"The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is where we came from, and it carries our commerce. It represents home and migration, ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we seem to ignore it, and what it means.
In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. He begins on the south coast where he grew up, a place of family memory and an abiding sense of aloneness and almost monastic escape offered by the sea. From there he travels to the other side of the world, from the Isle of Wight to the Azores, from Sri Lanka to Tasmania and New Zealand, in search of encounters with animals and people – the wild and the tamed, the living and the extinct. Navigating between human and natural history, between science and myth, he asks what their stories mean for us now, in the twenty-first century, when the sea has never been so important to our present, as well as to our past and future"
"Holloway - a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres & great strangeness. Six years later, after Deakin's early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape."
A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of a Misspent Life, Mary Randolph Carter
"A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life focuses on living well with everything that makes a house a home. If you have been influenced by the picturesquely cluttered studios of Pablo Picasso or Alexander Calder, or by the art- and book-filled house of Vanessa Bell, this unique style book will stimulate you with its creative ideas.This volume explores how real-life tastemakers (photographers, textile designers, fashion designers, writers, artists) integrate their life and interiors to live well with their passions, histories, conveniences, and inconveniences. In inspiring essays, Mary Randolph Carter muses on such key housekeeping concerns as clutter versus mess; open windows; and unmade beds. Combining practical tips with liberating philosophy—"Don’t scrub the soul out of your home"; "Make room for what you love"—this volume celebrates living beautifully and happily, not messily. Life isn’t perfect—why should your house be?"
"The outer world flew open like a door, and I wondered, what is it that we’re just not seeing?
Five years after Findings broke the mould of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie subtly shifts our focus on landscape and the living world, daring us to look again at the ‘natural’, the remote and the human-made. She offers us the closest of perspectives and the most distant, too: from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, or the pores of a whale’s jawbone under restoration, to satellites rising over a Scottish island, or the aurora borealis lighting up an iceberg-strewn sea. We encounter killer whales circling below cliffs, noisy colonies of breeding gannets, and paintings deep in caves. Written with precision, delicacy and personal recollection, Sightlines invites us to pause and look afresh at our surroundings."
I'm sure a particular theme is becoming apparent in my choices here, and I realise I don't seem to choose pure fiction very often! I have actually fallen out of the habit of reading fiction, my last dabble was 'The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out Of The Window And Disappeared' which I really did enjoy, but couldn't seem to snap back into reading again very easily. My short term memory seems to find non-fiction slightly easier to store at the moment, but then again, with a selection of books as interesting as those above, I think I'll be perfectly happy reading them in the sunshine!
I might have to indulge in one of these Classic Book Covers for Kindles by KleverCase from Not On The Highstreet. These cases imitate the look of leather or cloth bindings, and are all made by hand in The New Forest, perfect gift for the bookworm in your life!
What are you reading at the moment? Any recommendations for me?
Katie
I might have to indulge in one of these Classic Book Covers for Kindles by KleverCase from Not On The Highstreet. These cases imitate the look of leather or cloth bindings, and are all made by hand in The New Forest, perfect gift for the bookworm in your life!
What are you reading at the moment? Any recommendations for me?
Katie
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