Authors Christmas Recommendations 2020 - Part III
Part III of a special series of posts in the run up to the holiday season! (Part I here), Part II here I asked a range of authors that have previously appeared on the site about their Christmas book recommendations. Hopefully these books might help you with your own Christmas shopping gift ideas too! :-)
Q. Is there a smart thinking book that you are looking forward to reading this Christmas, or one you would like to give or receive as a gift?
Amanda Ellison
I want to read How You Feel: The Story of the Mind as Told by the Body by James Tresilian. I hope I receive Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan (I’ve dropped enough hints!). And I will give MD Herter’s translation of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke as a gift.
How You Feel: The Story of the Mind as Told by the Body
Review from Book Depository:
Close your eyes and ask yourself, 'what do I feel?'
You might feel thirsty or tired. You might feel healthy and well or perhaps a little under the weather. Maybe you can feel that you are standing or that you are leaning over. You may also feel the world around you - the shape and texture of an apple in your hand, the feel of a chair you're sitting on.
All these feelings have something in common, say psychologists and neuroscientists. They are all mental events, things that happen in the mind. But what if this is all wrong?
What if it's not just the mind, but also the body itself that feels? And not merely physical sensations, but other feelings that seem to have nothing to do with bodies. Things like 'emotions' and 'intuitions' - joy or rage, anxiety or optimism, or the feeling of being hard done by or misunderstood?
Drawing on the latest research and a range of classic and contemporary thought, How You Feel shows you that your brain and your body are two parts of a single system that creates your mind and mental life. You will discover that you don't have feelings, thoughts and emotions inside your body, you have them with your body. There can be no mind without the body.
Psychology is no longer about the brain, or about 'mind and body', it is about the whole that is you.
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Book Depository €13.47 Waterstones £14.99 Wordery $14.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading
Review from Book Depository:
Close your eyes and ask yourself, 'what do I feel?'
A love letter to the joys of childhood reading from Wonderland to Narnia.
When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one.
She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy, and played by the tracks with the Railway Children. With Charlotte's Web she discovered Death and with Judy Blume it was Boys. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library or to spend her pocket money on amassing her own at home.
In Bookworm, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way.
Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life - prompting endless re-readings, rediscoveries, and, inevitably, fierce debate - and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm.
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Waterstones £8.99 Wordery $9.83(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Letters to a Young Poet
Review from Book Depository:
Drawn by some sympathetic note in one of his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young would-be poet, on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. An accompanying chronicle of Rilke's life shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote these letters.
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Book Depository €9.65 Waterstones £9.99 Wordery $12.86(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Splitting: The Inside Story on Headaches
Review from Book Depository:
Written by a leading neuroscientist, Splitting tells the fascinating true story about headaches, and the secrets they reveal about your brain and overall health.
Did you know...
- chocolate doesn't give you a headache - and may in fact prevent one happening?
- 30% of us sneeze at sunlight?
- you can see off a headache with an orgasm?
- that you shouldn't wear a striped top if your spouse gets migraines?
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Book Depository €14.02 Waterstones £16.99 Wordery $14.99(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Jenny Kleeman
I'm looking forward to reading The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. I've already bought myself a copy but I've yet to dive in, apart from looking at the opening paragraph, which is one of the best I've ever read.
The Science of Storytelling
Review From Book Depository:
Why stories make us human and how to tell them better.
There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story - but few have used a scientific approach.
In this incisive, thought-provoking book, award-winning writer Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us.
Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories - and make sense of our chaotic modern world.
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Book Depository €8.98 Waterstones £8.49 Wordery $10.61(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex and Death
Review from Book Depository:
What if we could have babies without having to bear children, eat meat without killing animals, have the perfect sexual relationship without compromise or choose the time of our painless death?
To find out, Jenny Kleeman has interviewed a sex robot, eaten a priceless lab-grown chicken nugget, watched foetuses growing in plastic bags and attended members-only meetings where people learn how to kill themselves.
Many of the people Kleeman has met say they are finding solutions to problems that have always defined and constricted humankind. But what truly motivates them? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll - and why? Who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash?
Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is not science fiction. It's not about what might happen one day - it's about what is happening right now, and who is making it happen. In the end, it asks a simple question: are we about to change what it means to be human . . . for ever?
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Book Depository €13.06 Waterstones £14.99 Wordery $17.15(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Howard Means
This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury, 2019). I read the first ten pages at a friend’s house and found it a beautiful rain of words. Can’t wait to read the rest.
This Is Happiness
Review From Book Depository:
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha; a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it comes a lodger to Noel's home, Christy McMahon. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
As Noel navigates his coming-of-age by Christy's side, falling in and out of love, Christy's buried past gradually comes to light, casting a glow on a small world and making it new.
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Book Depository €8.84 Waterstones £7.49 Wordery $10.97(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Splash!: 10,000 Years of Swimming
Review from Book Depository:
From the first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the recreational swimmers in your local pool, humans have been getting wet for 10,000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a ripple that touches us all.
Splash! dives into Egypt, winds through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages (at least in Europe), and then re-emerges in the wake of the Renaissance before taking its final lap at the modern Olympic Games. Along the way, it kicks away the idea that swimming is just about speed or great feats of aquatic endurance, revealing how its history spans religion, fashion, architecture, public health, colonialism, segregation, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory and much, much more.
As refreshing as jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history with an irrepressible enthusiasm that will make you crave your next dip.
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Book Depository €13.92 Waterstones £16.99 Wordery <117 class="15">(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
A. Kendra Greene
I have been overthinking this trying to land on one—last year I gave so many copies of Ross Gay’s brilliant The Book of Delights, I missed mentioning Desirae Matherly’s exceedingly smart Echo’s Fugue the last list, and this moment I’m swooning over Toni Jensen’s Carry which I just set down—but I think Fowzia Karimi’s Above Us The Milky Way is it.
The Book of Delights: Essays on the small joys we overlook in our busy lives
Review From Book Depository:
The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.
Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an aeroplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything other subject, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world - his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.
The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.
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Book Depository €10.33 Waterstones £9.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Echo's Fugue
Review From Book Depository:
Through a series of variations on the theme of love-unrequited, polyamorous, monogomous, scandalous, adulterous-Desirae Matherly's Echo's Fugue explores love in all its failures and delusions. Patterned on the unfinished The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach which has been a mystery for centuries, Echo's Fugue undertakes Bach's project in prose-the tantalizing numerical correspondences throughout, the repetition of a single theme, the unfinished final piece. Matherly's essays appear as letters, indexes, narrative, or sentence diagrams, each defying the rules of the blank page. Song lyrics, obsession, Greek mythology, psychology, game theory, and human sexuality form a fragmented narrative about loss and unhealthy attachments.
Mimicry of Bach's fugues leads the author to questions about love, sex, desire, the "Bach or Stravinsky" paradigm in game theory, and relationships considered taboo by mainstream standards.
What authority speaks clearest with regard to love, sex, and desire-and is objectivity even possible? The final essay attempts to resolve this question while echoing the puzzle of Bach's final unfinished fugue.
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Book Depository €24.52(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land
A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.
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Amazon £18.57(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Above Us the Milky Way
Debut novel about a young family forced to flee their war-ravaged homeland, forced to leave behind everything & everyone beloved & familiar. Old family photographs & lush watercolor paintings based on medieval illuminated manuscripts interweave with remembrances, ghost stories/stories of the war dead, & fairy tales to conjure a story of war, of emigration & immigration, the remarkable human capacity to experience love & wonder amidst destruction & loss, & how to create beauty out of horror.
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Abe Books £18.19(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See : Travels Among the Collectors of Iceland
Review from Book Depository:
Welcome to Iceland, a very small nation with a very large number (two hundred and sixty five) of (mostly) very small museums.
Founded in the backyards of houses, begun as jokes or bets or memorials to lost friends, these museums tell the story of an enchanted island where bridges arrived only at the beginning of the 20th century, and waterproof shoes only with the second world war. A nation formerly dirt poor, then staggeringly rich, and now building its way to affluence once again. A nation where, in the remote and wild places, you might encounter still a shore laddie, a sorcerer or a ghost.
From Reykjavik's renowned Phallological Museum to a house of stones on the eastern coast; from the curious monsters which roam the remote shores of Bildudalur to a museum of whales which proves impossible to find, here is an enchanted story of obsession, curation, and the peculiar magic of this isolated island.
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Book Depository €13.09 Waterstones £14.99 Wordery $14.99(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Tim Gregory
This Christmas period I will be re-reading The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. Now more than ever it is important to reflect on why there are anti-science sentiments and mindsets all along the political spectrum in society, and how we can overcome them peacefully and with good faith.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Review From Book Depository:
A prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news stories and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected American populace "A glorious book . . . A spirited defense of science . . . From the first page to the last, this book is a manifesto for clear thought."--Los Angeles Times How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
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Book Depository €14.04(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Meteorite: The Stones From Outer Space That Made Our World
Review from Book Depository:
Every rock has a story tell, and none more so than those which have fallen from the sky: meteorites. Originating in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, these rocky fragments offer clues not just to the earliest origins of the Solar System but also to Earth's very survival into the future.
Sky at Night presenter, Dr Tim Gregory takes us on a journey through the very earliest days of our Solar System to the spectacular meteorite falls that produced 'fiery rain' in 1792, to the pre-solar grains (literally stardust) that were blown in from other solar systems and are the oldest solid objects ever discovered on earth.
Meteorites reveal a story much bigger than ourselves or our planet. As Tim says, 'it is an epic beyond compare'.
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Book Depository €13.50 Waterstones £14.99 Wordery $16.69(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Huge thanks to Amanda, Jenny, Howard, A. Kendra, & Tim for their great Christmas book picks!
Merry Reading Christmas everyone! :-)
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Little, Brown Book Group (How You Feel), Vintage Publishing (Bookworm), WW Norton & Co (Letters To A Young Poet), Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (Splitting, This Is Happiness), HarperCollins Publishers (The science of Storytelling), Pan Macmillan (Sex Robots and Vegan Meat), Atlantic Books (Splash!: 10,000 Years of Swimming), Hodder & Stoughton (The Book of Delights), Ohio State University Press (Echo's Fugue), Ballantine Group (Carry), Deep Vellum Publishing (Above Us The Milky Way), Granta Books (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See : Travels Among the Collectors of Iceland), Random House USA Inc (The Demon-Haunted World), John Murray Press (Meteorite).
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