Interview with Simon Barnes, author of Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways To Make Nature More Visible
Simon Barnes, author of Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways To Make Nature More Visible, recommends a super list of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Simon's book:
Review from Book Depository:
We're not just losing the wild world. We're forgetting it. We're no longer noticing it. We've lost the habit of looking and seeing and listening and hearing.
But we can make hidden things visible, and this book features 23 spellbinding ways to bring the magic of nature much closer to home.
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Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways To Make Nature More Visible
Mammals you never knew existed will enter your world. Birds hidden in treetops will shed their cloak of anonymity. With a single movement of your hand you can make reptiles appear before you. Butterflies you never saw before will bring joy to every sunny day. Creatures of the darkness will enter your consciousness. And as you take on new techniques and a little new equipment, you will discover new creatures and, with them, new areas of yourself that had gone dormant. Once put to use, they wake up and start working again. You become wilder in your mind and in your heart. Once you know the tricks, the wild world begins to appear before you.
For anyone who wants to get closer to the nature all around them and bring it back into focus, this is the perfect read.
Buy On:
Book Depository €7.90
Waterstones £7.49
Wordery $10.63
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
I’ve been reading (and re-reading) Ulysses by James Joyce since I was 16. It is the book of my life and therefore it must be my favourite smart thinking book.
Review From Book Depository:
Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'.
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Smart thinking?
It retells the entirety of the Odyssey in the course of a single day in Dublin. In other words, the smallest and most humble things are of epic stature and eternal significance.
There is greatness in the least of us, in the smallest things we do, and everything that happens to us can be compared to the loftiest ideas of humanity.
That apart, the book is about the importance of the humblest virtues; decency, generosity, tolerance.
And it is also unspeakably beautiful – and funny.
Ulysses
'The most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape' T. S. Eliot
Buy On:
Book Depository €8.69
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $11.26
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I’ve just read - and reviewed - Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild. Safina works in the Badlands that lie between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom: the book is about learning and acquired knowledge: the way that non-human animals inherit more than their genes. They also inherit their culture, their society, the way they live. Safina discusses sperm whales, macaws and chimpanzees: and tells us that we humans are not alone in the way we understand the world.
Review From Book Depository:
Who are we? What do we value? How do we live here?
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Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn to be Animals
Guided by parents, carers, teachers and siblings, we learn to answer these questions as we grow up. But it's not just us. Many animals must learn to answer them too.
In Becoming Wild, Carl Safina reveals that culture, long thought exclusive to humankind, is abundant in the animal kingdom. Sperm whales in the Caribbean communicate through a system of clicks akin to Morse code, announcing which clan they belong to, which family and who they are individually. Among chimpanzees the obsession with male status may guarantee violence, even war, but they also have many ways to quell tensions.
As Safina shows, the better we understand the animals with whom we share this planet, the less different from us they seem.
Buy On:
Book Depository €17.66
Waterstones £18.99
Wordery $17.62
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
I still re-read childhood favourites. Perhaps the best of these are the seven books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia. They are marvellous on many levels, one of which is the matter-of-fact nature of magic. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Lucy says a spell to make hidden things visible. It is so effective that Aslan himself is made visible along with everything else. I have been haunted by this all my life: that’s why I wrote Rewild Yourself: 23 spell-binding ways to make nature more visible.
Review From Book Depository:
All seven tales in The Chronicles of Narnia are bound together, with full-colour illustrations, in one magnificent hardcover volume with a personal introduction by Douglas Gresham, stepson of C. S. Lewis. Talking beasts, heroic deeds and epic battles between good and evil await you in C. S. Lewis's classic fantasy series, which has been enchanting readers for over sixty years. This edition presents the seven books-The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle-unabridged and arranged in C.S. Lewis's preferred order, featuring full-colour artwork by the original illustrator, Pauline Baynes.
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The Complete Chronicles of Narnia
Buy On:
Book Depository €27.25
Waterstones £35.00
Wordery $30.56
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I tried kindle, but I couldn’t get on with it. But I do have Ulysses on my phone to read on the train.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I live in the country and don’t get to any shops very much. But let me add a word for the website Abe Books, which miraculously finds you the second-hand books you were always looking for.
Huge thanks to Simon for answering my questions and for the super list of books he has shared with us! Please don't forget to check out his book Rewild Yourself: 23 spell-binding ways to make nature more visible..
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Simon & Schuster Ltd (Rewild Yourself), Penguin Books Ltd (Ulysses), Oneworld Publications (Beconing Wild), HarperCollins Publishers (The Complete Chronicles of Narnia).
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