Earlier in the year I wrote a blog post recommending some good books I’d read in Coronavirus Lockdown Purgatory. As 2020 winds down (and never before have I wished away time), I’ve been reading a good deal of books during the second (and hopefully final) lockdown. [EDIT: I was wrong about that… Here are my book choices from Lockdown 3.]
(See also my definitive list of books to give as gifts, another list of books that make great presents, my books of the year from 2019 and 2017 , my list of travel books that you must read, travel books that make good presents, useful business books, and some thoughts on Christmas presents in general.)
Here are my recent recommendations (in no particular order, though the ones in bold are my strongest picks:
THE NATURAL WORLD
- Food and Climate Change without the hot air: Change your diet: the easiest way to help save the planet
- Mudlarking has made a late run for my favourite book of the year. Exploration and curiosity right under our noses. Wonderful. (And @london.mudlark’s Instagram photos are fabulous too.)
- We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (I’ve written about this book on my blog, here.)
- Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal
- The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
- English Pastoral
- Our Isles: Poems celebrating the art of rural trades and traditions
- The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season
- The Forager’s Calendar: A Seasonal Guide to Nature’s Wild Harvests
“A frequent comment is, ‘Have you brought me to a special place?’ The answer is that, yes, it is a good place, though much like many others. The difference is that today I have given them time to look. Searching for wild food has a powerful effect on how people see the natural world. They suddenly find themselves a part of it, rather than merely an onlooker.” - The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet
“Planting more flowers is a far better way to help the bees than trying to keep more bees.”
“Most parents and grandparents would do almost anything for their offspring, except, it seems, when it comes to leaving them a healthy planet to live on.”
“76 per cent of the Earth’s farmland is currently being used for meat production, either directly or indirectly. Overall, nearly three-quarters of the greenhouse gases produced by farming activities come from livestock production.”
TRAVEL
- The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain
“This thing is the Gypsy belief – the core belief of the culture – that it is possible to live in a different way; in your own way, part of the world, but not imprisoned by the rules. That you can know the ropes and yet not be hemmed in by them. That you can dwell alongside the mainstream, whilst not being part of it. Otter-like, you can live in the bank of the river and swim and hunt there when you need to, and then climb back out with equal ease and alacrity.”
“Everyone wants nice things if they can get them. The yearning for a spartan life sometimes comes to a culture later, when the wolf of poverty no longer scratches at the door.
“Travellers are alone, perhaps, in visualising a destination which has no proper name; knowing that if needs be, they could go back to living nowhere. ‘Back on the road.’ ‘Roadside again.’ Back to wherever we end up, each hedge or lay-by only so different from the next; and so on.”
“The Scottish mountaineer and writer Nan Shepherd wrote that ‘no one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it’, and I believed the same would be true of the stopping places.
“It also suddenly hits me that my interest in the old Gypsy ways and my fascination with British explorers are not so contradictory as they always seemed to me: people equipped to live out in all seasons, making fires and cups of tea to boost their tired morale.”
FICTION
- That Old Country Music
- A Gentleman in Moscow
- Pachinko
- Convenience Store Woman
- Home Fire
- My Sister, the Serial Killer
NON-FICTION
- Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All
“Puzzles bring out important qualities in each of us: concentration, curiosity, a sense of play, the eagerness to discover a solution. These are the very same qualities that form the bedrock for all human creativity.”
“What does it mean to be curious? I think it is the capacity to be surprised and then to try to comprehend what it was that may have surprised you. One gets curious about something that one finds unusual. It is an almost paradoxical fact that the deepest and most difficult questions can be found in connection to the most common things that we at first take for granted. To find the secret of a magician’s trick is much easier than to understand why the apple is falling from the tree. Curiosity is like thirst or hunger, a drive to fill a gap, scratch an intellectual and emotional itch. With curiosity, you have the feeling that something is there but you aren’t quite sure what it is. There is an internal drive to follow up and some kind of promise that there may be a discovery of something that is hidden and I may be the only one to whom it is not visible. What is beneath the surface is the need to comprehend. In that sense, we are not creators but discoverers. Inside that stone there is a statue; you need a sculptor to show you how it emerges.” - Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
“It is difficult to believe we are alone in a cosmos which contains perhaps 2 trillion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars.” - Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking
- Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading
- Fermat’s Last Theorem
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum
SELF-HELP
- Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life
- The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams – Lessons in Living
- The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
- The Dip: The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)
“When it comes right down to it, right down to the hard decisions, are you quitting any project that isn’t a Dip? Or is it just easier not to rock the boat, to hang in there, to avoid the short-term hassle of changing paths?”
WAR
- The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz
- The Wooden Horse
“The best part of escaping was when we were in charge of things. Building the horse, digging, planning – the break itself, and travelling across Germany. The feeling that every minute was vital, that everything one did could sway the balance between success and failure … The part I didn’t enjoy was when we were in other people’s hands – not knowing the score and having no say.” - The Colditz Story
“A. J. Evans said that escaping is the greatest sport in the world. In my early twenties I thought that to ride in the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree would be the epitome of sporting excitement – more so even than big-game hunting. I longed to do both. Since the war and my experiences as an escaper, my one-time ambitions have died a natural death. I feel I have quaffed deeply of the intoxicating cup of excitement and can retire to contemplate those ‘unforgettable moments’ of the past. I can think of no sport that is the peer of escape, where freedom, life, and loved ones are the prize of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.”
“It was the first escape from this prison, probably the first escape of British officers from any organized prison in Germany. We were the guinea-pigs. We undertook the experiment with our eyes open, choosing between two alternatives: to attempt escape and risk the ultimate price, or face up to the sentence of indefinite imprisonment. There were many who resigned themselves from the beginning to the second of these alternatives. They were brave, but their natures differed from those of the men who escaped and failed, and escaped again; who having once made the choice between escape and resignation, could not give up, even if the war lasted the remainder of their lives. I am sure that the majority of the men who sought to escape did it for self-preservation. Instinctively, unconsciously, they felt that resignation meant not physical but mental death – maybe lunacy. My own case was not exceptional. One awful fit of depression sufficed to determine my future course as a prisoner. One dose of morbidity in which the vista of emptiness stretched beyond the horizon of my mind was quite enough.” - The Road to En-Dor
I read the Colditz story as a teenager and remember it well. A great adventure story made even better by the fact that it was true.
Fascinated by Gypsies, my favourite book is Smoke in the Lanes. Pretentious to think of the suggested book as more
properly titled “Atchin Tans”?
It’s all about Atchin Tans!
Looking forward to reading these! Especially as we have yet another lockdown. Surprised you linked them to Amazon though and not an independent site like https://bookshop.org/ 🙂
I’ve begun since that post to reference Bookshop. Great site.