Three neglected science fiction books by New Zealand writers:
The Red Dust by Bee Baldwin (1965) is one of the first NZ post-apocalyptic novels. A deadly red dust released by Antarctic drilling wipes out much of the world. A group of immunes must survive roaming gangs and a mastermind who wants to rule New Zealand. It’s a chilling, well-structured story, with great use of NZ settings (this adult novel was inexplicably in my primary school library where I read it at age 10 and understood about 10%).

The Unquiet by Carolyn McCurdie is a strikingly original intermediate novel and a suspenseful read. It has an apocalyptic opening when the planet Pluto and parts of the Earth’s surface vanish. A small town girl has a gift for sensing unrest in the fabric of the universe and becomes the focus in a battle as the novel turns into a fantasy.

Where All Things End by David Hill describes a spectacular journey into a Black Hole. A mission to study the hole goes wrong and the crew race towards the Singularity- a point where all things become no-things. A ripping yarn underpinned by a convincing depiction of space travel and universal theories.

One evening, a Sufi stopped by the roadside to read a book. He lit a bright lamp then walked some distance away and lit a small candle. He sat by the candle and read. People passing by asked, “Why don’t you read by the lamp?” The Sufi replied, “The bright light attracts all the moths. Here I can read my book in peace.” (Adapted from A Perfumed Scorpion by Idries Shah)

Big, bright blockbuster books attract many readers, but I’m attracted by books that the masses have almost forgotten. Here are a few of of my favourite hidden gems:

• Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche – this love story is Lewis’ least known work but one which he described as “far and away the best of my books.”
• Catastrophe, the strange stories of Dino Buzzati (1949) – a brilliant collection of surreal stories.
• Daydreamer by Ian McEwan – imaginative, interlinked stories about a boy who daydreams to cope with the trials of  growing up.
• The Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang – thoughts on everything by Chinese writer and inventor (1938)
• Drift by William Mayne – controversial survival story about a North American Indian girl and a white boy.

We should not write them off as superstitious primitives.

It’s a myth (turned cliche) that science and faith have always been at odds. The superb book, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam, shows how the medieval church supported the genesis of science. Early universities were church-sponsored and ‘natural’ philosophy (as science was called – the word scientist wasn’t used yet) was a core subject. European thinkers drew on ancient Greek and Islamic texts to develop scientific principles that we still use today. Hannam brings a warm appreciation to these unsung scholars (eg. Gerbert); debunks the myth of the ignorant ‘Dark Ages’ (eg. people knew the Earth was round) and that the church burned scientists; and details inventions such as clocks and spectacles.

Choosing a title is the fun stage of writing a book. The hard work over, I spend hours happily test-driving pithy, bizarre or lyrical titles. The great children’s titles describe some aspect of the book (plot, setting, character, etc) in utterly striking language. My favourites titles are: A Swiftly Tilting Planet; The Stupid’s Die; and of my own, a book of cautionary rhymes titled, Global Norman. Here are some classic titles of children’s literature:

* Character: Oliver Twist, Shrek, The Halfmen of O, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Flat Stanley

* Plot: Millions of Cats,  Journey To The Centre of the Earth, The Shrinking of Treehorn

*Setting:  Outside Over There, The Horror of Hickory Bay, The Black Island

*Theme: To Kill A Mockingbird, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

* Joke: War and Peas, Squids Will Be Squids, Green Eggs and Ham

There is only one time that is important: Now. – Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales (1903) inspired me in my youth and today I still love the wisdom of his folk tales. The classics are How Much Land Does a Man Need (very little, naturally); and The Three Questions (Eg, What should I do with my time?). One of the unsung tales is A Grain as Big as a Hen’s Egg, an environmental metaphor that has gained in power. This is the only colour photo of Tolstoy (here aged 80), from 1908. Download a free ebook of Twenty-Three Tales by Tolstoy

A Bee in a Cathedral by Joel Levy is a fascinating book of science analogies and astonishing numbers. Suitable for all ages, only the physics section is a bit complex. A few of my favourites factoids:

• Every day 1 million meteoroids strike the Earth.
• Travelling in a rocket at 250,000km/h, it would take you 18,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.
• Most of the living cells in your body are less than a month old.
• About 50 million neutrinos are passing through you now.
• Every molecule in a glass of water is changing partners billions of times a second.
• How hard does your heart work? Empty a bathtub in 15 minutes using only a teacup —do this without stopping for the rest of your life.

If an atom were blown up to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be no larger than a bee buzzing about in the centre.

Why Does The World Exist? by Jim Holt is a fascinating book that asks the question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’  Holt looks at all sides of the question, interviewing scientists, philosophers, atheists and believers (Richard Swinburne, John Irving, Roger Penrose, Adolf Grunbaum…). There are three types of theorist:

The “optimists” hold that there has to be a reason for the world’s existence and that we may well discover it. The “pessimists” believe that there might be a reason for the world’s existence but that we’ll never know for sure… Finally, the “rejectionists” persist in believing that there can’t be a reason for the world’s existence, and hence that the very question is meaningless.

Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason says that ‘For every thing there must be a reason for that thing’s existence‘, which is the basis of our scientific worldview. Holt does a good job of summarizing some knotty philosophy, physics and maths (understanding it is another matter!).  Although he offers no firm answers, the book left me feeling “optimistic”; and it’s oddly comforting that after picking the brains of the world’s greatest thinkers, Holt concludes,

No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence.

Photo: Solar eruption, Dec 31, 2012 – courtesy of NASA Images

This is not the end of the book is a fascinating conversation between two great bibliophiles, the author  Umberto Eco and film-maker, Jean-Claude Carriere. They discuss the history of the physical book and our digital future. It’s a rambling, wide-ranging conversation (as the best are) and the enthusiasm of these book lovers swept me along. And there’s an especially fine chapter on book censorship.

The Internet has returned us to the alphabet … From now on, everyone has to read… Alterations to the book-as-object have modified neither its function nor its grammar for more than 500 years. The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.’ – Umberto Eco

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavour, enjoyment, and suffering. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This sentence, from the classic Letters and Papers from Prison, was written by Bonhoeffer three weeks before he was hanged on Hitler’s personal orders in 1945. Meanwhile, Hitler wrote:

Nature is cruel; therefore we, too, may be cruel.

Bonhoeffer, a pastor, and his brother-in-law lawyer, Hans von Dohnanyi, resisted the Nazi’s control: recording crimes, helping victims and plotting against Hitler himself.

Hitler had no greater, more courageous, and more admirable enemies than Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.– Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern (read the full story here)

Fiction should be both canny and uncanny.

The best short story I’ve ever read is Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find, the opening story of an impressive collection. Her stories are dark, her characters grotesque, but there’s always a thin redemptive thread – in the title story it’s found in the unlikely shape of a psychopath called The Misfit. Brad Gooch’s detailed biography, Flannery, reveals how O’Connor honed her stories to near perfection despite the pain of a disease (lupus) which killed her at the age of only 39. Her writing is infused with a tough spirituality (she was Catholic) but she never sacrifices the story for a message. The book Mystery and Manners is a wonderful collection of her essays and lectures – some favourite quotes:

If you want to write well and live well at the same time, you’d better arrange to inherit money.

When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting dusty, then you shouldn’t write fiction.

There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the fiction writer can hardly do without and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting to the point at once.

As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity.

The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.

Anyone can write but editing must be learned. One of the masters of the finely wrought story was P.G. Wodehouse; a relentless editor, he polished his manuscripts to comic perfection. Douglas Adams (in The Salmon of Doubt) described Wodehouse’s unique system:

‘When he was writing a book he used to pin pages in undulating waves around the wall. Pages he thought were working well would be pinned high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall.’

The aim was to get the whole story up to the ceiling level. What ever your system, a little ‘ruthless efficiency’ is required. Here are 3 books that have helped me:

Self Editing For Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King: Teaches the mechanics of style: dialogue, point of view, ‘show not tell’, character, beats etc. Best of all it gives examples, checklists and a self-test at the end of each topic.

The writer must be as God in his universe — present everywhere and visible nowhere. -Flaubert

The Art of Writing by John Gardner: A more stringent book but motivating. Gardner talks about maintaining the ‘dream’ of the story – but when the writing draws attention to itself (in a bad way) then the dream is broken for the reader.

Go over and over it…refusing to let anything stay if it looks awkward, phony, or forced.– John Gardner

On Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (1934) is based on the idea that that the writer is both artist and self-critic. Brande believes we should begin with the unconscious mind ‘bringing at demand all the treasures of memory’, while the conscious mind ‘must control, combine and discriminate’.

But in the end don’t be too hard on yourself. The writer Jacob Needleman thanked his editor for going his book ‘with a flaming sword in one hand and a sweet-sounding bell in the other.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1940) is best loved for his exquisite fable The Little Prince, but he also wrote one of the great adventure books, titled Wind, Sand and Stars (1940). It’s not only exciting but is a poetic, philosophical memoir. Saint-Exupéry’s flights in the 1920s and 30s took him across the Pyrenees, the Andes, and the Sahara in a tiny plane that would sometimes conk-out “with a great rattle like the crash of crockery.” There are remarkable descriptions of flying among waterspouts through a typhoon, and his survival story after a crash in the desert (which no doubt inspired The Little Prince). Here’s a thoughtful review, and here’s my favourite quote from the book:

In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I lie glued by the swing of the planet to the sand. A different weight brings me back to myself.  I feel the weight of my body drawing me towards so many things.  My dreams are more real than these dunes, than that moon, than these presences…Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than itself.

Iona and Peter Opie were the Brothers’ Grimm of the 1900s. Their greatest contribution to cultural history was the fabulous book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. It’s an epic collection of children’s rhymes, sayings, riddles, superstitions, jeers, tricks and customs – garnered from interviews with over 5000 UK children in the 1950s – passed on through generations, and naturally not intended for adult ears. Today’s children are perhaps not the ‘savage tribe’ they once were but it’s heartening that many of these verses persist in the playground today. Here are some morsels from the Opie’s collection:

Pinch-me, Punch-me, and Steponmytoes,
Went down to the river to swim,
Two of the three were drowned,
Who do you think was saved?

Old Mr Kelly,
Had a pimple on his belly;
His wife cut it off,
It tasted like jelly.

When the war is over Hitler will be dead,
He hopes to go to heaven with a crown upon his head.
But the Lord said, No! You’ll have to go below,
There’s only room for Churchill, so cheery, cheery oh.

Same to you with knobs on,
Cabbages with clogs on,
Elephants with slippers on,
And you with dirty knickers on.

God made the bees
The bees make the honey;
We do the work,
The teacher gets the money.

Scab and matter custard,
Green snot pies,
Dead dog’s giblets
Dead cat’s eyes.
Hard boiled snails, Spread it thick
Wash it down with a cup of cold sick.

Can you keep a secret?
I don’t suppose you can.
You mustn’t laugh or giggle
While I tickle your hand.

Books are sensory objects. They have a pleasing look, a comforting smell, a grainy feeling, a reassuring weight. The best-loved ones are battered, dog-eared, coffee-stained, signed by the author, and they create beautiful bookshelves. You can lend a book, read it and shove it anywhere, hide treasures in it.  A book carries your memories with it, locked into countless brain networks by all those senses and ideas you had when reading it. Why do you love your books?

“If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper–memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.” ― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

I still wonder if books will survive a long time because there’s nothing as convenient, nothing else that entertains and informs us in so “human” a manner. A book works at my speed, comfortable and slow, faster when I want it to be, then slow again. Many of my books are old friends. A world of chaos is a high possibility, given the human urge to dominate others, but our need for story, for understanding ourselves through story, our history through story, for entertaining ourselves with story is a constant.– Jack Lasenby (Read the full interview here).

Books will have to earn their keep – and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside… When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.– Julian Barnes

Twenty-Three Tales by Tolstoy

There is only one time that is important – Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.

Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson

Moominpappa no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done.

A Moment of War by Laurie Lee

  I was in that flush of youth that never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck and a uniquely charmed life, without which illusion few wars would be possible.

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

When a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. And, it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. – Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone)

Catastrophe, the strange stories of Dino Buzzati (1949) is a brilliant collection of surreal stories. Each deals with a disaster and many have an allegorical mood. People are trapped on a train rushing towards an unknown cataclysm; a reporter searches for a elusive landslide; a rich family refuses to believe there’s a flood outside their house.
Buzzati wrote Catastrophe after WW2 and it reflects the fears of the time. My favourite is a kind of parable about dictatorship in which a bat-like creature terrorizes a household. A more satirical story has an epidemic of ‘state influenza’ which attacks only those opposed to the government. The scariest tale is about a hospital with seven floors that lead a patient either upwards or downwards, towards life or death.
These bizarre, suspenseful stories reminded me of the best of The Twilight Zone which also walked the fine line between real and imaginary (eg. the episode Nick of Time) .

Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism.– Dino Buzzati

It’s really, really heartbreaking. But for some reason you want to read it again and again. It’s an extraordinary love story. It really is exquisitely written.– Michael Morpurgo

Every Sunday morning as a child  I’d listen to Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince (1888) on the radio and cry into my pillow (so my brother in the next room wouldn’t hear). I suspect the story shaped my attitude to justice and God. I didn’t understand half of it then but the message about compassion got through. Today, I see it’s also a love story between two needy characters (a guilty Prince and a self-absorbed bird) and I like Wilde’s digs at authority figures and subtle commentary on happiness. Here’s the wistful old radio version read by Robert Morley. Still makes me cry.

Some of my favourite lines:

The living always think that gold can make them happy.
Death is the brother of sleep, is he not?
Bring me the two most precious things in the city.

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. – Graham Greene

In a world that offers children so many digital delights, why bother with books?

1. Books help children understand the world

Books expose children to new ideas and help to shape their view of the world. Reading is a meeting of minds.

While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture – Maryanne Wolf

2. Books help children understand themselves

Children ask (subconsciously) ‘Who am I? Why am I feeling this?’ Stories give a frame of reference by which they can measure their experiences.

3. Books develop children’s imagination

Reading is imagination and imagination is a powerful thing. Imagination also enriches the real world.

Children do not despise real woods because they have read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all woods a little enchanted.–C.S. Lewis

4. Books develop children’s brains

Books boost a child’s intellectual development, especially language. The brain changes when children learn to read: it creates new neural pathways which are the basis for innovative thinking. Reading and thinking enhance each other.

5. Books are enjoyable.

Ultimately a child must want to read. The child who reads for pleasure is forming a wonderful habit – and there’s also pleasure for parents in reading aloud.

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, “Do trousers matter?”’

‘The mood will pass, sir.’

P.G. Wodehouse (WOOD-house) created a world without earthquakes, wars or dictators (except Roderick Spode whose ‘eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces’), where nothing mattered except tidy trousers and nothing broke except engagements. He was a brilliant writer who cooked up similes like a master chef:

His legs wobbled like asparagus stalks.

She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

Her face was shining like the seat of a bus-driver’s trousers.

Her voice trailed away in a sigh that was like the wind blowing through the cracks in a broken heart.

Wodehouse published 90 books, writing until his death at 93 years. When asked about his technique he said ‘I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit’. My favourite is Right Ho, Jeeves, about Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, who is ‘so dashed competent in every respect’. The chapter where  Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at a private school is a brilliant piece of humour.

Exceptional style, and the sheer joy of stories which offer a world where things come right.– Sophie Ratcliffe (Wodehouse, Letters)

The theme that animates Wodehouse’s work … is the quest for sweetness and light in the daily transactions of humanity.– Robert McCrum (Wodehouse: A Life)

Stephen Fry’s tribute to P.G. Wodehouse.

Book review: Across Many Mountains by Yangzom Brauen is the remarkable true story of three generations of women from one Tibetan family, who encompass cultural extremes from old Buddhist Tibet to Hollywood glitz. The first part of the book is a gripping account of an escape, via the Himalayas, from the brutal Chinese invasion of 1950 ( which fulfilled a 1,200 year old Buddhist prophecy: ‘The Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth‘.) Part two is fascinating because of the culture clash when the Tibetans experience Western ‘civilisation’. When the family finally return to Tibet in the 1980s they find ‘a country that has been robbed of its soul’. The Chinese have suppressed the language and culture (and still do). But the book is even-handed and also has a warts-and-all picture of Old Tibet where Buddhism was influenced by folk religion. The 90 year old grandmother-nun, Kunsang, is the heart of this inspiring book.

Book group discussion notes.
Recent news about Tibet

Comics were banned in occupied France but Edmond-François Calvo secretly produced a powerful satirical comic that became a French icon after the Germans scuttled in 1944. It’s the story of the bloody European war but told with Disney-style animal characters: the French as rabbits; British bulldogs; and German wolves (Goebbels a weasel, Himmler a skunk). La Bete Est Morte! was a forerunner of the  graphic novel, Maus, with its Nazi cats and Jewish mice. Here’s an extract:
My dear little children, never forget this: these Wolves who perpetrated these horrors were ordinary Wolves … They were not in the heat of battle excited by the smell of powder. They were not tormented by hunger. They did not have to defend themselves, nor to take vengeance for a victim of their own. They had simply received the order to kill.

That touch of reality in a child’s life is a child’s comfort. The child gets the sense that this person who wrote this book knows about me and knows the world can be a troubling, incomprehensible place. Maurice Sendak

One of the world’s most treasured children’s book creators, Maurice Sendak, has died, aged 83 years. For me, his picture book Outside Over There is the essence of Sendak – haunting, comforting, uncompromising –  nobody else combined the real and the unreal so brilliantly. In a rare interview, Maurice Sendak talked about how his stories reflect ‘childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business’.  Outside Over There is a  tale of separation and siblings that features a creepy ice baby (pictured). Sendak’s books can also be exuberant (In the Night Kitchen) and even spiritual (Dear Mili). On teaching writing Sendak said:

I stress character, character, character. And for authors to go where you want; go where you will. Children will go everywhere.

Imagine a world where instead of weapons of mass destruction, governments made weapons of mass instruction. Instead of spending $1.5 trillion a year on lethal weapons they could spend it on books. Here’s a better invasion strategy: Literacy Drones fly over villages and identify those without libraries; vehicles called Book Tanks (photo) move in to give away books to children; finally Seuss Troops visit schools to read aloud to them. Delivering books instead of bullets to children is a more effective way of fighting terror and raising living standards. Artist Raul Lemesoff already has a prototype Book Tank delivering free books all over Argentina, including to rural areas where there are few schools. Read about him in English or visit his Spanish website.

Sum, Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman, is a hugely entertaining, often thought-provoking book. Each very short story describes a quirky version of life after death. There is an afterlife populated only by people you remember; one where you are split into different ages; another where God is a married couple. Listen to Stephen Fry reading one about a highly ordered afterlife. The stories are not so much about theology or God (although He, She, and They do appear as somewhat fallible characters) as about treasuring the life we have now – plus a bit of humour and sci-fi just for fun. Here’s a video interview with Eagleman (a neuroscientist) who describes himself as a ‘Possibilian’– one who explores new ideas. (More novels about the afterlife).

I’ve read many books about Hitler’s Germany but none as remarkable as Wolfram, The Boy Who Went To War, by Giles Milton (Hodder, 2011). It overturns clichés about the War and helps answer the old question ‘Why didn’t more Germans resist Hitler?’

Wolfram was the child of freethinking, artistic parents who resisted by not joining the Nazi Party and refusing to display a swastika flag – their Gestapo file described them as ‘dangerous eccentics’. Wolfram was 9 years old when Hitler came to power in 1933 and spent his childhood trying to avoid the Hitler Youth so he could draw and sculpt. Through his peace-loving family we see how the Nazis tightened their grip through brutality, laws, and a system of local informants.

One can’t help ask, ‘Would I have had the courage to resist?’ Wolfram was conscripted and became part of the War nightmare in Russia and Normandy. The story of his survival is completely gripping. (Note: not a children’s book, but would interest teens.) Wolfram is still alive and you can see his stunning paintings here.

This is a study in enforced conformity as Milton shows how the Nazis became increasingly intrusive in the lives of ordinary Germans Guardian review

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched…

So begins The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells (1898) perhaps the most influential of all sci-fi stories. Wells gave the world its extraterrestrial consciousness and opened dramatic wells that produced countless alien books and movies (and inspires my writing today) . On this day in 1938, Orson Welles news-style broadcast of TWOTW  on American radio had many thinking it was an invasion, if not by the Martians then the Germans. (Listen to a clip from this clever radio report). The style was much copied: in Christchurch in the late 1940s, a radio station broadcast that a UFO had landed in Hagley Park, causing people to flock to the park. H.G.Wells once met Orson Wells and recorded this interview. And I like the TWOTW musical with Richard Burton’s cool narration.

Picture by Alvim Corréa, TWOTW 1906 ed.

Alone we are one drop, together we are an ocean Ryunosuke Satoro

Honey bees are a super-organism: each one working for the health of the whole. In the same way many people contribute to a book. At the writer’s end: family, friends, writing group, experts, research subjects. At the publishers: editor, proof-reader, designer, publicist, education coordinator, accountant. In the world: distributors, retailers, reviewers, website designer, media, networkers and most importantly, readers. Readers are the book’s power — an unread book will wither like a hive without a queen.

Photo: Swarm by Sarah Anderson

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf is a remarkable book that explains how reading deepens our thinking. Brain plasticity enables us to learn to read – the brain creates new pathways and these then become the basis for new, innovative thinking. Reading and thinking enhance each other:

…the rich associations, inferences, and insights emerging from this capacity allow us to reach beyond the specific context of what we read to form new thoughts.

Wolf wonders if this ‘constructive heart’ of reading will be weakened by computers which favour shallow thinking – read The Shallows. All this suggests that primary schools should invest in excellent libraries, before getting laptops for every child. Wolf also looks in micro-detail at the skills a child needs to learn to read. It’s a challenge but there’s something we can do to help, Wolf concludes:

The amount of time the child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read continues to be one of the best predictors of later reading.

Two war memoirs I was gripped by: Resistance by Agnes Humbert tells of her four year imprisonment by the Nazis. The title refers not only to the French Resistance but also the inner strength that enabled Humbert to survive horrific treatment. Its shows ‘how the human mind can preserve the heart and soul intact against all attempts to annihilate it’ (Linda Grant).  A Moment of War by Laurie Lee relates his time in the Spanish Civil War. Lee begins his journey as an idealistic young man – ‘I was in that flush of youth that never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck and a uniquely charmed life, without which illusion few wars would be possible’ –and ends it a shattering ‘moment’ when he sees the consequences of his actions. An honest book; the third in Lee’s stunning memoir-trilogy (with Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning).

The four fundamental forces of writing – Imagine, Write, Edit, Hope –  harmonize with nicely with the four known forces of nature:

1. Electromagnetism: gives us our world of molecules; and like Imagination it has infinite range.

2.  Weak force: is confined to nuclei of atoms; like a Writer confined with a story.

3.  Strong force: holds atomic nuclei together; as Editing gives a story strength.

4. Gravity: like Hope, it keeps us anchored and also has infinite range.

I find physics challenging but I enjoyed The Edge of Physics by  Anil Ananthaswamy – it illuminates tricky ideas and amazes with a tour of grand physics experiments in the uttermost parts of the world.