Reading over Christmas

Fox investigating

I am sure you have plenty of light books to read over Christmas. Here are five not-so-light that I have found very re-readable over the last year. They are all to do with The Planet  and they are all well written and fascinating.  

1. Otherlands - A World in the Making (2022) by Thomas Halliday. This is the extraordinary tale of  our planet from today down to its first appearance 550 million years ago. How Thomas Halliday has managed to make something so complicated and long so easy to read I don't know, but he has. There is a table of eras and a list of maps of each era.  There is also one illustration on each section of something relevant to the era. The writing itself is easy to read and full of information. I dip into this book from time to time, - there's so much to take in. 

2. The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022) by Guy Shrubsole. This is a call to restore our temperate rainforests before it is too late. They may once have covered up to one fifth of Britain, ranging up the whole of the left hand coast, and although only a fragment remains they are home to an amazing variety of life-forms. This book is a fascinating account of visiting these diminished rainforests, of the saving of at least one of them and hope that we can save the rest before it is too late. 

3. Underland, A Deep Time Journey (2019) by Robert Macfarlane. This book was winner of the Wainwright Prize in 2019 and of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award in 2020. It is a beautifully written account  of visits to the wonderful and mostly unknown world underneath our feet. It took ten years to write and can be read again and again. It is full of surprises. 

4. English Pastoral, an Inheritance (2020) by James Rebanks. This is Rebanks account of becoming an organic farmer again, after several years of trying to keep up with the rest of the world using chemicals and pesticides. His family have been farming in the Lake District for three generations and his obvious pleasure in going back to the old ways, says so much. 

5. Islands of Abandonment, Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021) by Cal Flyn. Descriptions of places where man has been and gone. And how these places may provide the best opportunities for environmental recovery. Places in Scotland, Cyprus, Estonia, Ukraine, United States, France, Tanzania and Montserrat, show ghosts towns and exclusion zones and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. 

Have a wonderful Christmas and good reading.