Gooley's clues

Although we increasingly rely on GPS devices to get us from door to door I guess we all know something about natural navigation. The Sun is in the South, right? Moss grows better on the North or shady side of trees, right?

It's not the fact that Tristan Gooley, in his Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs, knows more about it than you or I that surprises me. What surprises me is that it could be so interesting.

I knew some of the plant and soil stuff (from soggy experience in the New Forest bogs) but there was a great deal of about this planet's behaviour in terms of it's near neighbours and weather that is obvious when explained if only you take the time to look. If this book does nothing else it will teach you to observe and make deductions. It is a cumulative and rewarding process.

Immortalised in print

"This is a work of fiction and any similarity to places, events or people, living, dead or unconscious, is purely coincidental."
But of course any writer draws on the people they encounter in life as inspiration for at least some characteristics of the people they create. Happily, for this reader at least, Warwick and Fru have made those coincidences funnier by not disguising some of the names in the insane old people's home in which we have both worked and that forms part of the plot.
I laughed.
I laughed a lot.
That alone is a good enough reason for me to recommend this book. True... it relies on broad, black humour but if you can't laugh at yourself, at life, at illness and at death then you are in danger of taking yourself far too seriously.
Matron take note.

The blind leading the blind

Being blind doesn't stop the mind's ability to visualise space so a model you can feel with your fingertips to gain information is a great idea. Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See uses the construction of a model town for a carpenter/locksmith's blind daughter as a symbol of how to engage with the world. But there is more than blindness she has to face. She also loses her father and her country because this is a small French girl trying to survive first in Paris then in Saint Malo during the Second World War. She is destined to meet our other protagonist who is a Nazi radio operator and so also lives in a world described to him by others. What Doerr does well is make us have equal interest and sympathy in both characters. I was a little cautious that this would turn into a corny romance. It didn't. It was romantic but the ending wasn't telegraphed in the way I expected. So for an American to set a novel in historical Europe, to enthuse it with the atmosphere of a Jules Verne fantasy, throw in the corruption of money and to contrast it all with naturalistic greed and violence is quite some accomplishment. I found the bestseller pace and short chapter formats a bit formulaic but nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.