15/06/20: Luke Haines – Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll 1997–2005 (2011)

A sequel to Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall (2009), this second volume of Luke Haines’ recollections covers Black Box Recorder, the final demise of The Auteurs and the start of Haines’ eccentric solo career.

It's even more whimsical than the first volume, diversifying into “conversations” with a cat and various dead rappers. These flights of fancy – not usually my kind of thing – work surprisingly well.

As his career strays further from the mainstream, there’s less of the anecdotal wit and satire about fellow bands. However, he does detail a run-in with Chrissie Hynde and his first Top of the Pops appearance. You also get to hear of his plans for a “Pop Strike”, which pre-dated Bill Drummond’s No-Music Day.

Highly recommended. I'm hoping he will write a third volume covering 2006–2020.

26/05/20: Luke Haines – Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall (2009)

“I am none of the following, but have been described variously as: the pioneer of, the godfather of, the man who invented, the butcher of, and the forgotten man of Britpop (1990s version). Let’s not get too bogged down in tracing the lineage any further back. It’s never cost-effective and always leads back to a caveman banging a rock with the tusk of a woolly mammoth.”

Luke Haines was never really a part of Britpop. The Auteurs were a band on the outskirts of that scene, who predated most of the nonsense associated with those acts. He’s a brilliantly acerbic, extremely witty narrator (I read both of his books twice) and most of what he has to say about his contemporaries is not very complimentary:

“The full idiocy of the era has yet to be felt. But I already loathe the brashness, the vicars-and-tarts-forced-jollity of the Blur–Elastica alliance. The head boy and head girl appear to be doing rather well for themselves. I had more of a Carrie-style ending in mind for the nauseating couple.”

He reserves particular dislike for Suede. “The Auteurs are European, intense and intellectual,” he states. “Suede are a quick fix. Baked beans and sulphate. Brett’s pseudo-bumboy androgyny is more Grange Hill than Bowie.” He keeps coming back to them, too: “I’ve heard their single and I know I can outwrite them. Brett’s got a few good lines and knows there’s a bit of mileage to be had in writing lyrics about ‘retards’ and ‘dads’, but overall they’re just a little too reliant on the old wasted-glamour-in-council-estates routine.” He also has a bash at The The, who he toured and fell out with.

Haines depicts the rise and fall of The Auteurs, not shying away from his own self-destructive role in their ups and downs. By the sounds of it, they were never a “proper” band in the old-fashioned “gang of mates against the world” sense of the word. The bassist was his girlfriend and the cellist irritated Haines so much that he refuses to call him anything other than “The Cellist” throughout the text.

The book concludes with a happy ending of sorts – the formation of a second group, Black Box Recorder.

A savage satire on 1990s culture, Bad Vibes is hugely entertaining.

13/05/20: Dean Karnazes – Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner (2005)

“Just as a race-car driver pushes his vehicle to the limit, or a pilot tests the ‘edge’ in an experimental plane, I wanted to see how far I could go. What I now realize is that the way other people seek physical comfort and blissful well-being, I seek extremes. Why run 10 miles when you can run 100? Moderation bores me.”

Dean Karnazes lives for running. He can run for days. He eats while running, and organises pizza deliveries along the route. He has fallen asleep while running. He even dictated this book while running. He ran in Death Valley, where it was so hot that his trainers started melting.

I really enjoyed his account of his obsession.

08/11/19: John O’Farrell – Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter 1979–1997 (1998)

“Only in Britain are people criticised for attempting to make something ‘a political issue’, when surely everything is a political issue.”

Witty and self-deprecating account of supporting the Labour party when they were at their lowest ebb. It certainly resonates with recent events, as Labour once again appear to have hit rock bottom.

O’Farrell worked as a researcher for an MP and as a press officer for a councillor. Later he wrote satirical and topical jokes and sketches for Spitting Image and Clive Anderson. It’s a genuinely funny memoir.

“I am just someone who feels very strongly that people should take part in every election: European elections, council by-elections – part of me even feels compelled to take part in the Stars in Their Eyes phone vote just because I have a right to do so.”

You feel his pain and he suffers endless Labour defeats and set-backs. The book ends on a note of total euphoria with the Labour landslide of 1st May 1997 and the beginning of the Tony Blair era. With hindsight that wouldn’t be quite the golden era it promised, but the author didn’t know that yet...

26/09/19: Christopher McDougall – Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009)

Brilliantly uncategorisable book about ultrarunning, the Tarahumara people of Chihuahua, Mexico, and a 50-mile desert endurance race that the author himself takes part in.

It’s a rambling, restless narrative covering a lot of ground (literally!), but the writing is razor-sharp and very witty. As well as bring a vital work of ethnography, it’s an almost gonzo journalist account of being a runner that brings to life various colourful characters.

McDougall argues along the lines of the “endurance running hypothesis”, i.e., that humans developed the ability to run for long distances so that they could run down their prey.

Perhaps the most memorable part is chapter 25, in which he details how terrible trainers are for your feet. He investigates barefoot running and provides compelling evidence that trainers offer nothing whatsoever beyond protection from rough surfaces and the cold. In fact, he argues that modern running shoes are actively bad for us – denying the human foot its own evolutionary genius by ironically cushioning it into experiencing even more impact. And therefore making us run unnaturally and harmfully. This, he claims, means that the more “hi-tech” the trainer, the more likely we are to be injured. His argument is backed up with a lot of respectable research and suggests the world is being sold a lie about running shoes.

Born to Run is highly recommended – entertaining, funny and informative. Worth a read, whether or not you yourself run.

15/08/19: Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

Gently philosophical meditations on being a runner and a writer.

Murakami listens to the Lovin’ Spoonful and ponders the meaning of tackling marathons and triathlons as he grows older.

I found the following passage the most interesting:

“I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.

On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days. When I’m sad I think a little about sadness. When I’m happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning.

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.”

08/08/19: David Thomas and Helen Krasner – Travels with Cookie: Narrowboat Cruising with a Cat (2014)

The author learns that he has terminal cancer and decides to fulfil his lifelong ambition to buy and live on a canal boat. He does this with Cookie, his large, fluffy, white cat.

During their four years afloat, David saves a woman stuck in the mud and meets a seal, while Cookie – perhaps not the brightest button in the box – falls in the water a few times. But otherwise, not a great deal happens beyond boating up and down England and Wales. This is no way prevents it being an enjoyable read.

I came to this book via its co-author, Helen Krasner, whose Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain I enjoyed recently. The story of how David meets and falls in love with Helen is touching. They end up living together (she has five cats of her own) and his health miraculously improves.

I would have liked a bit more Cookie and a little less boating, but it’s to the authors’ great credit that this doesn’t become yet another sentimental “me and my pet” memoir.

31/07/19: Gavin Boyter – Downhill from Here: Running from John O’Groats to Land’s End (2017)

“What better way to celebrate a country than by passing a continuous strip of it under your feet, literally feeling the entire terrain of a top-to-bottom treadmill composed of tarmac, earth, sand and grass?”

You can tell what this is about from the title. It’s the story of the run and also of the author’s attempts to make a film about the experience – a complicated project indeed. He secures the help of his father (who operates a drone to film aerial shots) and various drivers to meet him at the end of each day’s journey.

He gets lost a lot. He gets his film equipment stolen. He suffers various injuries. At times it’s a standard John O’Groats to Land’s End (JogLe) account, with moments of tedium and frustration.

Occasionally Gavin can sound oddly Alan Partridge-like:

“I often try a thought experiment, imagining what it would be like if I was ‘parachuted in’ to a random workplace and asked to muck in. I imagine myself in those factories, workshops and offices; I hope I’d be able to fit in amongst my fellow employees in these theoretical work placements. Such empathic daydreaming whiles away hours on an urban trail. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.”

See also the passage in which he writes:

“You can’t have your loft conversions, fridge-freezers, fork-lift trucks and basic, functional sanitation without a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

But maybe that’s harsh. He follows this latter observation with the wiser and more insightful: “We are drawn to watercourses because they seem to embody life, even when as comparatively still as a canal.”

He gets there in the end and his document of that experience is worth reading.

01/04/19: Helen Krasner – Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain (1998)

“I wasn’t particularly interested in fulfilling an ambition, nor did I want the great feelings of achievement people thought I must be seeking – this just wasn’t the way I looked at walking, or indeed at life.”

In 1986, Helen Krasner became the first woman to walk around the coast of Britain. This is her tale. Rather than present a day-by-day account, she simply reports back on the interesting bits – a wise decision, as this makes for a far more compelling narrative. There’s a visit to Sellafield nuclear power station, where she commits the faux-pas of carrying a camera. She passes Paul McCartney’s farm at the Mull of Kintyre. And she looks for the monster at Loch Ness.

She is unpretentious and easy to like, with a relaxed view about the “rules” of the walk. She undertook the journey for pleasure, not for the sake of setting a record. Plus, there can be no definitive route. It’s not as simple as keeping the coast on your left. How literally do you take this when paths come and go? Even if the path followed the coastline strictly, where is the “coast” anyway? It depends on dynamic factors including tides, ocean currents, times of year, weather and erosion – an infinitely complex matter. You realise that she is absolutely right to interpret the route the way she does.

She only suffers one blister on the entire trip and the book is refreshingly free of gripes about the pain of endurance. She does it for fun, and that cones across well.

Along the way she depicts an older and more innocent Britain – one without computers, GPS technology and mobile phones. On one occasion she has to call for some medical results (foot X-ray to rule out suspected fracture) and only had 10p to use in a phone box. Keen to hear about her walk, the radiographer is slow to get to the point and reveal the good news: “She had told me in the nick of time. The pips went, and we were cut off.” There must be generations now who have no idea what the pips even means.

I particularly liked the way she refuses to play the role others expect from her. By the time she completes the walk, returning to Brighton, she has become weary of retelling the same story endlessly and generally disappoints the press by not issuing the kinds of memorable statements they expect to hear.

Only one real criticism: the book would have greatly benefited from a map showing Helen’s route route. Amid the barrage of obscure place names, I found I was often looking up locations online to see how far she had travelled. That said, she does end with a day-by-day listing of each stretch she completed and a running tally of distances covered – in fact, a journey of 4,922 miles from the start of March 1986 to the end of January 1987.

22/03/19: Tony Hobbs – One Pair of Boots: Land’s End to John O’Groats (2000)

I was very keen to read about a journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats (a.k.a. the LeJoG), but this wasn’t quite the account I was hoping for. The author generally fails to inspire with his descriptions of the physical feat of undertaking the walk, which he completes slowly over nearly 15 weeks. Nor does he especially engage the reader with descriptions of people and places along the way, although it’s touching when he seems to make a friend called Nicky:

“She was tall, with a mop of thick light brown hair, spoke with a soft Devon accent, and was reading John Paul Sartre’s Nausea...In the dark we left the pub and walked the half mile to where Nicky was camped. She held a torch while I put up my tent, and then we looked at the stars, she pointing out the Plough and North Star.”

You wonder if he is somewhat smitten, although he misses the chance to use an obvious joke about carrying a torch.

His interlude aside, the book, like the journey itself, seems to lack passion and purpose. There’s a charity angle (£2 goes to the MS Society for every copy sold), but this is only mentioned when he’s close to finishing. It’s not presented as a motivating factor for his walk. He visits a lot of churches and takes a lot of wrong turns, but you don’t really learn how he feels about anything.

For a narrative like this to succeed, it cannot simply be a list of places trudged through, meals eaten and places camped at. It needs to do something with that information to give you a reason to invest your time in the story and experience it for yourself. He could have taken one aspect – such as the fact that he “consumed 285 pints of beer of 83 different varieties” – and framed the entire narrative around that. It could have worked so much better as Land’s End to John O’Groats in 285 Pints.

But despite all this, I grew to like the author and found myself wanting to get to the end to see him finish his journey – even if the huge achievement of his reaching that point fails to even warrant a new paragraph in the text. There’s something about the sheer ordinariness – the complete lack of pretension – that makes this book difficult to dislike.

13/03/19: Phoebe Smith – Extreme Sleeps: Adventures of a Wild Camper (2013)

This was free from the Totteridge & Whetstone book exchange – the wonderful “Leave one, take one” scheme run from the waiting room on the station platform.

Believing that you don’t need to travel far to find real wilderness, Phoebe Smith hikes to obscure and remote UK locations and then camps in them. Each chapter covers one such location and details what happened when she travelled and slept there. Sometimes it’s fascinating (camping beside the wreckage at the crash site of a World War II bomber) and sometimes it’s a little mundane and repetitious.

There are quite a few typos and sometimes the grammar doesn’t work. See, for example, this awkwardly dangling sentence: “Looking at the map, the River Liza which feeds the reservoir, should have been nearer to where I was standing.” This implies that the river is looking at the map. The commas are in the wrong places, too.

That said, Smith’s cheery and energetic writing bounces along. It's friendly and upbeat – an amiable read.

26/02/19: Lauren Elder with Shirley Streshinsky – And I Alone Survived (1978)

Back cover: “Lauren Elder set out in a light aircraft in company with the pilot and his girlfriend. It was going to be a joyride, sightseeing over the mountainous splendour of the Sierra Nevada range. 

The Cessna hit the mountain fifteen feet from the crest. The joyride had turned into a nightmare. 

After a night of sub-zero temperatures Lauren was the only one of the three left alive.

She faced the terrifying prospect of climbing down to safety, wearing only a jacket and skirt and fashionable boots, down 8,000 feet of fearsome, precipitous mountain to the desert below...”

I love that reference to “fashionable boots”...

The opening pages are written like a racy novel, which added a certain distance for me: somehow it wasn’t very engaging. From the moment the plane hits the mountain ridge, the book becomes hugely compelling. After a frozen night huddled in the wreckage with no underwear and crammed in a tiny space with the one other survivor, she finds herself alone as her second companion dies from injuries and exposure. Sensing rescue was unlikely she begins the long climb down the snowy mountain, despite serious wounds and the onset of hallucinations. The account of her long trek to safety is interspersed with details of the rescue mission launched by her boyfriend.

The most fascinating sections of the book involve her describing how she felt during the ordeal: “From the moment I had lowered myself over the side of the crest early that morning I had been aware of a feeling of pure physical strength. But it was really more than that. It was strength tempered by balance, a kind of power that seemed to spring from some untapped well. It was as if I had been granted an unlimited supply of energy, and I was amazed and confounded by it.”

This energy – a sense of purpose and defiance – saves her life: “I had known the feeling before. I had it sometimes when I was surfing. I would catch a big wave and ride it on and on, sensing that I was part of the sea. I didn’t have to think or even make an effort. We just flowed together, my body responding without any command; And it happened to me at other times – the best times when I was jumping a horse. Then everything was so finely balanced that I knew I could do no wrong, that whatever move we made together was right. But I could not believe I that I had this feeling on a sheer granite cliff in a mountain wilderness.” 

She also comes to terms with death as being “neither dramatic nor even alarming”, simply something that “is”. It's impressive how wise and mature she is, and her will to live is inspiring: “I had also discovered, that spring day, that there is little that cannot be endured. Much of the time I had felt as if I’d been possessed of a special grace. That is all I could think to call it, grace. It was as if a transcendent power had been loosed in me as I made my way down that mountain. At times during the day I’d been filled with a peculiar sense of well-being, of elation. I had fallen out of the sky, had in the most primeval sense been lost in the wilderness, and it had not overwhelmed me. It had been, even, exhilarating.”

22/02/19: Deborah Levy – The Cost of Living (2018)

“The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life...”

This little hardback was free from the Totteridge & Whetstone book exchange – the wonderful “take one, leave one” scheme run from the waiting room on the station platform.

It’s a short, philosophical memoir about writing, the break-up of her marriage and the death of her mother. Levy writes beautifully, in clear, concise sentences. The structure seems abstract – rambling even – but then she loops back to certain individuals, themes and ideas and you realise how cleverly constructed it is.

A work of philosophy and gentle wit, she flits between playful and profound with graceful ease.

19/02/19: Karl Pilkington – An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington (2010)

The tie-in book of the first Sky TV series of the same name. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant send their friend Karl to witness the Wonders of the World, and Karl – a man who dislikes travel and is well out of his “comfort zone” – responds to these alien experiences in his usual deadpan manner.

Written down, it’s considerably less funny. You can still enjoy Karl’s unique slant on things, but it seems one-dimensional without hearing his voice (so familiar from podcasts and radio shows) and seeing his face. Another disappointment is that the little drawings are not by Karl, but by an illustrator and made to look as if they are Pilkington doodles. Despite some funny sentences, the whole book has a child-like quality that makes it oddly unsatisfying.

It’s undoubtedly lightweight, but there’s still a certain pleasure to be had in reading about these adventures – however flimsy. Despite his many prejudices, Karl mostly emerges as a kind and likeable character. You wouldn’t necessarily want to travel with him, though.

18/02/19: Deborah Scaling Kiley and Meg Noonan – Albatross: The True Story of a Woman’s Survival at Sea (1994)

“I opened my eyes and felt the sting of salt water. I waited for my vision to clear. When it did, my stomach contracted. A cold sword of fear stabbed through me. I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I didn’t want to believe it. Now I knew what had been bumping Mark’s legs. Sharks. There were sharks everywhere. Dozens, no, hundreds of them – as far as I could see. Some were so close I could see the membrane hooding their lifeless, clouded eyes. Others were just slow-moving angular shadows spiralling into the depths.”

Another raft-survival memoir, which I was inspired to read following the accounts of Steven Callahan and Maurice and Maralyn Bailey. The blurb on the dust jacket pretty much tells you everything:

“From the moment Debbie Scaling left Southwest Harbour in Maine she had misgivings about both the crew and the 58-foot Boothbay Challenger yacht. Yet, although she was an experienced sailor, she ignored her instincts and embarked on the voyage to Florida to deliver the boat – the aptly named Trashman – to its owner. They never made it.

Halfway through their voyage, the Trashman sank in a ferocious storm. Debbie and her four crew-mates were left on a tiny rubber dinghy in the middle of a raging ocean. They spent the first night in the water, under the upside-down inflatable, trying to keep warm. In the morning they discovered the water was infested with sharks. Back in the dinghy they covered themselves with seaweed for warmth – but were bitten by the creatures in it. They were attacked by birds, developed hideous sores, and with no food, no water, and inadequate clothing they began to hallucinate. Driven beyond endurance, two of the crew drank seawater and, little by little, went mad. With the others too weak to stop them they swam off and didn’t survive. The skipper’s girlfriend also died – of exposure and gangrene.

After days of this living nightmare, and resigned to their fate at the mercy of the sea Debbie and her only surviving crewmate, Brad, were rescued by a Russian ship.”

It’s a fairly harrowing read, not least because the incompetent “crew” (including two men with drink problems) are constantly at each other’s throats. There’s little unity, making a scary situation even more terrifying: “Then Meg was shouting at John again and John was shouting back and Mark was ranting and I felt myself drowning in the sound of their voices, the whining, the shouting, the crying, the complaining. Why couldn’t everyone just be quiet? I saw John kick Meg. He was doing it on purpose. She wailed and he kicked her again.”

The horror doesn’t end with the rescue. Deborah endures a decade of post-traumatic stress disorder and battles bulimia and depression as she struggles to comprehend what happened. She also files a lawsuit against the US coastguard, who she considers negligent. Inexplicably, the official reports claimed that the Trashman had arrived safely at its destination.

With marriage, motherhood, the writing of this book and a return to sailing she eventually starts to move on with her life. An extremely gripping story, it makes for a sobering read.

Postscript: it’s heartbreaking to learn that the tragedy continued. Debbie’s marriage ended. Her son John Coleman Kiley IV died by drowning in 2009, aged just 23. And Debbie herself died in 2012, aged 54.

“...the ocean us like a snarling dog,” she writes at one point; “it can sense when you are afraid.”

13/02/19: Stuart Stevens – Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure (1989)

“You would have to be out of your mind to go anywhere with Stuart Stevens, but when the travel is only mental, he is the perfect companion: brave, funny and ever-watchful” – Martin Amis

Amusing account of the author’s attempt to cross Africa by car, from Bangui in the Central African Republic to Algiers. His does this with his glamorous, remarkably laid-back companion Anne. Intriguingly, the exact nature of the pair’s relationship – not romantic – is never explained.

Their efforts are continually thwarted by local corruption, a lack of roads, failing equipment and poor living conditions. It’s to his great credit that Stevens finds so much humour in a situation that continually veers between maddening, desperate and scary.

According to the book blurb, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Mali, all of which he drives through, are “bizarre places where the vestiges of colonial folly, idiosyncratic enterprise, bribery and endless, pointless bureaucracy are the stuff of life”. Indeed, the frustrations of bureaucracy are such that the actual road journey only begins halfway through the book – and even then not in his friend’s Land Rover, as planned, but in a completely different vehicle. The section detailing the Toyota Land Cruiser breaking down during their attempt to cross the Sahara is genuinely hair-raising. It had to be locked into third gear and then driven in a continuous session without stopping, whatever the terrain.

It’s a miracle that they survived to tell the tale.

05/02/19: Maurice and Maralyn Bailey – 117 Days Adrift (1974)

M and M hit a sperm whale and their boat sinks off the Galápagos Islands. They drift for nearly four months in their raft and dinghy, surviving on turtle meat and raw fish.

This book lacks the lucid poetry and existential insights of Steven Callahan’s Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (1986). However, it does have a special charm of its own. Alternating between narrations of husband and wife, the presence of not just a second person but a spouse gives their account a special “domestic” dynamic. They keep each other going, whether it’s mutual support in killing sea creatures or – in the early days of the ordeal – reading out loud to each other and improvising games of dominoes and cards with paper to pass the time (“We spent many hours during the next few weeks playing whist”).

The rather matter-of-fact way its written means that the book is surprisingly low on drama. Some important details are almost glossed over: toilet arrangements are not mentioned until page 95.

“In some weird and detached way we found peace in our complete and compulsory isolation. We talked without the encumbrances of modern living; we explored the hidden depths of each other’s character, we threw away the trappings of so called civilization and reverted to a simple prehistoric way of life. We had our ‘lair’, the raft, and only emerged to hunt our food. Life was simple, but not secure.”

While they revert to a primitive state, it’s remarkable that there seems to have been very little tension between the couple: “We were now existing at a primeval level where the layers of civilization had been stripped away from us. We found our bodily functions unembarrassing and it was surprisingly easy to stay clean. We would wash in sea water, clean our teeth and comb our hair, and in my case, my beard. It was usually far too cold to sit out in the rain and we did not often take advantage of the frequent downpours for bathing.

They lose weight and suffer medical problems, but manage to fish and collect rainwater at such a rate that they mostly avoid serious physical and mental harm. They are eventually saved by a Korean fishing boat – the eighth ship they saw.

Appendices include thoughts on the design of the raft and dinghy, medical evaluation of the couple by Surgeon Captain John Duncan Walters and a list of all the boats that didn’t stop to save them.

01/02/19: Cheryl Strayed – Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found (2012)

“Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

When her mother dies and her personal life unravels (one-night stands, divorce, heroin), Cheryl Strayed decides to walk the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) from Mohave, California, to the Bridge of the Gods on the border of Oregon and Washington. Even with sections of the route being missed, it ends up being a journey of 1,100 miles.

Along the way she evades rattlesnakes and bears, struggling through parched deserts and deep snow. She has excruciating foot pain and loses toenails, but meets kindly strangers, makes some hiking friends and starts to come to terms with her past.

It’s hugely readable. The film made in 2014 is a fairly faithful adaptation of this text, but suffers from condensing such a detailed narrative into a couple of hours and somehow seemed a more disturbing tale overall. It’s also harder for a film to show an emotional transformation, which is perhaps the real subject of Wild.

The book is far more varied in tone, with plenty of gentle humour amid the soul-searching and recollection. You end up admiring her spirit and determination. And if you like walking, as I do, it leaves you yearning to undertake your own epic journey.

26/01/19: Richard Mabey – The Unofficial Countryside (1973)

Now regarded as a pioneering classic of psychogeography, but written before such a thing was fashionable, The Unofficial Countryside remains a luminous and visionary work.

It was revolutionary at the time of first publication for the way it refused to accept the standard definitions of “urban” and “rural”. Mabey found and observed nature in the marginal spaces defying categorisation between the two. This wonderful book celebrates the wildlife that others overlook or condemn, and expands at length on the notion that “a weed is just a flower in the wrong place”. His outlook is liberating. There’s a sort of poetry about his observations that – as Iain Sinclair notes in his introduction to this beautiful edition created by Little Toller Books – isn't far from J.G. Ballard’s ability to see possibilities in ugly and abandoned spaces: “...a sliver of land left over between two strictly rectangular factories, a disused car dump, the surrounds of an electricity substation. Nothing can be done with these patches. They are too small or misshapen to build on, too expensive to landscape.” Ignored, they therefore “form some of the richest and most unpredictable habitats for wildlife to be found in urban areas”.

The book is a reassuring reminder of how resourceful life can be – what he calls nature’s “perennial opportunism and exuberance” – with birds and other small creatures often finding ingenious means to sustain their threatened communities.

There are musings on the life-giving properties of abandoned gravel pits and the English canal system. Plus, there are brilliant passages on the ingenuity of urban pigeons and the demonisation of foxes: “Our attitudes towards urban wildlife, our readiness to tolerate pests, is conditioned more than anything else by whether the creature in question will eat, both literally and metaphorically, out of our hands. No doubt foxes would be regarded as acceptable if they came sweetly, by day, to lap milk from doorstep saucers. Being lone wolves, midnight ramblers, prowlers and looters, they are branded as outlaws. It is homo sapien’s old chauvinism again: we are the stewards; animals should live by our rules, not those of the jungle. It’s not one of our most consistent attitudes.”

Mabey despairs at the sorry state of our parks, but marvels at the urban/rural idyll that is Hampstead Heath. It’s delightful to read of how he looked for a rare orchid on a golf course: “I quartered the slope carefully, eyes close to my feet, and going down on hands and knees in the more promising patches...I didn’t notice whether in fact it was the ninth and final green where I struck lucky, but my patience was running out and it was certainly the last one I was going to play. But there, nestling under a foot-tall birch shrub, I spied a couple of skulking frogs. I crawled about the area, expecting a horrified ‘fore’ to ring in my ears at any second, and found a couple of dozen plants growing in an area not more than two yards square.”

I particularly admire the way the book is organised, moving fluidly between topics without you really noticing. It’s a more satisfying approach than if it had been rigidly structured into sections.

The author largely avoids the topic of insects: “I think we may be lucky that insects are too small and remote ever to have entered our understanding in the way that birds and flowers have. If we saw their lives for what they really are I think it might be too much for us to bear.” He also writes surprisingly little about the vast volume and ubiquity of litter spoiling wild land everywhere, but then this is a problem that has grown since the book’s original publication. There was far less plastic debris in our midst in 1973 than there is today.

Whether he’s looking for wading birds at sewage farms or admiring the natural riches at landfill sites, the book is a joy to read because of his gentle wit and empathy for all living things. It’s a real pleasure to see the world through his eyes.

20/01/19: Anne Scott – 18 Bookshops (2011)

I love books and I love bookshops, so it’s difficult to say why this account of 18 “significant” bookshops seems so uninvolving. Perhaps it’s the dry way the author relates history, or maybe it’s just that her writing lacks character. Either way, I found myself wondering why I was reading about the ephemeral aspects of books rather than actually spending time reading something life-enriching. There were quite a few typos, too. It also annoyed me that this edition is printed without page numbers. It seems over-designed in general – intended to be a beautiful object, no doubt – but its usefulness is diminished as a result.

Trivia: Anne Scott is the mother of Mike Scott of The Waterboys.