Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Aldersey-Williams takes us on a guided tour of a subject that is both earthily familiar and a great unknown to us: our own bodies.  He writes fluently about the history of how our bodies have become known through science and literature, and how that understanding has changed over the centuries.  He moves from introducing us to the men and women such as Galton and Hippocrates who have helped us understand the functions of the body to quoting Shakespeare who speaks a great deal about the body, as metaphor, similie and curse.  Aldersey-Williams also relates his encounters with a wide range of people who are in themselves experts in their field:  neurologists, blood donor nurses, a professional clown, artists (conventional and tattoo), atheletes, pathologists, psychologists and many more.  He relates his own experience of witnessing dissections, anatomy lessons and attempting life drawing.

The book is split into three sections which gives it a pleasing and coherant structure.  The first part takes 'the whole', narrating how we have historically understood and mapped the human body.

He then goes on to take the parts and how we have come to understand these parts as separate with a chapter on each: head, face, brain, heart, blood, ear, eye, stomach, hand, sex, foot and skin.

And finally he speaks about the future, about meeting a paralympian and how technical innovations can augment and enable our bodies to function.

A real education, a sweeping introduction to the history of how we have come to our current understanding of the human body.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozaki

Ozeki's book opens with an entry from a diary by Nao Yasutani, a 15 year old Japanese girl living in Tokyo.  She introduces herself as a time being and says that we are all time beings, that is, creatures living within and defined by time.  She draws our attention to the dual meaning of Ozeki's title, we are time beings but also the phrase 'For The Time Being' means 'just for now', again a play on Nao's name.

Next we are introduced to a second first person narrator, Ruth herself finding Nao's diary on the beach of her isolated island in British Columbia, across the Pacific from Japan.  Is this the Ruth writing the book or another, it's not clear?  How did the diary get to British Columbia?

Twin narratives unfold, of Ruth, a Japanese American living with her partner Oliver in the wilderness but pining for New York, and Nao, raised in California but forced to move to Japan when the dotcom bubble burst and her father lost everything. 

Nao struggles to adjust to life in a Japanese high school and is bullied viciously.  After her school perform a mock funeral for Nao in an act of ultimate ostracism her father Hiroki #2, who is suicidal for much of the novel, takes Nao to live for the summer with his grandmother Jiko.  Jiko is an ancient buddhist nun who with gentle kindness, exercise and meditation helps Nao find peace with herself.  And and through Jiko a connection is made to Hiroki #1, Juki's son and Nao's father's uncle, a kamikaze bomber but also deeply thoughful intellectual who died in the Second World War. 

Ruth struggles with her loneliness and with her neighbours, and remembers caring for her own mother through her descent into alzheimers, unravelling in time.  They have a visitor, a Japanese crow that perhaps came over on the tsunami wreckage, but is certainly not indigenous and somehow links to Nao's story.

Ozaki shows us things and events from both sides, 9/11 is witnessed by both sets of characters from opposite sides of the ocean.  The things that happen to Nao are both sad and to me unacceptable but Ozaki is deft at helping us realise that perhaps our constructions of what is and is not acceptable are at heart cultural.  As a Westerner I learned so much about the differences between Japanese and American culture, between collectivism and conformism versus rampant individualism. 

Towards the end of the novel things begin to break down and Ozeki playfully shows us the constructed nature of her tale, things begin to appear where they cannot be, the two stories begin to merge and unravel and a cat is rescued.

I simply can't wait to read more of this author, this is a beguiling haunting book which I really enjoyed.

Harvest by Jim Crace

Walter Thirsk is a farmer, although it has not always been so.  He was once the servant of his master Mr Kent before he settled, travelling with him from city to city.

With his neighbours Thirsk gathers in the barley harvest in his tiny village, more a gathering of houses serving the master.  It's a feudal world and a brutal one.  The masters dovecote is burning, and despite the knowledge of the village that two of the local boys have played a prank that has gotten out of hand, strangers camping in the nearby woods looking to settle are blamed.  For the death of the of the birds most masters would hang the accused but Mr Kent is seen as mild for placing the two men: one older, one younger, in the pillory and shaving their woman companion's head.  As the older slips and breaks his neck a fury is unleashed.

This is a timeless old world where little changes over many years.  It is a world in which women are brutalised physically and sexually as a matter of course and childhood is no protection, where a whispered word, a rumour, can begin a blaze of violence.  Thirsk has lived in the vilage since he married his wife, a villager, and although she has died and he has remained he is still an outsider.  He acts as conduit for the changes that are coming to the village, where subsistance farming is being replaced by enclosure, people by sheep.

Crace's deft use of first person narration communicates the suffocating dangerous nature of the world he lives in, a tenuous veneer of civility a thin skin over lawlessness and violence, but poised against a world of nature that although ungiving and indifferent to human suffering is beautiful.

Mio's Kingdom by Astrid Lindgren

Karl Anders Nilson, known as Andy, is a lonely boy.  An orphan, he lives in Stockholm with his foster parents, Aunt Hulda who wanted a boy and Uncle Olaf who thinks Andy makes too much noise.  His only friend is Ben, but they sometimes fight.  The only person who is kind to him is Mrs Lundy from the sweet shop.  But then one day Aunt Hulda, after telling Andy yet again that the day he came to their house was an unlucky one, is given a card to post by Mrs Lundy and an apple that turns to gold.  The card is to the King of Farawayland.  Sitting in Tegnerlunden Park watching Ben eat with his loving parents through their lighted window he cries, but on the ground is a bottle and in the bottle is a genie.  For release from the bottle he grants Andy one wish, and he wishes to go to Farawayland.

A magical adventure of lost princes, love, friendship, courage, a white horse named Miramis, a bridge called Morninglight and a terrible foe, Sir Kato, begins.  Andy learns the truth of his birth and finds both happiness and a strength he never new he had.

Simply one of the most beautiful enchanting stories I have ever read.  I read this aloud over several days and nights to my 9 year old and enjoyed every moment.  Written in mesmeric prose, in less skillful hands this would have been just a good story to tell a younger child, but Lindgren makes it magical, mythic and unsentimental.

The Shadow in the North by Philip Pullman

It is 1878 and Sally Lockhart is now working as a financial consultant.  One of her clients comes to her after the ship she has invested in goes down and Sally feels responsible, so she investigates with the help of her friend Jim, now working for Garland's Detective Agency with Frederick Garland.  Sally's investigations turn up a hornet's nest involving powerful industrialist Axel Bellman, a world of disgraced cut off aristocratic children and forced marriage and a terrible lethal secret in the frozen north.

This was my favourite of the Sally Lockhart mysteries, Sally is a strong female lead who Pullman is not afraid to give flaws but shows real courage and the author returns to a subject about which he speaks so beautifully: the far north.

The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

A good well written Victorian murder mystery in the venerable tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and Willie Collins.

London, 1872 and 16 year old Sally Lockhart has just seen a man fall dead in front of her.  Her father, the Lockhart in Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, has been lost at sea and she has come to their offices desperate to try and find out why.  But when she utters the phrase she has received on a mysterious note 'the seven blessings' to Mr Higgs, the Company Secretary, he suffers a heart attack and dies.  Suddenly she finds herself thrust into a lethal high adventure with only the office boy Jim Taylor as an ally.  Opium smuggling, fraud, piracy and a priceless Indian ruby make for a heady headlong story and Sally Lockhart has to dig deep emerging as a truly wonderful heroine.

The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman

It is 1881 in Victorian London and Sally Lockhart is faced with solving a mystery that could cost her the one thing most dear to her: her own child.  On her doorstep is a man with a piece of paper telling her that a man she has never met is petitioning her for divorce for her cruelty and immoral behaviour.  With her business partners Jim Taylor and Webster Garland away on a photography expedition she seems vulnerable and the net closes fast around her, a forged marriage certificate, accusations of improper behaviour lethal to a woman and her business in the 1880s.  And behind all is the shadowy puppet master figure of the Tzaddik.

Great melodrama, Sally despite all the odds managing to hold her own in a world in which men have all the power and influence.  Not as warm as The Shadow in the North, but still good

The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman

It is 1882 Sally Goldberg is away to America with her new husband leaving young Jim Taylor, consulting detective, to take the helm in the fourth Sally Lockhart mystery.

In pursuit of a lost girl Jim finds a princess: Adelaide was last seen escaping from the fire that killed Sally's love Frederick.  Now she's engaged to be married to Prince Rudolf, Crown Prince of the tiny kingdom of Razkavia and there are plenty of forces arraigned against her.  Jim finds himself assigned as her protector as they travel with Razkavian exile and interpreter Becky Winter to the country, bordered and threatened by Austria and Germany who both have their eyes on the prize of Razkavia's tin mines.  Murder, skulduggery, high politics and the transformation of a cockney prostitute to a Crown Princess makes for a hell of a ride of a story, entertaining and ultimately heart warming.

The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick

Two children, Boy, nameless servant and Willow, assistant to singer Madame Beauchance. A magician and alchemist named Valerian using Boy and infernal powers to create illusions for his act at the Great Theatre.

It is the Dead Days, those oddly quiet days between Christmas and New Year. And a terrible drama plays out in the City, a great sprawling decaying metropolis gripped in winter, once magnificent and powerful, now rotting and impoverished.

Valerian was always unpredicatable, carrying out his mysterious experiments in the rambling ruin of the Yellow House. But now he is becoming increasingly volatile as New Year and his deadline for an infernal pact runs out. Boy and Willow are drawn into a breakneck adventure trying to find a mysterious book that will let the slippery Valerian once more cheat his fate but at a terrible price.

Sedgwick's writing is fast paced but also evocative and haunting, you feel the cold of the City seep into your bones as you're borne away on his adventure.

Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales by Sarah Maitland

This is a difficult book to review because it has many many good points but there are areas where I feel a little uncomfortable with what Maitland has written.

Maitland breaks her book down into 12 chapters, visiting 12 forests one a month from March through to February.  Some are familiar names, like the Forest of Dean, the New Forest and Keilder Forest, others like Airyolland Wood and The Purgatory Wood are more obscure.  In her writings on these forests Maitland writes beautifully and eloquently on the history of each woodland and her experience within them, also reflecting on the way that the histories of the woods and that of fairytales are intertwined.

Between each chapter she gives us a fairytale but written from a new and thought provoking perspective, for instance, we hear from Hansel as he and Gretel have grown to adulthood and his thoughts on their experiences in the forest, from the woodcutter of Red Riding Hood and his reasons for becoming a recluse.  Last of all Maitland gives us an appropriately bewitching poetic history of the woodlands of Britain in the dreams of Briar Rose.

There is so much of interest in what Maitland has to say but there are things missing and she does at times repeat herself.  For instance, the focus appears to be on the Grimm canon of fairy tales, when she speaks of the Seven Swans fairytale she does not mention Hans Christian Andersen's similar The Twelve Swans and how the two relate.  However, these are small complaints, this is a book from which I learned much and was charmed by, a book that sends me straight back out to the woods.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong (Almost Naked Animals) by Sarah Courtauld

If you have watched Citv's Almost Naked Animals you'll have some idea of what to expect - anarchy, destruction and hysterical antics.  Howie is the hotel manager of the Banana Cabana (a mad dog), Octo the blue octopus receptionist, Bunny the much put upon Hotel Activities Director, Sloth the bellhop and Narwhal the singer.  All are Almost Naked except for swimwear.  The story begins with Howie surfing down the hotel lobby stairs on a washing machine, and goes full throttle from there.

It's a slight but colourful 57 pages in full colour, with a page of funky stickers at the back.  Warning, may induce sniggering, don't expect morals or uplifting narrative, just animals in pants...