Here are 100 books that Walking Through Spring fans have personally recommended if you like
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Journeys of discovery are my favorite kind of story and my favorite vehicle for (mental) travel. From Gilgamesh to last week’s bestseller, they embody how we live and learn: we go somewhere, and something happens. We come home changed and tell the tale. The tales I love most take me where the learning is richest, perhaps to distant, exotic places—like Darwin’s Galapagos—perhaps deep into the interior of a completely original mind—like Henry Thoreau’s. I cannot live without such books. Amid the heartbreak of war, greed, disease, and all the rest, they remind me in a most essential way of humanity’s redemptive capacity for understanding and wonder.
This is a hero’s journey, right out of Joseph Campbell: a young man goes to sea, circumnavigates the globe, and experiences marvel after marvel of nature. What he learns on his journey matures into a kind of wisdom that transforms the world.
Darwin’s adventures keep me on the edge of my seat; his descriptions seduce me; his ideas inspire me. I want to be there with him as he recoils from the horrors of slavery in Brazil or observes the aftermath of a Chilean earthquake. And I feel I truly am with him, collecting birds and lizards on the islands of the Galapagos, as he begins to divine the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the world.
Charles Darwin's travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world's beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences'.
Yet in a travel journal which takes the reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to South Sea Islands, Darwin's descriptive powers are constantly challenged, but never once overcome. In addition, The Voyage of…
I fell in love with all things Greek around the same time I fell in love with my Greek Cypriot husband about 30 years ago. That was when I started reading books about Greece as well as fiction set in Greece. I also learned to cook Greek food, which made both my man and me happy. I traveled to as many Greek islands, and of course, Cyprus, as time would allow. Eventually, I started writing books set in Greece myself. I went to a Greek Orthodox church and took Greek language evening classes. I feel at this point and have been told by Greek islanders, that I am now essentially Greek.
I love Greece and Greek life, and I love animals and nature, so this book set in Corfu, which is the story of how Gerald Durrell spent his early childhood when his mother decided to move the entire family to Corfu, really hit all the buttons for me.
In my opinion, the book is even better than the television series. Gerald Durrell’s love of fauna and flora possibly began in the White House on Kalami Bay in Corfu. I was so excited when I arranged a holiday in Corfu and actually stayed in Kalami Bay myself. I ran around looking at lizards, birds, and plants, thinking of Durrell as a wild child, swerving away as far as possible from conventional education. What an idyll I found it truly was.
The inspiration behind ITV's hit family drama, The Durrells.
My Family and Other Animals is Gerald Durrell's hilarious account of five years in his childhood spent living with his family on the island of Corfu. With snakes, scorpions, toads, owls and geckos competing for space with one bookworm brother and another who's gun-mad, as well as an obsessive sister, young Gerald has an awful lot of natural history to observe. This richly detailed, informative and riotously funny memoir of eccentric family life is a twentieth-century classic.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics…
Telmo Pievani is Full Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Padua, where he covers the first Italian chair of Philosophy of Biological Sciences. A leading science communicator and columnist for Il corriere della sera, he is the author of The Unexpected Life, Creation without God, Serendipity, and other books.
I loved this book because I think it is a masterpiece on the contingency of evolution and our presence.
Rewind the tape of life and times and you will get different endings: that’s a great message of freedom for me. The epic of diversity that led to the explosion of multicellular life forms in the early Cambrian concerns us too. Unmissable.
High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived-a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
I don’t warm to crime novels where the only point is to find whodunnit. Those that resonate with me are the ones that have an extra dimension. It may be taking me into a world I am unfamiliar with, like bell-ringing or a theatre troupe. Or it could be a richly-evoked setting, like Donna Fletcher Crow’s Celtic Christian background. Or a character whose very flaws make them more gripping, such as Rebus or Wallender. I want to come away feeling enriched and not just pleased that I guessed that it was the butler with the candlestick.
Mankell’s troubled hero, Kurt Wallender, hits new depths in this final novel. Things have not been well. His handgun left on the seat of his car was to be picked up by a child. Past conversations with his artist father, who paints the same landscape 7000 times while his memory deteriorates. Wallender now has to face the realization that he, too, is losing his memory. I felt for him on this difficult journey.
But there is still a last case to be solved. The father of his daughter’s fiancé goes missing on his morning walk. Dark secrets from Sweden’s Cold War past threaten to resurface. Wallender has to battle with deteriorating health to solve the mystery, fearing the truth may not be welcome. For me, his integrity shines through.
Every morning Hakan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. However, one winter's day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace.
Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for his interest in the case as Hakan's son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier, at Hakan's 75th birthday party, Kurt noticed that the old man appeared uneasy and seemed eager to talk about a controversial incident from his past career that remained shrouded in…
As a graduate student in library science, I stumbled across an entry on Macbeth in a biographical dictionary. It stated he was actually a good king who ruled for seventeen years. Furthermore, he claimed the throne in his own name and that of his wife. I was hooked. I did extensive research trying to find the man behind the legend, and how the tale got twisted into what Shakespeare gave us. From Celtic, Norse, and English sources, I extrapolated the culture of 11th-century Scotland, and a man who might well have been the historical high king Macbeatha.
One of the key characters in the Arthur legends is Guenevere, and nowhere does she become more real than in Parke Godwin’s Beloved Exile. In post-Roman Britain, after Arthur’s defeat by the Saxons, a mature and bereft Guenevere is taken captive by a Saxon thane. Keeping her identity secret, she struggles through life as a slave in her enemy’s household. Yet, in her soul, she is still a queen and cannot bear to see her nation torn by treachery and internal conflict. She becomes attached to the Saxon family she now serves and discovers that, in order to preserve Arthur’s legacy, she must make allies of her enemies.
As a graduate student in library science, I stumbled across an entry on Macbeth in a biographical dictionary. It stated he was actually a good king who ruled for seventeen years. Furthermore, he claimed the throne in his own name and that of his wife. I was hooked. I did extensive research trying to find the man behind the legend, and how the tale got twisted into what Shakespeare gave us. From Celtic, Norse, and English sources, I extrapolated the culture of 11th-century Scotland, and a man who might well have been the historical high king Macbeatha.
I will read anything by Parke Godwin. His command of language and his talent for bringing history to life won me over from the first book. In Sherwood, he takes on Robin Hood, whose legend is compiled of stories collected over a 200-year period. Godwin sets the story a hundred years prior to the legend, in the time of William the Conqueror. Sherwood gives us the life of a brash young Saxon landholder, displaced by the conquerors, who leads a guerrilla resistance from Sherwood Forest. It also paints a sympathetic young sheriff of Nottingham, who starts as Robin’s foe but grows to admire the outlaw—and falls in love with his wife Marian.
Forced from his home by Norman invaders, young Edward Aelredson, Thane of Denby, takes refuge in the forest Sherwood, where, with sword and bow, he bedevils the usurping king and comes to be called "Robin Hood." Reprint.
As a graduate student in library science, I stumbled across an entry on Macbeth in a biographical dictionary. It stated he was actually a good king who ruled for seventeen years. Furthermore, he claimed the throne in his own name and that of his wife. I was hooked. I did extensive research trying to find the man behind the legend, and how the tale got twisted into what Shakespeare gave us. From Celtic, Norse, and English sources, I extrapolated the culture of 11th-century Scotland, and a man who might well have been the historical high king Macbeatha.
This is perhaps my favorite historical novel ever, not only because of Godwin’s evocative prose (“Half a baby in a ditch.” Brrr!), but because it contains an extended section on the “little people,” the mound dwellers who predated the Celts in Britain. These people became the fairies, elves, and gnomes of legend, but in Firelord they are the last of a dying culture, trying desperately to survive in a changed world. They capture a wounded Arthur, and as they take him underground, the author’s voice alters radically. It brilliantly captures the alien nature of the mound dwellers and their hypnotic effect on Arthur. Only after Arthur leaves them behind does it return, like Arthur, to something familiar.
Artorious Pendragon, a young warrior-king destined to unite the shattered land of Britain, reaches unattainable heights, only to lose his heart and his kingdom to the greatest betrayal of all. Reprint.
Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the early modern era–and I was always drawn to the big personalities and events: Henry VIII and his wives, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. But, having made a career out of studying the era and its literature, I found that the drama didn’t end with Elizabeth in 1603 (and certainly not with Mary either when she fled Scotland or when she was executed in 1587). In fact, things became even more colorful under the riotous reign of King James. This led me to want to reassess his life and reign with a focus on the things that had historically been brushed over.
This mammoth book leaves no stone unturned in investigating how and why claims arose regarding the alleged murder of King James VI and I in 1625. It reads as part dossier or evidence and part detective story–and thus, it is never boring.
The authors are canny enough to make no definitive claims about James’s death–but their methodical investigation into why people at the time and afterward suspected foul play will leave readers in little doubt about what probably happened…
A year after the death of James I in 1625, a sensational pamphlet accused the Duke of Buckingham of murdering the king. It was an allegation that would haunt English politics for nearly forty years. In this exhaustively researched new book, two leading scholars of the era, Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, uncover the untold story of how a secret history of courtly poisoning shaped and reflected the political conflicts that would eventually plunge the British Isles into civil war and revolution. Illuminating many hitherto obscure aspects of early modern political culture, this eagerly anticipated work is both a fascinating…
I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.
I love cheese, and I love how British cheeses have reinvented themselves as dairy farmers have been forced to diversify in order to keep in business.
This fascinating book has taken me on a journey around the British Isles and in time and place from the Stone Age and the Roman era, the influence of Monasteries, the post-war industrial boom, to right now, and the renaissance of traditional farmhouse artisan cheesemaking.
I love this book because it does not just outline British cheeses; it is also the human story of the people who handcrafted them. Best of all, I can actually find and purchase some of these cheeses to enjoy while reading the book!
Shortlisted for the Andre Simon Food and Drink Book Awards for 2019
'A beautifully textured tour around the cheeseboard' Simon Garfield 'Full of flavour' Sunday Times 'A delightful and informative romp' Bee Wilson, Guardian 'His encounters with modern-day practitioners fizz with infectious delight' John Walsh, Sunday Times
Every cheese tells a story. Whether it's a fresh young goat's cheese or a big, beefy eighteen-month-old Cheddar, each variety holds the history of the people who first made it, from the builders of Stonehenge to medieval monks, from the Stilton-makers of the eighteenth-century to the factory…
As a university historian and archaeologist my focus has been the Early Middle Ages. In the 1990s I wrote several books about the fifth and sixth centuries which barely mentioned Arthur but popular histories and films based on his story just kept coming, so I decided to look again at his story and work out how and why it developed as it did. I have published three well-received books on the subject, each of which builds on the one before, plus articles that have been invited to be included in edited volumes. I disagree with much in the five books above but collectively they reflect the debate across my lifetime. It is a great debate, I hope you enjoy it.
John Morris was an ancient historian specializing in the later Roman Empire who late in life turned his attention to Dark Age Britain. I only met him very briefly at a conference in the mid-1970s, by which time he was already very ill. He wrote by far his best-known work while presiding over the translation of a host of source materials for early medieval Britain and their publication by Phillimore, all the time fighting his own battle against cancer. He didn’t just accept Arthur as a real historical figure but made him the pivotal figure of British history in the decades around 500, accepting as authoritative all sorts of stories written many hundreds of years later. In so doing he was largely responsible for bringing the Arthurian Period of British history into existence and certainly gave it enormous popular appeal. Rarely has one writer had such an impact on a…
A lifetime's scholarship enabled John Morris to recreate a past hitherto hidden in myth and mystery. He describes the Arthurian Age as 'the starting point of future British history', for it saw the transition from Roman Britain to Great Britain, the establishment of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales from the collapse of the Pax Romana. In exploring political, social, economic, religious and cultural history from the fourth to the seventh century, his theme is one of continuity. That continuity is embodied in Arthur himself: 'in name he was the last Roman Emperor, but he ruled as the first medieval king.'
