One of my goals for this trip, is to read more and watch less, exceptions are F1 and rugby!. Here are the books I have enjoyed (mostly!), on my year in the Algarve.
It has taken me a while to read these next three books all of which I selected to help with my writing.
Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist and a scientific advisor to Match.com!! Her book, Anatomy of Love, looks at the scientific evidence for love at first sight, infidelity, flirting and the hook-up culture.
She traces partner straying back three million years to specific genetic mutations.
I laboured under the delusion that I was, at least, a good writer until I read this book.
Stein on Writing utterly changed the way I approached my keyboard. It was like unlearning how to ride a bike and then sitting backwards on the saddle.
The penalty for this relearning, is mental effort. I summarised his 300 pages of advice into 8, which I read every time I sit at my laptop.
“Provide the reader with an experience that is superior to their own experiences in everyday life” – is my current mantra.
“Our senses define the edge of our consciousness.” Begins Diane Ackerman.
I read this Natural History of the Senses to help me captivate the reader(of my writing) through deeper use of our six senses, drawing the reader into every scene.
In this book, I learned why we spray ourselves with substances derived from the anal sac of a deer! The scent of musk induces a change in female hormones.
While not a page-turner, there is nothing left uncovered in this reference manual of the senses.
Jeanine Cummins’ publishers pulled all marketing and media tours on her book, American Dirt, citing threats to the publisher and author.
The main issue was negative reviews about a non-Mexican writing about Mexican migrants. Then Oprah stuck it in her club, and it sold 3 million copies!!
I listened to this on Audible and couldn’t “put it down”.
Add this to your birthday or holiday list.
This was a lucky-dip pick for me and turned into a lovely read (listen actually!) where no one gets murdered or assaulted.
Craig David is a British singer and songwriter. He is also well renowned for his mixing, over-dubbing and DeeJaying.
His story is a very personal one about his rise from a chubby kid mixing tracks in his bedroom in Southampton, to hosting weekly parties for the biggest recording names in his Miami apartment. Trying to find love is his frustrated theme.
Your twelve-year-old could read this safely. Loved it.
My Turiscampo friends and gym buddies for many years, Marcus and Sandra, gave me “The Discovery of Slowness” by Sten Nadolny.
This is a German classic about the story of Sir John Franklin, a sailor, who turned his childhood inadequacy of being very slow into an essential attribute for exploring the wild Artic wastelands and making sea voyages to the other side of the World.
If you like historical adventure stories told in a magical way, this is for you.
I met this author, April Lee Fields, shortly after I arrived in the Algarve. “A Version of You” is her main body of work and is an exquisite use of English descriptive language.
Through 550 pages, April tells the story of her one year of travelling in South East Asia and Australia aged 27, falling in and out of love and meeting characters that journey like sprites through her life.
Her recollections of the time, at 15, when she found herself living in a squalid crack house, are harrowing.
April’s book reads like a poem, in which reality sometimes emerges from fantasy.
Kathryn Harden is a geneticist and an author.
She tells how inequalities within social and racial populations are not just caused by environmental conditions, but that genetics plays a significant role.
Her argument is, that measures aimed at levelling social inequalities largely fail because they neglect to consider genetic factors.
This book will change the way we look at society.
A very short read, and shortlisted for the Booker 2022 prize.
This was one of my random picks, and well worth the risk of chance. I have copied the summary of the book from Amazon, as I could not have made a more concise description.
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
“This is not a pity memoir” – This is a gem!
I was looking for a memoir to study writing techniques when I came across this newly published book by Abi Morgan.
Abi is a screenwriter responsible for “The Split”, “The Iron Lady”, and she won a grammy for “The Hour” and several Emmys.
Her book tells of 3 years of her life beginning in 2018, when her husband Jacob, an actor, collapses with a rare condition after taking an experimental drug for MS. When Jacob comes out of a coma, he does not recognise Abi. Jacob spends 450 days in the hospital, while Abi tries to look after their children, carry on her writing and visit Jacob daily.
Then, Abi is diagnosed with breast cancer. The narration on audible is superb, and the writing takes you inside the head of Abi, where most people will relate to her fears and to the destruction of the person she used to be. Get this book.
I listened to this short introduction to Psychopathy on Audible, Essi Viding is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of London.
Her book is informative and easy to understand. She explores and dispels myths that many of us have, about how psychopaths behave. How they use manipulation and control.
Essi uses neuroscience and the latest genetic evidence, to take the reader through the development of psychopathy.
I picked this one because it was a debut novel for the author Richard Armitage. He was Thorin Oaken Shield in The Hobbit and I saw him last week on Netflix’s, “The Stranger”.
The novel is about a Nobel Prize winning scientist Sarah Collier, whose father has Alzheimers and she is starting to show signs too. Her husband Daniel is a neuroscientist and Sarah is invited as the main speaker to a biotech conference in Geneva. Once in Geneva, Sarah worsens and a devious plot emerges.
This is a good “page turner” novel for sun loungers, and the narration by three speakers on Audible is superb.
I bought this book in 1993, just after it was published, and following an interview I saw with the author on TV. It was not normally my type of reading, but the sentiments echoed mine at that time in my life. I gave it to Sandra with notes I had made in the margins.
I found the book again, after 29 years, shortly before I left for the Algarve and read it on the ferry.
This 3 hour read book, has sold 60 million copies.
Penguin have just published 50 titles over a wide range of authors. I picked 2 at random. This is a very short (50 pages) book of 5 essays on women’s power (or lack thereof). It is an interesting and very unusual perspective.
Audre Lorde classifies herself as a ‘black lesbian, mother, warrior and poet’. Her writings are dark and angry.
Audre was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and died of metastatic liver cancer, after 14 years, in 1992.
Sandra found breast cancer in 2008 and died less that 14 years later from the same condition. I hope, for everyone’s sake, that this is just coincidence, and not a reflection of the lack of progress in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer.
This title is number 26 in the Penguin Modern 50 books.
Another 50 page volume of two connected stories. Samuel Beckett is a master of post modern black humour.
Two vagrants, who are aware they are approaching the end of their lives, stumble through life with no possessions nor money to sustain them. Moving from disused dwellings, a cave by the coast and sleeping on the streets.
Written in a style that can only be the authors.
Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He has previously studied genetics at Berkeley and Stanford universities.
It is by far the best and most easily understood book on the topic, that I have read.
The bottom line, which Kevin Mitchell provides extensive research for, is that our personality, traits and behaviours are affected very little by the environment we grow up in. That is, unless we are subjected to chronic and extreme treatments, where these can have some effect on our outcomes.
Our personalities and traits are based on inherited genes and random mutations at conception. Thereafter, the development of our brains is guided mostly by the base set of genes.
