- I spent a large part of the week writing a review of Richard Powers’ new novel, The Overstory, for Caught By The River. It (the review) is due to appear on the site this Saturday and, as usual, I’m slightly nervous as to how it will read and whether it might be worthy of a site that, over the past few years, has become a source of inspired writing about the natural world. Powers’ book, by the way, is rather wonderful.
- And so, having now read four of Powers’ books, it’s time to become a completist. Some publisher will hopefully reissue all of his books as shiny new paperbacks with thematic covers (good luck with that), but for now it’s down to the second-hand and charity shops. Luckily, at one of my favourite used book shops, a tiny, crammed space near the cobb at Lyme Regis, I came across Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance and I can’t wait to read it.
- And on the subject of favourite book shops, a mention for the truly excellent Mr B’s Emporium in Bath : https://mrbsemporium.com. Friendly, knowledgable and innovative, they are the standard to which all other independent book shops need to aspire in these Amazonian times.
- This week saw the publication of the 6000th issue of the venerable Times Literary Supplement. I first bought a copy of the TLS in the early seventies largely because one of my heroes, the late Richard Boston, reviewed books for them. But I never got into the habit of buying it regularly, finding it mostly either too academic, aggressively critical, or just boring. Over forty years later that’s all changed and largely due, I think, to the influence of its new editor, the curiously-named Stig Abel. The TLS is now essential reading - lively, interesting, more irreverent, still rigorously critical but also fair and well-balanced. The covers are a huge improvement as well. I am also hooked on their weekly podcast, Freedom, Books, Flowers & The Moon : https://www.the-tls.co.uk/podcast-freedom-books-flowers-moon/
- The new issue (No.7) of the excellent Ernest Journal was published this week. I’m becoming increasingly wary of all the visual-orientated ‘specialist’ magazines that have lots of empty space on their pages, look like slim books and sell for a minimum of £10, but Ernest is one that is consistently interesting (to me anyway) and worth the £10 cover price. Check it out at : http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk
- I read Sara Baume’s second novel A Line Made By Walking in the space of a couple of days. It’s had such favourable reviews and reading that it’s about a young woman, plagued for most of her life by the kind of mental disorder that somehow seems commonplace these days and who goes to live in her recently-deceased grandmother’s house in a remote part of Ireland to sort herself out, I couldn’t resist it. And I’m glad I didn’t.
- As someone who has, only relatively recently, come to terms with jazz and how it can play havoc with my listening habits, I am woefully late to pick up on Val Wilmer’s book As Serious As Your Life : Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, recently re-published. There was an excellent radio programme celebrating her life recently : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tcdx9 and listening to it got me wishing that someone would write a biography of her or that her memoir Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This : My Life in the Jazz World could be re-issued.
- Purveyors of aforementioned expensive magazines, Stack Magazines, recently posted an interview on their web-site that they conducted with Gail Pirkis and her team at Slightly Foxed :https://www.stackmagazines.com/literature/love-reading-slightly-foxed-magazine/ . The word on Slightly Foxed has spread steadily throughout its fifteen-year history so far and I can’t imagine the literary landscape without it.
- One of my favourite New Yorker writers is Jill Lepore and her essay in a recent issue on Rachel Carson’s neglected writings on the sea : https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-right-way-to-remember-rachel-carson is fascinating. Renowned for writing what is generally accepted as the first book (but her last) about our ongoing environmental crisis, Silent Spring, her trilogy of ‘sea books’ have now been added to my growing ‘wants list’.
- Finally, only one book purchase this week - The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben - bought in order to find out more about the world that the protagonists in The Overstory risked their lives to try and save.
