to Mabey’s works and his respect for him). Mabey is a doyen of nature writing and put out the foragers’ bible, “Food for Free” the year before he published this one. There’s a super interview with him by Kate Mossman in the New Statesman in 2021 here.

What this book does is record the walks around what Mabey coined the “unofficial countryside” in 1972, published the next year, linked by seasons and then with some divided by headings, for example in Summer we have predators, pests and pets, parks and gardens. He wanders loosely around London, soon realising that intentional nature rambles like those he’d do in the official countryside won’t do here and instead going in for little forays along his local canal or joining botany groups exploring rubbish tips and the weird things that grow there. His own enthusiasm and foibles come through clearly – he’s not so good with insects and loves his birds but faithfully records failures to spot things and near-misses of vagrants and migrants and orchids. Mabey is absolutely clear on the value of the “unofficial countryside” for our mental health and well-being:

The last sentence in the quotation above has changed, for now our canal banks, and indeed the canals, are regularly used for leisure, and I thought about this book when I went for a canalside run yesterday morning. But those liminal spaces that Mabey describes, while they might have moved on and changed from the early 70s, are still to be found everywhere: railway cuttings, abandoned building sites (there was one FULL of buddleia for ages in central Birmingham), and notably here and presumably still, sewage farms full of waders that could be mistaken for a river estuary.

A mention for the cover image, it’s a detail from Mary Newcomb’s “The Pylon”, also from 1973, which I absolutely love. Mabey’s own sketches and notes are reproduced at the start of each chapter inside. I thoroughly enjoyed this classic read, so readable and so prescient, and the progenitor of the style and content of so many books that come out today.

A Bookish Beck serendipity moment: there is quite a long section describing the battle to save Hampstead Heath which I’ve also been reading about in Hunter Davies’ “The Heath”.

This was Book 18 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Ross Barnett – “The Missing Lynx”

I’m suddenly doing quite well with my 20 Books of Summer challenge (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) having finished this AND the next one today! I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. This was another one I bought in part 2 of my early-year book token splurge using my book tokens – I officially bought this “from” the Bookshop but actually had to order it through their page on bookshop.org as the book token wouldn’t work in person. I have read and reviewed six of those eight pictured books now. I think I was inspired to add this to my wishlist by Paul from Halfman Halfbook, who reviewed it a few years ago now here.

Ross Barnett – “The Missing Lynx: The Past and Future of Britain’s Lost Mammals”

(25 January 2023, The Heath Bookshop on Bookshop.org)

An old wrong has been set right. We did the honourable thing for once. It should make you feel proud. It makes me feel proud. in a world of tragedy and hurt, this success needs to be bellowed in the faces of everyone. We can fix things. It’s not always too late. The return of beavers signifies the successful completion of tens of thousands of hours of work by hundreds of committed individuals, pooling resources towards a shared dream. (p. 291)

In this interesting book, Ross Barnett takes a selection of animals extinct in Britain (from longest-ago to most recently extinct, the last few managing elsewhere in the world still) and describes them, their habits and habits, their genetics and their links to existing creatures, mapping their extinction onto the introduction of humans into their environments, which is his central theme, that we wiped them out. We run through cave hyaenas through various cats, the woolies (mammoth and rhino) to wolves, lynxes and beavers.

I’d managed to mistake this for a book more about rewilding and reintroductions of lost creatures (through my mistake not the book’s marketers’) whereas the weight is firmly on the fossil and genetic record of lost creatures and how they went extinct (or were driven to extinction). This is well done and we do get more about reintroduction in the latter part of the book, when there are animals to reintroduce and this was my favourite section. He also has some good theories on why certain species went extinct when similar animals didn’t, for example the brown bears being more flexible in their habitats than the cave bears.

I did find there to be a slightly uneasy mix of hard science and quite complicated explanations of genetics with funny or attempted-funny asides (he describes Richard Owen, founder of the British Museum (by which he means the British Museum (Natural History) or simply Natural History Museum) in South Kensington as a “polymath and massive shit” (p. 63) and labours this whenever he’s mentioned, although most jokes are gentler than that). The puff from The Times on the front says “As elegies go, The Missing Lynx is an awful lot of fun” and I think, and sorry to be po-faced here (and I am someone who once criticised a version of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” for being too fun) but in a way the jokey asides did distract for me. However, a lot of people like that kind of writing, otherwise Bill Bryson wouldn’t be so popular, and if it helps people to learn about conserving and saving our fauna, then fair enough.

Barnett is clearly passionate about his subject and it’s nice to join his excitement when he sees a few of the animals we’re discussing in the wild. I was struck by the Afterword in which he confides that the loss of his mother when he was very young probably triggered his interest in loss in general (also the Afterword explaining the book is a feature in the previous book I finished, not yet reviews, and I need to mention that there, although the fact I have read so many books mentioning aurochsen recently is probably just repetition now!).

This was Book 17 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Dean Karnazes – “A Runner’s High”

I’ve been trying to keep up with my 20 Books of Summer challenge (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) while also working through review books and NetGalley. I might not manage the 20 this year at the rate I’m going! I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this one in part 2 of my early-year book token splurge using my book token from running friends – I found out the Bookshop had run a book stall at the Running Show including Dean Karnazes’ book and that they had some signed copies left over and in the shop and nipped to get one. I have read and reviewed five of those eight pictures books now, and am reading one more. The picture includes some of the awards I’ve won at running club for supporting other runners and a lovely card my running mate Claire made me for my 50th birthday.

Dean Karnazes – “A Runner’s High: Older, Wiser, Slower, Stronger”

(25 January 2023, The Heath Bookshop)

It has been said that we are creatures raised by God above the animals, but just look at any aid station’s food table during an ultramarathon and you may think otherwise. I went in with both hands. Savages we are. (p. 183)

I did think that this was going to be a book about how to run as you age (something I’m increasingly interested in) but it was more about Karnazes’ later career as a runner, constantly meeting younger, faster, bigger fields in ultramarathons but also constantly encountering people who he’s inspired.

As usual he’s pretty humble and self-effacing, and he actually opens the book sprawled on the ground having fallen over in what we learn is an ultra done to prepare for another ultra. We get the stories of both those races and touching memories of both his dad and his son crewing for him, as well as a description of a long run he did along the Silk Road and one across America that involved a barefoot encounter with Michelle Obama on the White House Lawn. As usual in books published in the last couple of years, the pandemic impinges, cancelling his races and leading him to go out and run virtual races (I have SO many medals from the virtuals I did in 2020 and 2021, far more than the ones I’ve earned around then!) and his own long runs. Nice to see he did the same as the rest of us.

Can Karnazes run forever? He certainly hopes to. And although he makes generalisations about those of us who are runners that I don’t recognise in myself (low body fat, obsessive, keen to embrace pain and risk that we don’t get in our everyday lives) he also emphasises the mental health benefits of being outside in the natural environment, the companionship and the fact that a lot of runners don’t choose to race (I can definitely identify with that one!). I also loved how he highlighted the sterling work of the volunteers who staff races, including some of the elite runners he competes with turning up at the aforementioned aid stations.

This was Book 16 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Kerri Andrews – “Wanderers: A History of Women Walking”

There are no camels in this book, but I thought it would be a good backdrop for my picture! Onwards with my 20 Books of Summer challenge book (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this one in my first book token splurge of the turn of the year, and I can report with some glee that I’ve now read and reviewed all of the books bought then!

Kerri Andrews – “Wanderers: A History of Women Walking”

(08 January 2023, The Heath Bookshop)

As I stood there at the central point of the Lakeland mountains, my backside chilled and exposed, my mind raced with the thrilling thought that I could explore every path, peek into every valley. How much more wonderful would it have been to have known that I was feeling then what Harriet Martineau felt when she realized where her newly strong body could take her? (p. 156)

Andrews offers a history of women walking through a series of chapters, chronologically arranged, on women who were walkers and also writers, from the mid-18th century Elizabeth Carter through familiar figures such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau and Virginia Woolf to contemporary Cheryl Strayed and Linda Cracknell.

We have an introduction that sets out the need for the book and talks about the men walker-writers who only seem to write about each other even when gathering together anthologies. Then we have a set of chapters on the women, one by one. Each chapter gives us the woman’s life story as affected by her walking, then a section where Andrews muses on her own reactions to the woman and the paths she trod, sometimes recreating one of her walks, sometimes reflecting on a time she was in the area of interest but didn’t yet know about her subject.

The author interrogates her subjects’ feelings of freedom, worries about safety, disregard for conventions, etc., through their recorded writings, so it’s all nicely rooted in evidence rather than “must haves”. I particularly liked some of the women’s letters to their friends exulting in their long, powerful walks. And we cover city walking as well as country walking, so we can be on the streets of Paris with Anais Nin or striding up frightening precipices with Nan Shepherd, chapter to chapter.

For women walkers, their literary creativity is bound to walking just as tightly, and just as profoundly, as men’s. But women move differently, see differently and write differently about their experiences. To deny the existence of their accounts is to deny ourselves our own history. (p. 263)

The final chapter brings things together and there’s much mention of Rebecca Solnit, throughout, who has also written a book on women walking, I think a bit more theoretical than this one (Emma has Solnit’s book, so we’re either going to do a swap or we’ll add that one to our Emma and Liz Reads). It’s nice to see these books interwoven and celebrated.

There’s an appendix listing other women walker-writers; the only lack here is portrayals of women of colour, though I didn’t check everyone I didn’t know in the appendix.

This was Book 15 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Ian Francis – “This Way to the Revolution”

This 20 Books of Summer challenge book (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) on 31 July is an example of why it’s amazing to have a local indie bookshop. I would NEVER have come across it on my own, and there it was in the bookshop, looked at for a while before I realised no one was going to surprise me with it for a Christmas or birthday present and I needed to buy it for myself. I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this one in my second book token splurge of the turn of the year, and I can proudly report that I’ve now read and reviewed four of the eight books pictured in that post, with two more to be read this month.

Ian Francis – “This Way to the Revolution: Art, Activism and Upheaval in Birmingham 1968”

(15 January 2023, The Heath Bookshop)

What I found interesting was the way these wider battles [of 1968 in general] translated into the context of a sprawling Midlands city experiencing its own dual revolution. Firstly, a radical, decade-long reshaping of core areas which displaced whole communities and saw the creation of a new ring road. Secondly, a growth the in migrant population as workers from across the world arrived in numbers to take up less popular jobs in industry, health and construction. (p. 6)

In 2018, the Flatpack Festival, an arts festival in Birmingham that runs every spring, held a celebration of events, films and photographs from 50 years previously – including sets of archive photographs of Balsall Heath and artists working at the Midlands Arts Centre. From that interrogation of popular and arts history came this wonderful book, which traces and explores work, people and organisations from that period – whether that’s the bikers’ club run by a vicar, the burgeoning MAC, a rock venue in Erdington, student protests in Aston and Selly Oak, films about Asian teens or art collectives like Arts Lab. Text contributed by different people and excellent reproductions of photographs make this an essential piece of Birmingham history to own.

I learned such a lot reading this book, about protest and art, about how the MAC was originally for under-25s – and it was lovely to read about all the outdoor parts of MAC being used for happenings and plays – and as the quotation at the top highlights, it’s very much set in the historical and sociological context of the time, featuring Asian residents’ protests against Enoch Powell as much as White students holding sit-ins. As usual, I enjoyed reading about places I know well, such as the University of Birmingham, but there’s something of interest on every page.

Something that was very lovely was that the author and his team of researchers managed to track down quite a number of the people featured to see what had happened next or what they were up to now, including Frank and Val, who had shared their young artistic lives back then and returned for a reunion showing of their photographs and interviews.

My only tiny reservation is that some pages are printed in combinations of colours (orange on brown, etc.) and small print that challenged the eye somewhat. In a Bookish Beck serendipity moment, Jane Jacobs, the late activist on cities and urban planning, pops up here less expectedly than she also did in “Happy City“.

This was Book 14 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Helena Lee (ed.) – “East Side Voices”

I finished this 20 Books of Summer challenge book (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) on 31 July, thus keeping to the programme I’d set myself. I’ve read Book 14 already and am reading Book 15, and still doing a month of poems from Book 20 every week, so I remain on track. I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. This was another one bought in my book token haul reported in January, and I have now read and reviewed six from that post, with one in hand.

Helena Lee (ed.) – “East Side Voices: Essays Celebrating East & Southeast Asian Identity in Britain”

(08 January 2023, The Heath Bookshop)

The mission of the book has therefore evolved from inspiring empathy and raising our voices through the magic of stories, to also breaking the cycle of systemic non-representation. (p. 6)

A note on terminology for those outside the UK: we tend to refer, as this book does, to people from China, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc., as East and Southeast Asian people; people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would be South Asian or “Asian”.

In this book Helena Lee expertly gathers a range of writers, younger and older, from different parts of this diaspora, which is fairly small in the UK and which you can’t find much about (I just bought Angela Hui’s “Takeaway” and have an older book on Chinese people in Britain; most of the books I can find about these communities are from the US, so if you have any to recommend, do let me know.

In Lee’s introduction she talks about how visibility of East and Southeast Asian people was limited to stereotypes, often mocked, on the TV and in films, and how gathering together a book that increased representation became more urgent as the Covid-19 pandemic kicked in, with its associated rise in racism against these communities and parallel spike in deaths in, for example, the many nurses of Filipino heritage who nursed so many people through the pandemic. She also shares the work the East Side Voices organisation is doing within diversity and campaigning.

Then we meet a range of writers, mostly contributing essays and memoir but also some poetry, who have reacted to their life in the UK, sometimes as people of dual heritage, by either celebrating their difference from the start or by trying to deny it and blend in. Some take a purely personal approach, some use, for example, the lens of W.E.B. Dubois’ “double consciousness” to interrogate their experiences.

Some pieces are heartbreaking, for example Claire Kohda’s story of the portrait her White gran paints of her, with a postscript that acknowledges the complexities of family and race. There’s intersectionality as well, as June Bellebono, for example, looks at gender nonconformity in Myanmar and Britain. Actor Katie Leung asks why East Asian characters in films and TV can only be portrayed as people with “East Asian” issues, not people who just incidentally happen to be East Asian, which echoes pieces I’ve read by South Asian and Black entertainers, similarly pigeonholed. Gemma Chan, for her part, looks back at the history of Chinese merchant seamen who were deported after doing their bit in the Second World War, reminding herself how lucky she is to still have her father around.

A varied and interesting collection: i learnt something from each piece and it’s so important to have this representation and read these narratives.

This was Book 13 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,