Coming up next: Books for July 2010
Here’s my projected reading list for the next four weeks:
- Diamond Mask – Julian May
- American Gods – Neil Gaiman
- 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot – Richard Wiseman
- Dockers and Detectives – Ken Worpole
- The Unofficial Countryside – Richard Mabey
Diamond Mask is part of a long-term household project to get through the entire Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series which sees us in sight of the end, if not actually in the final volume yet. American Gods has been on the list (and the shelf) for ages and was brought back into focus by the Crowdsourcing reading project on Twitter, but got shunted forward a month. Richard Wiseman’s new book was going so cheap on Amazon that it was a no-brainer, really.
Perhaps the most interesting are the last two, both bought from the Newham Bookshop stall at the British Humanist Association’s recent event on Humanism, Philosophy and the Arts. Ken Worpole, author of Dockers and Detectives, was one of the speakers and we came away with both this volume and his book Last Landscapes which promises to be a fascinating look at funerary architecture and landscape design. The book mentioned here is described on its back cover as “a pioneering study of working-class reading and writing” focusing on Liverpool and the East End of London. Also picked up there was Richard Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside, about those half-forgotten places like an overgrown footpath or a patch of waste ground glimpsed from a train, where all town- and city-dwellers experience nature daily.
Should be an interesting month.
Tags: British Humanist Association, Julian May, Ken Worpole, Neil Gaiman, Newham Bookshop, Richard Mabey, Richard Wiseman