Well, I'm a Scouser, so I couldn't stop myself! Brian Reade's affectionate and stirring account of being a lifetime Liverpool fan, 43 Years with the Same Bird: A Liverpudlian Love Affair, pushes all the right buttons (is it me or are football books getting better again? Provided You Don't Kiss Me and, in a very different way The Damned Utd both set new standards after the bar was raised a few years back by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch). A story of a fan, a Dad, and a proud Scouser: magic, moving stuff!

Here's the full publisher blurb:

There have been football books which have told their tale through the partisan heart of a besotted fan, and those that dissected their subject through the scientific mind of an objective writer. But rarely does one fuse the blind passion of a lifelong supporter with the cold eye of an award-winning journalist in the way 43 Years with the Same Bird does.

That bird is the Liver Bird, and on the surface, this book is a pitch-side view of the entire modern era of Britain's most successful football club. It is Brian Reade's take on the extraordinary stories behind the 48 trophies he has seen Liverpool lift since watching them en route to their first-ever FA Cup win in 1965, right through to the Champions League defeat in Athens in 2007. It takes in all of the big nights that propelled the club to five European Cups, three UEFA Cups, 12 titles, countless domestic cup triumphs, bitter failures, the tragic disasters in Sheffield and Brussels, as well as the barren years of the late 60s and the 90s.

But the book goes far deeper than that. It's about how football allowed a father who was separated from his son to forge a precious bond. How a football club can make a city that is dying on its knees keep believing in itself. How you should never, as a professional, get too close to your heroes. How being part of a disaster at a football match (Hillsborough) can leave you a mental wreck, unwilling to carry on, but how witnessing a miracle on a football pitch (Istanbul) makes you realise that no matter how low you sink, you should never give in.

 

Advance information about the Bath Festival of Children's Literature (via the Bookseller):

Authors including Michael Rosen, Michael Morpurgo, Meg Cabot and Charlie Higson will be appearing at this autumn's Bath Festival of Children's Literature.

The inaugural festival in 2007 reached around 20,000 children and families. There will be about 150 events at the festival this year, which runs from 19th to 28th September, including 88 public events and more schools-based activities.

The festival will also include more for younger children. "Last year the events were weighted towards fiction for eight to 12-year-olds but we had requests for more events for younger children, so will be providing those this year," said joint festival organiser Gill McLay. One of the biggest will be a Funtastic musical event for toddlers based on Templar’s Amazing Baby series.

The festival is also holding an event with Annette and Nick Butterworth in Bristol the prior weekend, to attract more visitors from Bristol to the Bath event.

Last week, we had our second What on a Wednesday column where I asked blogger John Self a couple of questions about blogging and books (the week before I spoke with Lynne Hatwell).

Well, today is the the turn of Karen Howlett the blogger behind the popular Cornflower blog. 

Karen lives in Edinburgh with her husband, three children and two dogs, having given up a career as a lawyer in favour of family life. She is also a reviewer for The Good Book Guide.

Mark Thwaite: What first drew you to blogging?

Karen Howlett: Having only the vaguest idea of what a blog was I was lucky to stumble upon two of the best. I still visit Dovegreyreader and Yarnstorm) every day, but two years ago they were a revelation to me and inspired me to have a go myself, without knowing quite what my subject-matter would be. Sharing Dovegrey's passion for books and delighting in the domestic pursuits which Yarnstorm excels at means Cornflower has become a bit of a mix of the two themes, but that reflects my life exactly.

MT: What do you most get out of it?

KH: Blogging is like a wide-ranging, ongoing conversation with a group of good friends: it's wonderful to be able to talk about books - and other things - with knowledgeable, enthusiastic people, and even when our views don't coincide, we learn from one another's perspectives. If I've read something which I think is truly good it's great to be able to shout about it. When people follow the recommendations and tell me they've enjoyed books I've mentioned, that's very gratifying, and then in turn readers put me on to books I might not otherwise have come across.

MT: What are your favourite blogs?

KH: There are so many! What is wonderful is the incredibly professional standard that the best blogs maintain, whether it's the blogger's way with words, knowledge of their subject, or skill with a camera - there are scores of talented people out there. Apart from the two already mentioned other favourites are Books do furnish a room which is written by a real-life friend of mine who is by far the best-read person I know. "Lindsay" is seriously good at talking about literature, and very succinct - an underrated quality. Another daily "must read" is Stuck in a book where Simon's quirky, gentle sense of humour complements his love of books and the facility with which he writes about them.



MT: What are you reading right now?

KH: Appropriately for an Edinburgh blogger, I'm reading a very Edinburgh book: Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It's the current choice for Cornflower's own book group (and anyone who'd like to join us is welcome), and it's a book many of us are familiar with through the film version, so it'll be interesting to see how the original Miss Brodie compares with our Maggie Smith image of her. So far the book is superb: concise, precise, 'perjink' (to use a Scots word), and although it's short it will give us much to talk about.

 

MT: What books that you have read recently do you most recommend?

KH: I read Owen Sheers' novel Resistance before it came out last year and I tipped it to do very well; I'm now seeing the paperback everywhere which I suppose proves I was right! It's a thriller written by a poet, intense, exquisite, and extremely accomplished. I loved it.

In non-fiction, I was very taken with Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places. Again, beautifully, sensitively written, and a fascinating account of wilderness, including history, literature, geology, botany and more, but above all a love of the natural world.

MT: Thanks Karen!

 

Dannie Abse has won the Wales Book of the Year 2008 (not Welsh Book of the Year, but Wales Book of the Year: odd!) for his book The Presence published by Hutchinson. Well done, sir!

The announcement was made Tuesday 1 July, at a Gala Dinner at the Cardiff Hilton Hotel, introduced by BBC presenter Rhun ap Iorwerth and editor of The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, John Davies.

Dannie Abse, one of Britain's most distinguished poets received the £10,000 prize from the Heritage Minister, Rhodri Glyn Thomas.

The Presence, written after Abse's wife Joan was killed in a car accident in June 2005, is both a journal of his grief and a portrait of a marriage which lasted more than fifty years. 

His book was described in The Independent newspaper as "supremely fresh and vital ... matching profound emotion with witty observation ... a truly marvellous book."

 

 

Rhyll McMaster has written six prize-winning poetry books. Her first novel, Feather Man, published in Australia in 2007, has won two major literary prizes and is short-listed for two more. It is published in the UK by Marion Boyars.



The Complete Novels of Jane Austen: Seven Great English Classics by Jane Austen

This volume contains Jane Austen's seven completed novels. To quote from Lord David Cecil in his book, A Portrait of Jane Austen: “Her genius was twofold. Along with her comedy sense she possessed a subtle insight into the moral nature of man. The union of the two is the distinguishing characteristic of her achievement...” A must-have for readers who want the serious enjoyment of a large dose of brilliant gossip.



The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and Alfred Appel

A novel of immense sadness and yet odd humour from one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition teases out the textual richness of the book, and examines its playful delight in language that contributes to the novel's impact. This is perhaps the definitive novel of desire, perverse or otherwise.



The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Lily Bart must marry to survive, and she's a woman who's willing to take a desperate gamble. First published in 1905, this American literary classic tells the story of the fateful pressures, and of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton's era. Wharton speaks of family, marriage, and money in ways that sound across the generations. This book is ageless.



Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Tyler's seventeenth novel tells the tale of two very different Baltimore families who both adopt Korean orphans. As with all Tyler novels this book investigates the sense of belonging to and alienation from family. She's such a quietly subversive writer that you might be fooled into thinking that she's simply cataloguing domesticity, but you must press on. Somewhere, in every Tyler novel, will be a passage so profoundly moving that tears will start in your eyes.



The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The story of a group of classics students at an elite American college, who are cerebral, obsessive and finally murderous. They're also morbidly detached. A stony, chilling literary murder mystery, a thinking person's thriller. It's so stylish it's almost criminal.



Towards the Light by A.C. Grayling

The story of the struggles for liberty and rights that made the modern west is the subtitle of this book. Did you know that women's rights grew out of female agitation for the abolition of slavery? I didn't. This book shows how dearly we must value hard-won universal human rights and freedoms. Grayling is my favourite modern philosopher, and writes a lovely sentence.



The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

A book by the now famous Professor of Clinical Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, its characters are stranger than fiction: one man leans like the Tower of Pisa, and has to have a spirit-level built into his spectacles to keep upright. A man develops visual agnosia, and cannot recognize everyday objects and so mistakes his wife for a hat. This mesmerizing book tells us what happens when things go wrong with the brain. It's scary how much science has still to learn. This book was an instant classic.



Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham

This is the memoir of Lily Shaine, an orphan brought up by her two eccentric bachelor uncles in New York in the 1950s. Uncle Len is an extremely tall private investigator, and Uncle Gabe is a librarian who is definitely odd. But what is beautiful about these two men is that they took up the task of bringing up this little orphan in the hard streets of the Bronx. Lily learns the secrets of sex, bereavement and unexpected family love. Astute, original and funny sad.



The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

From one of the greatest twentieth-century Anglo-Irish writers comes her masterpiece. In it she exposes the cruelty of cold and conventional people when sixteen-year-old Portia comes to live with her wealthy half-brother and his wife, Anna, in London during the thirties. Portia, tormented by the agonies of her first love-affair, is obsessed by the feeling that people are laughing at her: on discovering that Anna has been reading her diary she takes a sudden explosive step... One of those books that lets you in on the secret of why people behave the way they do. A brilliant divination of human motivation.



Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

Six of Comyns' eight novels are written in the first person; that must surely be a first. Here, Sophia is a twenty-one year old girl who marries a painter and lives a rather downtrodden and desperate bohemian life in London. Occasionally surreal, Sophia carries a newt in her pocket, and has a very individualistic take on life. So credible and alive is this character that you will feel this book must be autobiographical, and when you've finished reading you will wonder what will happen next in Sophia's life. Comyns does "artless" without whimsicality. A timeless masterpiece of evocative characterization.

Each week, here on Editor's Corner, I quickly run through the latest issue of the Bookseller magazine and pick out the bits and pieces of book industry news that catch my eye.

This quick round-up of book stuff is culled from the pages of last Friday's 27th June issue:

• suffering bookshops "could be forced out of business by rising rents according to the c.e.o of the British Shops and Stores Association"


• "writing workshops with Labyrinth" author Kate Mosse, bedtime story sessions and a pirate party will be among the events" taking place this week as part of Independent Booksellers Week


• the "warring factions of PFD and United Agents entrenched themselves deeper into their respective positions this week, as PFD revealed it was looking to recover £853,000 from its former directors, and United Agents lined up 19 employment tribunal cases against PFD"


• four buyers "have expressed an interest in taking over the e-commerce side of Retail8, which includes the BookRabbit and Samedaybooks websites"


• beleagured "US Christian charity St Stephen the Great is facing tribunal claims from as many as 30 disgruntled booksellers"


• John Blake "is unlikely to go ahead with an autobiography from Sue Katona, mother of reality TV star Kerry Katona"


• Boydell & Brewer has "incorporated academic publisher James Currey into its group"


• Faber "has launched a new website with a fully integrated e-commerce facility"


• The Bookseller's deputy editor Joel Rickett "has been hired as editorial director of Viking" -- good luck Joel

As Mike Marqusee shows in his excellent If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew, criticising Israel can leave one open to accusations of anti-Semitism.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's controversial and closely-argued The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy caused a lot of fuss when it came out in America, but it deserves the widest reading and discussion: and discussion means not accusing the authors of anti-Semitism, but calmly evaluating what they have to say.

Does America's pro-Israel lobby wield inappropriate control over US foreign policy?

This book has created a storm of controversy by bringing out into the open America's relationship with the Israel lobby: a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape foreign policy in a way that is profoundly damaging both to the United States and Israel itself.

Israel is an important, valued American ally, yet Mearsheimer and Walt show that, by encouraging unconditional US financial and diplomatic support for Israel and promoting the use of its power to remake the Middle East, the lobby has jeopardized America's and Israel's long-term security and put other countries -- including Britain -- at risk.

The latest interview here on The Book Depository is with the much-vaunted Sarah Hall (who recently featured on our Tuesday Top Ten slot you may recall). Sarah has won lost of prizes, but most recently was awarded the annual James Tiptree, Jr. Award which is given "to a work of science fiction or fantasy that engages the subject of gender in new and thought-provoking ways."

Her latest novel, The Carhullan Army, had already won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for literary writers under the age of 35 and was also shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain's most prominent SF prize, which was this year won by Richard Morgan's Black Man.

 

 

Via BronteBlog:

Branwell Bronte was born in Thornton on a day like today in 1817. Although he would grow up to be known as the black sheep of the Brontë family, it should also be remembered that he actually was the driving force behind the juvenilia, pushing the Brontë girls into the world of writing they would never leave.

For that, and for many more other 'small' achievements he certainly deserves to be remembered.

Last week, we had our first What on a Wednesday column where I asked blogger Lynne Hatwell (Dovegreyreader) a couple of questions about blogging and books.

Well, today is the the turn of John Self the blogger behind the popular Asylum blog.

John was born in 1973 and lives in Belfast where he works as a lawyer. John tells me his spare time is taken up with reading, writing blog entries, and placating his wife over the amount of time he spends reading and writing blog entries!

MT: What first drew you to blogging John?

JS: I started my blog as a place where I could have some peace and quiet to think amid the hustle and bustle of the rest of the internet: hence Asylum. I've been writing about books I've read, and been in online book forums, for years, but it appealed to me to have a place of my own. So there must be some lust for glory in there too.

MT: What do you most get out of it?

JS: To begin with I would have said that it kept me thinking about books, and made me disciplined into marshalling my responses. This is a great way to work out what you actually felt about a book! And it also helps fix it in the memory. Now, though, my favourite part of blogging is the rich range of responses I get from other readers who leave comments. They invariably know more about the book or author than I do, have something interesting to say and an alternative take, and enrich my reading enormously.

MT: What are your favourite blogs?

JS: Most people reading this will probably know most of the book blogs I like: they're in most book bloggers' sidebars, and on the essential BritLitBlogs, which never fails to throw up interesting new posts every day of the week. So I'll draw attention to a few that I love which don't get as much publicity: Steerforth is on BritLitBlogs but his blog, The Age of Uncertainty, is more general than that suggests, and always entertaining. For guaranteed amusement I also turn to JunkMonkey, a very funny blog kept by a stay-at-home dad in the Scottish highlands. His riffs on trashy films are particularly worth reading. Finally, back on books, and dealing with an aspect of publishing dear to my heart but generally overlooked by bloggers, is Caustic Cover Critic, a smart look at book cover designs.

     

MT: What are you reading right now?

JS: Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland, which seems to have come from nowhere to be a new critical darling: it's been compared with Banville, Bellow, Fitzgerald and Updike -- and James Wood liked it too! After that I'll be tackling Pat Barker's The Ghost Road, the last of the Best of Booker shortlist that I've yet to read, and I'm looking forward to Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, a large comic novel which has been tipped for this year's Booker list. Throughout these I'll be continuing to wallow in Tobias Wolff's collection of new and selected stories, Our Story Begins. It's out in August in the UK but for some reason my local bookshop put it on their shelves early: anyway the US edition is readily available and has a nicer cover too. It's a terrific collection which is certain to make the best of year lists for many people, including me.

     

MT: What book(s) that you have read recently do you most recommend?

JS: Philip Roth's The Prague Orgy, the last volume of the Zuckermand Bound series, reached new heights of brilliance in a writer I have only recently learned to love. I am now tremendously excited about all the books of his I haven't read yet. Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl is about the same short length -- 80 pages -- but an emotional and intellectual kick in the teeth: two connected stories which take their protagonist from the Nazi death camps to modern day Florida. Two of my favourite authors published new books this year, both pushing at the edges of their comfort zones to produce satisfying and enjoyable books. Patrick McGrath's Trauma applies his gifts for the psychology -- and psychiatry -- of relationships and unreliable narrative to New York, and Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia brings together space travel, Communism and parallel universes.

 

 

Kester Aspden, author of The Hounding of David Oluwale, was born in Toronto in 1968. He was raised in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and York. He has a doctorate in history from Cambridge University, taught the history of crime at Leeds University, and left academic life in 2004 to become a full-time writer. He now lives in Istanbul.



Complete Plays by Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane didn't live to be thirty but she left behind a stunning body of work. I saw Blasted at the Royal Court a few years ago, and of course it should be seen not read, but it is a pleasure to read Kane, her language is so shocking and vital. Blasted is set in a Leeds hotel, a detail I love. "I've shat in better places than this," has got to be the best first line in a contemporary play. She was a deeply moral writer and we -- I mean Britain -- could do with her voice today. Such a loss.



Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach

Who would have thought a work of literary criticism could be so exciting? Well this is. It shows how writers from Homer through to Montaigne through to Virginia Woolf depict reality, so it's quite an intellectual journey. As someone who lives in Istanbul, I love the fact that Auerbach, an exile from Nazi Germany, wrote this book in the city. Because of the intellectual poverty of Istanbul back then, he worked without an abundance of secondary, critical literature, and with just the primary texts to hand. He said that he couldn't have written this book if he had had the luxury of a well-stocked university library -- he would have been "buried". So he was free of any of that crap and really got stuck into the meat of the texts. I also love his central insight, that a few passages of an author, if interrogated well, can yield more decisive information about a writer than a systematic, chronological treatment of their lives and works. This masterpiece is proof of that thesis.



Rule of Night by Trevor Hoyle

This cult classic is now back in print thanks to Pomona. It reminds me of A Clockwork Orange and Brighton Rock and Trainspotting, but it's set in Rochdale in the mid-1970s and centres on a young thug and his mates. There are battles between Rochdale and Halifax skins, farting competitions on the train to Chorley, great little snapshots of social life in grim Britannia. It deserves to be well-known again, and with all the 1970s nostalgia around it would certainly resonate.



Elmet by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin

This collection -- published first as Remains of Elmet -- is one I am very fond of since it is inspired by the people, industries (fading industries) and harsh landscape of Calderdale, the part of Yorkshire where I spent my early childhood. The poems are beautifully illustrated with photographs from Fay Godwin. There is even a poem about Billy Holt, a writer and eccentric from Todmorden, who I have vague memories of seeing round and about the town with his horse and cart. I love the collection because it reminds me of my grandparents.



Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche

Like Auerbach, this work is a great inspiration, particularly the essay on the uses of history. Don't write about your pain, he said, only write about things you have overcome. Treat the past critically is another great lesson -- break it up, dissolve it, condemn it. "Every past ... is worthy to be condemned."



Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams

It's a strange book, sometimes it's preposterous, but it works. It's about the Moors Murders and was written soon after the trial. Williams was trying to do an In Cold Blood, though he wasn't as skilled as Capote. He nevertheless builds up a powerful picture of Brady and Hindley, two individuals leading very mundane lives who would have remained obscure if they hadn't met. Another great strength is that it evokes the industrial north during a time of profound social change, when terraced streets were giving way to new council estates on the edges of cities. I am sure Morrissey must have read this book to have written Suffer Little Children.



A Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

If I had to choose one book out of the ten then it would be this one. It's a fiction and it's a history and it brings home the truth that all histories are imaginative constructions (postmodernists seem to think that this is a novel insight). But the Plague of 1665 was a very real event and Defoe's is an unflinching portrait of a city and people under stress and threat of death.



York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling edited by Richard Beadle

I grew up in York and watched the Mystery Plays -- which were revived in the 1950s after 400 years -- so this is another reminder of home (note to myself, this is not Desert Island Books). The mystery plays were of profound importance to the citizens of medieval York, socially and spiritually, though when I saw them they were just part of the heritage and tourist industry. I didn't appreciate them as a teenager, but now I love the mixing of the crude and earthy with the divine, and the alliterative lines.



The Damned Utd by David Peace

I could have gone for any of the novels that made up his Red Riding quartet, and I almost went for GB84 for its anger and humanity, but I've plumped for this one -- the best northern novel since the time of Storey, Braine and Waterhouse, and certainly the best novel about football.



Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley

Nothing much happens in this bittersweet little novel, but I enjoyed accompanying the narrator as she drifts with little purpose though the rainy streets of Manchester, detective's notebook at hand.

Who are the "true stars of London's creative industries and the powers behind the throne"? Well, funnily enough, despite living in Stockport, it turns out yours truly may be one of them!

The Hospital Club 100 will be the definitive list of who shapes the creative landscape in what is, after all, the most creative city in the world. We're not after fat cats and big wigs. Corner offices and chauffeurs are not a prerequisite for inclusion. We want to know the secret influencers, the creative catalysts, the unheard of power players; the unsung heroes who make the media world spin.

Each week, here on Editor's Corner, I quickly run through the latest issue of the Bookseller magazine and pick out the bits and pieces of book industry news that catch my eye.

This quick round-up of book stuff is culled from the pages of last Friday's 20th June issue which was a "special birthday edition of the magazine, celebrating 150 years since it first appeared." Happy Birthday!

• Blackwell "in introducing on on-demand printer the Espresso Book Machine to its 60-store chain after signing an agreement with US owner On Demand Books"


• Caroline Micheal "is hoping to draw a line under the Peters, Fraser & Dunlop saga after convincing media mogul Andrew Neil to take over the agency"


• Michael Joseph (a Penguin imprint) will "publish the sequel to Stephen Fry's bestselling memoir Moab is My Washpot in autumn 2010"


• Play.com "hopes to cut delivery times on key front and backlist titles with the opening of a new warehouse"


• Anthony Forbes Watson "has been appointed permanent managing director of Pan Macmillan UK"


• Transworld "has no plans to make any changes to its publishing for Raj Persaud, after the psychiatrist and broadcaster ... admitted to the General Medical Council to plagiarising work from other academics"


• Sainsbury's says "sales of non-food items including books are holding up well"


• media and competition lawyers "have poured cold water on suggestions that Amazon's tactics in its terms dispute with Hachette could put the online retailer at risk of committing an abuse of a dominant market position"

Following the worldwide success of her hugely influential and groundbreaking book No Logo, Naomi Klein has followed-up with the even more powerful and provocative The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

As the Guardian said, "There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books":

Free markets, we're told, mean free people. Yet around the world this "freedom" is being paid for in blood. When a catastrophe occurs -- whether war, terrorist attack or natural disaster -- there are people cleaning up and cashing in, using chaos to force through brutal economic punishment. They are the shock doctors.

Naomi Klein's gripping and explosive book reveals who these global racketeers are, how their ideology has come to dominate our world -- from raking in billions out of the tsunami, to plundering Russia and exploiting Iraq -- and how they are making a killing.

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish.

I suppose that it is one way of improving your vocabulary, but, really, how mad is that!?

More via OUPblog.

 

Via the Telegraph:

A lock of Jane Austen's hair has sold for £5,640 at auction.

It was contained in a three-inch high display case made of lambskin, surrounded by a wooden frame.

The lock had been fashioned into a weeping willow, a symbol of mourning or resurrection, according to Dominic Winter Auctioneers of Cirencester, Glos., where the sale took place.

It was bought by Holybourne Rare Books Alton, Hants., on behalf of an anonymous fan of the beloved early 19th century novelist.

Over on his excellent Asylum blog, John Self has been writing about Imre Kertesz's The Pathseeker (part of Melville House's matchless novella range).

John says he wants to describe the novel as Kafkaesque, but then wonderfully reminds us that:

Martin Amis points out that the word has become so devalued that a long queue in the Post Office is now described as Kafkaesque.

Lynne Hatwell writes one of the UK's most popular literary blogs: Dovegreyreader Scribbles. She has been married for thirty-two years, has three adult children and lives in an isolated cottage in the very beautiful Tamar Valley. By trade Lynne is a Gt. Ormond St.-trained paediatric nurse, but she has worked as a health visitor in GP's surgeries on the edge of Dartmoor for the last thirty years.

I decided to ask Lynne a few questions about her blog and about what she is reading...

MT:What first drew you to blogging Lynne?

LH: I had done an OU degree in English Literature in the late 1990's and it was a sudden and overwhelming need for therapy from that life in the NHS. There I have to write clinically and objectively and most certainly not creatively, on the blog I can share my passion for books and reading with subjective abandon. I love to share my thoughts on books, (I don't call myself a book reviewer, that feels presumptious), how a book has made me feel, what emotions surface, what else does it make me want to read, why would I press this book on you if we met in the street.

MT: What do you most get out of it?

LH: The therapy works! It has all given me a fantastic work-life balance and it has all opened some very exciting new doors. I can share a love of good books with like-minded people across the world and I value my blog-readers enormously and love getting into conversation and debate with them via comments and e mail. They have also given me some great reading recommends too.

MT: What are your favourite blogs?

LH: Well, apart from ReadySteadyBook which constantly reminds me there's an awful lot I don't know and makes me go and read books I may never have touched, I regularly head for Other Stories for Kirsty's feminist take on the world, Cornflower who has a real eye for that 'thing of beauty' the rest of us might miss, The Literary Saloon which was one of the first literary sites I discovered when the internet arrived and John Self's Asylum for the great book reviews. Mr Asylum and I read and blogged the Booker longlist last year, I'm hoping he's up for the challenge again this year!

MT: What are you reading right now?

LH: I always have about six books on the go and am currently in training for taking the blog along to the entire Ways With Words Festival at Dartington this year so am reading ahead.

I missed Ferney by James Long first time round and am delighted to have found it in its reincarnation. Alongside I have Katharine Whitehorn's excellent autobiography, Selective Memory, and gripping me by the throat Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport. I thought there couldn't be much more to say on that subject but how wrong I was.

MT: What books that you have read recently do you most recommend?

LH: Looking back to earlier in the year I think I finally cracked Michael Ondaatje having always thought I could only really cope with his writing if there was a film to explain it. I now realise I read The English Patient when I had three small children and not a lot of brain available. I've read Anil's Ghost and Divisadero this year and was completely mesmerised by Ondaatje's writing style. He's a writer who can still mould and shape me as a reader and having felt the pulse of his writing I feel perfectly in step with it, there's a line in Divisadero which says it all 'Oh, this older need for a lullaby not a storm'. Ondaatje does storms alright but he does them with dazzling and magnificent calmness and understatement which suits me nicely having been trained not to run when there is a crisis...WALK NURSE!

   

Bernd Brunner is the author of Bears: A Brief History and The Ocean at Home. A writer of nonfiction based in Berlin, he works at the crossroads of history, science and literature.

And here is Bernd's eclectic Tuesday Top Ten:



Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia by Piers Vitebsky

An in-depth-study of the symbiotic relationship between Siberians and reindeer passionately chronicled by the British anthropologist.



Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson

The title of the book says it all. Our bodies are not prepared for the world we operate in. A new perspective on why we struggle with diabetes and heart disease.



His World and Work by Andrew Delbanco

A great biography of a genius.



China Shakes the World by James Kynge

There are many books on China and its influence on the world, this one is best.



Stalking by Bran Nicol

A very interesting cultural history of a disturbing phenomenon that is, as Nicol demonstrates, not as new as we may be inclined to think.



The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn

The wonderful story of the Quaker Luke Howard who categorized the cloud types we still use today.



A Brief History of the Smile by Angus Trumble

Why we smile and what it means - an entertaining read packed with anecdotes.



Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

This historian reconstructs how people experienced the introduction of the railway during the first half of the 19th century. Written some thirty years ago, this book has become a classic.



Gomorrah: The Other Italian Mafia by Roberto Saviano

A gripping read. Literary nonfiction at its very best.



Insomnia: A Cultural History by Eluned Summers-Bremner

A survey of sleeplessness from various angles. Should be read at night.

 

The Richard & Judy Summer Read 2008 list has been announced (see e.g. the Guardian for more).

The eight books chosen for this summer are:

• No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay


• The Resurrectionist by James Bradley


• The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson


• East of the Sun by Julia Gregson


• Down River by John Hart


• The Outcast by Sadie Jones


• Addition by Toni Jordan 


• The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller