I’m having lots of fun reading Tristan Gooley’s **The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs”, that has a nice Victorian title and is a sturdy, thick, no-nonsense hardback.
And it talks about what it says on the label.The idea is to provide “walkers” – that is, people that take pleasure in walking, hiking and rambling about… to provide them, I was saying, of the tools to help them read the landscape and understand the relationships between its various elements: hills, rivers, trees, buildings, etc. Continue reading
Category Archives: Books
The Valley of the Beasts
Yesterday it was Algernon Blackwood’s birthday… his 147th.
Blackwood was one of the great supernatural fiction authors – really one of the founding fathers of the genre.
I read my first Blackwood story, called The Valley of the Beasts, when I was about ten.
It was the last story in a book called Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghost Gallery, and it was like nothing I ever read before.
And so, to celebrate the work of an author I always loved, here’s the audio version of that story I read so many years ago.
Enjoy!
Honorary Men
Today is the International Women’s Day, a day devoted to the celebration and promotion of female equality.
Which is both good and sad, if you think about it, because it’s a good thing, but we shouldn’t need it, not anymore.
But we know how things are going, and there’s still a lot of people that form an opinion on other human beings based on their reproductive role.
Sad losers.
And as I was thinking about what to write and how to write it for this post, I was reminded of a very fine comic, written by Barbara Hambly and called Anne Steelyard. Continue reading
Gore Vidal’s “Thieves Fall Out”
So how was it in the end?
Gore Vidal’s Thieves Fall Out was a very fast read, and quite a fun one.
While throwing in all of the clichés of the genre, Vidal was able to build a story in such an oblique way that for much of the story the protagonist – small time crook Pete Wells – does not know what he is doing, and why.
But he’s being paid, he’s sure he can face the dangers, and so he’s going along with the flow.
Wells is a flawed individual, a complicated mix of arrogance and weakness, and he will get more than a taste of true danger during his wild run through the Cairo underworld. Continue reading
A collector’s moment of happiness
Maybe because it’s not raining (yet) the postman delivered this morning a pristine (but used nonetheless) copy of Owen Lattimore’s High Tartary, in the gorgeous Kodansha International/Kodansha Globe Edition from 1994. No water damage, no other visible problems.
And I am as happy as a kid on Christmas Morning.
First, because I love Owen Lattimore’s work, and he is one of the most observant of the travelers and explorers in China and Central Asia from the last century. And getting his books in my country is not exactly easy1. Continue reading
Wilhelm Grimm’s Birthday
Today is the birthday of Wilhelm Grimm, half of the Grimm Brothers folklorist outfit that compiled a wonderful (and pretty… ah, grim) collection of legend and folktales, and later suffered the double posthumous indignity of having their “fairy tales” sweetened and disneyfied, and of becoming silly characters in a not-so-great fantasy action movie.
Karavansara salutes Wilhelm Grimm with a pretty grim black cat, by the great Arthur Rackham, from his illustrated edition of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Extremes under the rain
Yesterday the postman delivered a nice hardback copy of Nick Middleton’s Extremes along the Silk Road, thus stopping a gaping hole in my collection of Silk Road-themed books. The volume details Middleton’s expedition from China to Istanbul following the classic routes through Central Asia.
The book had been on my to-read list forever, but so far I always had something more urgent to add to the collection. Then I spotted this copy, and it was a wonderful bargain and a nice catch: a used book I paid about five bucks, and in pristine condition.
Or rather I should say, it was in pristine conditions.
You see, I was not at home when the postman came, and he decided to slip the book package between the bars of my courtyard’s gate.
It’s now three days that it rains heavily.
Yesterday I was out for various errands, and I came back home around 8 p.m.: the packet remained under heavy rain for about ten hours.
The effect was the same as leaving it under an open faucet for the best part of the day.
So now I have a water-damaged, second-hand copy of Nick Middleton’s Extremes along the Silk Road.
A little warped, but still readable. Which is more that I can say of the gas bill that was left together with the book, and that spent the night drying on the stove.
I’ll let you know about the book. Just give it time to dry.
Karavansara 