I was pondering updating my What I’m Reading page earlier, and in doing so got to reminiscing about all the many books that have come into and gone out of my life over the past year or so.  I love to keep a note of the books I’ve read, mainly because I seem to use them as a means of mapping out my life.  Last year, for example, I remember finishing New Europe by Michael Palin on one of the windiest days we had, when going outside wasn’t even an option.  I also vividly remember reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert on the grass in front of the leaning tower of Pisa in May, when the sun was so hot I couldn’t possibly have walked anywhere other than the nearest gelato kiosk.  Books are to me what I guess diaries are to people who use them properly: a record of one’s life, and a reminder of the little things that have happened that we might otherwise simply forget in our haste to keep moving forward.

With all the free time I had last Summer and all the many bus journeys I seem to have taken since starting my new job, I seem to have managed to read an impressive pile of books over the course of the past 12 months.  So in case you find yourself looking for a little literary inspiration this January, here are some recommendations based on what I’ve read and enjoyed recently.

If you want to read a classic but you dislike ‘the classics’, read Jane Eyre.  The writing is digestible, the characters aren’t annoying and although it’s a love story at heart it’s not sickly sweet and schmaltzy.  I read this during the first couple of weeks at my new job last September.  It was welcome respite at the end of busy days full of new faces and things.

If you want to laugh really hard until you think you might pee a little, read either Bossypants by Tina Fey, or Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby.  Either one will produce the desired effect.

If you want to be gripped, read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  I blame this book (and its two sequels) for many a groggy-headed morning in October and November.  I literally couldn’t put it down.  Not even for sleep, or to finish making a cup of tea.

If you want to learn things you’ll remember and that will make you sound knowledgeable, read A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich.  This is definitely in my top 3 reads from last year.  It’s full of interesting stuff, but it’s also written in such a way that reading it doesn’t feel like learning.  In fact, reading it feels like drinking hot chocolate in front of a roaring log fire while it snows outside.  It’s perfect.

If you want to escape, read His Dark Materials trilogy.  There are enough ideas in these three books to keep you thinking for months, and enough magic to rival the whole Harry Potter back-catalogue.

If you want to cry (sometimes I genuinely do want this from a book), read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.  This quickly became one of my favourite books of all time, and I read the whole thing in one evening.  It’s brilliant, and heart-breaking, and all kinds of life-affirming all at once.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

If you just want to be entertained, read Boiling a Frog by Christopher Brookmyre.  This didn’t change the way I see the world, and it didn’t cause me profound, deep thoughts or the loss of any sleep.  But it was funny, it was intriguing and it really did entertain me.  And sometimes, when it comes to a book, that’s really all you need, isn’t it?

What have you read recently that’s worth recommending?

Image above from here.

The penultimate day of the penultimate month of 2011 has been deathly cold and rainy round my way.  I scuttled, beetle-like, from home to bus to office to bus to home today in that depressing, wintery, never-saw-any-sunlight way which is by all accounts a little bit sad.  But given that there was very little daylight, let alone sunlight to be had anyway, no tears have been shed.  Plus, I saw a rainbow out of the window this morning, so it wasn’t all bad.

Thankfully, and gratitude being the general subject of this evening’s ramblings, there has been golden lamplight, spicy miso soup, blankets, reduced price flowers and pots of tea to enjoy tonight.  I’ll deliberately leave watching the news out of that cosy equation, although if you’d like a quick summary of the state of the nation as we enter December, the words DOOM, GLOOM, AUSTERITY and BANKERS seem to do a pretty fine job.

Anyway, I thought I would swoop down from my sofa nest to let you all know about a fantastic book I’m reading at the moment, and one that is helping me to think of the good that exists in the world, in spite of all I read in the paper.  The book is called In Europe, by Dutch writer Geert Mak.  Mak spent the whole of 1999 travelling around Europe, tracing the continent’s tumultuous passage through the 20th century as the Millennium bulldozed its way towards us.  The end result is a brilliant fusion of history and travel writing: immensely readable (it requires a little more concentration that some books but it handsomely rewards any effort you put in) and by turns hilarious and truly humbling.  If anyone is in need of something more ‘real’ than the tinsel, the credit cards and the John Lewis adverts this Winter I really would recommend giving this book a go.  Each time I put it down I feel a little more appreciative of the world we live in now, despite the spending cuts and the Tories and the Eurozone debt crisis.  I also feel a boundless sadness mixed with respect for the thousands of people throughout history who have worked and fought so hard for us to live the way we do now.  I am grateful that they did.  Truly so.

“Along the autoroute from Lille to Paris, the Battle of the Somme is only a tap of the accelerator.  In late Summer 1916, 1.2 million people died here, between two exits.  The motorway runs at a slight distance from the eastern boundary of the battlefield.  Drivers are kept informed of that as well, on big brown signs along the road, LA GRANDE GUERRE, the way a famous chateau or a pleasant vintage might be pointed out elsewhere.  Then they flash by, back into the serenity of present-day Picardy.

Here, the war has already entered the next phase, that of a popular tourist attraction, a mainstay of the region’s commercial infrastructure.  Everywhere one finds folders promoting these centres of infernal attraction; staying at my hotel – it is 15 February, the heart of Winter – there are at least three couples touring the front lines.  The museums compete by offering even more audio and visual effects.  For the first time in ages I can receive Dutch channels on the TV in my room.  On the news they are interviewing tourists who were stranded for a few days in a snow-bound Swiss village.  ’What we’ve been through!’ one tanned woman says.  ’We felt just like refugees.’  Another one cries ‘Everything, we’ve lost everything!’.  She’s talking about a suitcase full of skiing outfits and make-up.”

Image above from here.

“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school.  I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates.  In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”

A Little History of the World is, I think, one of the books I’ve been unknowingly waiting to read my entire life. A friend gifted it to me for my birthday last month, but it wasn’t until Friday just passed that I first picked it up.  To be perfectly honest, I was slightly sceptical at first; I love learning about history, but finding a book that just explains things without getting bogged down in dates and times and names of places, people and battles (gosh the battles), can be difficult.  I’m terrible with dates and I’m not so hot on names either so you can see why many a standard history text and I would fail to get along.  And it was because of this that my initial reaction to A Little History, along with my friend’s prediction that reading it was going to change the way I saw the world, was perhaps one of amused dubiety, rather than giddy enthusiasm.

Well you know what?  She only done and proved me wrong.

This book is amazing. It is beautiful.  It is all kinds of wonderfully enriching, life-affirming awesomeness.  I read the whole thing in four days straight and by the time I reached the end I was sobbing and wishing we could carry on some more.  Reading this book is like drinking warm milk while listening to a bedtime story, read to you by someone who wants nothing more than for you to enjoy learning.  From the sacred rituals of the ancient Egyptians to the glory of the Italian renaissance to the reasoned thinkers of the Enlightenment, Gombrich literally pieces together the jigsaw of the world’s history right before your very eyes.  As I read, I almost physically felt a whole bunch of abstract names of places and people I’d half-learned about at school slot into a context that I could actually understand without once wanting to stop for a cold drink and a lie down.  My patchy, pathetic knowledge of what happened when and who was responsible for it has undergone the most magical transformation in the space of only four days, and while I probably still couldn’t reel off many dates, I really do feel like I finally have some actual knowledge of how and why the world came to be the way it is.  Amazing, non?

Of course it helps that A Little History is intended to be read by children.  Gombrich was invited to complete the manuscript in 1935 after giving an unfavourable review to another writer’s draft.  He had just six weeks until submission when he agreed to take the project on, a timetable that propelled him into penning a chapter pretty much every single day.  As a consequence of the short period of time in which the book was written, as well as its intended purpose and audience, it is pleasingly free of references, footnotes and other distractions.  In fact, it really is told like a story.  A really rich, exciting story, full of interesting characters, wonderful adventures and jaw-dropping scandals.  And the best bit?  It’s all freaking true.  Every word of it.

But as well as providing a guide to the what, where and when, Gombrich’s book is a surprisingly rich source of little bits and pieces of information that I could quite easily have lived my whole life without ever knowing, but that I’m really glad I did learn.  Like how the urgent quest of an unnamed messenger from Greece gave us the word ‘marathon’ that we still use to describe a run of 26 miles’ length.  Or how the West Indies is so called because Christopher Columbus misjudged the size of the earth and thought he had sailed right round it and arrived on the West coast of India instead of in the middle of the Caribbean.  And it doesn’t stop at these joyful little quirks of language.  Reading about the countless battles, the innocent suffering and the abject misery through which so many of our ancestors lived (and in which, let’s not forget, so many people in the world continue to live) really encouraged me to think about and appreciate just how bizarrely amazing life is for us.  It’s true.  The 21st century affords us riches of the kind that many of the people who came before us could never even have dreamed about.  Warm, secure, comfortable living spaces?  A solid meal every single night?  Freedom to read books, take walks, socialise, work, marry and reproduce, all without fear of imminent death owing to disease, war, famine or even just the whimsy of authority?  That stuff is pretty brilliant when you come to think about it.  Definitely something to remember the next time you find yourself huffing because the milk has gone sour.

The other thought that came over me as I finished the book was just how many people lived, loved, fought and died during the making of the world’s history.  Legions of people from all over the Earth, each one given what is in history’s eyes no more than a passing glance at life here before passing on to who knows where.  Soldiers and farmers, kings and seamstresses, philosophers and factory workers, each life lived no more than a tiny fleck of colour in the painting of the story of the world.  And we are the same.  We live, we love, we toil and we die.  A depressing thought perhaps, but reading A Little History of the World made me feel blessed to have been given my passing glance, and excited at the prospect of enjoying it.  As Gombrich put it: “what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave.  But we must make use of that moment.  It is worth the effort.”

So, Gombrich.  Read it.  Buy a copy for a friend.  Perhaps even let it change the way you think.  Above all, let it make you thankful for your passing glance at life.

April 27th, 1992

Greetings from Fairbanks!  This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne.  Arrived here 2 days ago.  It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory.  But I finally got here.  Please return all mail I receive to the sender.  It might be a very long time before I return South.  If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man.  I now walk into the wild.

Alex.

It’s not often that I manage to read an entire book in a single sitting.  When it does happen, I’m either ill with nothing else to do, or the book is so special I can’t bear to be parted from it.  My experience with Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer falls, with certainty, into the second camp.

Into the Wild recounts the true and haunting tale of Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young man from an affluent Washington DC family who, upon graduating from college in 1990, donated the $24,000 he had saved for law school to a hunger charity, burned all of the cash he held in his wallet and set off to travel, anonymously, around the American west.  McCandless didn’t stop to bid his family farewell, he simply upped and left with a few meagre possessions, changing his name along the way in order that he couldn’t be traced.

McCandless, operating under his adopted name of Alexander Supertramp, spent almost two years in the north American west before embarking on a journey into the Alaskan wilderness, his ultimate dream.  In late April 1992, he sent the above message to his friend Wayne Westerberg, after which he ventured alone into the Alaskan wild, north of Mount McKinley.  McCandless lived for over 100 days in the wilderness, setting up camp in an old abandoned bus and using a small rifle to hunt for food.  The gritty reality of Alaskan survival, however, proved to be too much for McCandless in his state of ill preparation and inexperience.  His emaciated, decomposing body was found by a moose hunter in August 1992, four months after he had set off.  Chris McCandless had starved to death.

It was upon writing of McCandless’s fate in Outside magazine in 1992 that Jon Krakauer first became involved with the story.  A story which Krakauer found so compelling that he was moved to investigate it further and present his findings in the form of the book.  Chris McCandless kept journals and took photographs of his travels, both before and during his period in Alaska.  Jon Krakauer has combined those materials with information gleaned from the people McCandless encountered on his journey – some of whom became the man’s closest friends – to create a supremely powerful portrait of a life that was lived with little more than a passing nod to the bounds of conventionality.

When it was first reported in late 1992, the story of Chris McCandless and his death in the wilderness attracted a multitude of differing reactions.  Some people denounced McCandless as a selfish, impudent adolescent, someone who had demonstrated only fleeting regard for the power of the wild and as such, had no business being there.  Others championed McCandless as the founding father of a new way of living in the 20th century.  A man who, upon finding himself ill-suited to the constraints of conventional life as we know it, actually went ahead and dug out the gumption to do something about it – actions which lots of people only ever dream of in the wildest of their dreams.

Reading Krakauer’s book, I personally failed to find much evidence of immaturity, or selfishness come to that.  McCandless was not a stupid person, and while he may have underestimated the difficulties he would encounter in the Alaskan wilderness, his reasons for going there seem to me to be the result of deep, probing thought rather than a whimsical by-product of twenty-something angst.  McCandless lived his life guided by an internal compass which he had programmed for himself – as far as I’m concerned there’s far more to admire about that than there is to criticise.  My favourite passage from Krakauer’s book, which I’ve reproduced below, is hugely reminiscent of many of the books, blogs and articles I’ve read over the past two years.  Unconventional living has never been more in vogue than it currently seems to be, but what marks Chris McCandless out from the rest of the crowd is that he was thinking about, writing about, and actually living his unchartered life almost two full decades before the idea even occurred to the rest of us.

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.  The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.  The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

Letter from Chris McCandless to Ronald Franz, April 1992.

Here are a few little internet gems I’ve been loving over the past seven days.  The perfect accompaniment to any Saturday…

These photos made me shriek out loud with wonder – How and, more importantly WHY does he DO that!?  Found via the ever-beautiful A Cup of Jo.

16 harsh truths from Marc and Angel.  Inspirational and, yes, TRUE.

Well-articulated thoughts on Groupon via Curb your Consumerism.  What’s your take?

This eBay listing is ridiculous and hilarious and ridiculous all over again.  My favourite line: “The reserve is Ssssssshhh! £800 or if you prefer to look at it another way, thats 800 items from a pound shop”.  Genius.

Blueskies Blog is one of my absolute favourite reads of the moment.  Here, Charlotte makes her own pesto in little jars to give away as gifts.  My heart sings.

Be mine, O beautiful leopard print skirt…

Time to get your camp on (or ‘glamp’, for the princesses amongst us) with the Guardian’s camping guide 2011.

The ever-brilliant Daily Mash places the satirical boot on the other foot in response to one of the week’s biggest headlines.

Humourous post on amateur cycling – my favourite kind!

Super delicious-looking chicken and prosciutto recipe via Crumbs for Dinner here.

And…that’s all I got!  Have a marvellous weekend everyone, and make sure you spend at least some of it doing something you love!

Image above from Flickr – hellojenuine.