51 Inside a Pearl, Edmund White, 2014
Amusing, frank, pithy, funny - White is a flaneur, a story-teller and a wit. Here he recounts his years in Paris, fr 1983 to 1998. An American in Paris. His encounter with Bruce Chatwin is recounted on pp.189-190
52. River of the Gods, Candice Millard, 2022
An excellent book I read after hearing Candice Millard in an Explorer Podcast. The story of Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, and the search for the source of the Nile.
53. Sindh Revisited - A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Richard Francis Burton, Christopher Ondaatje, 1996.
Many good photos, but not a lively account of the author's journey retracing the steps of Burton during his time in India in the army of the East India Company, 1842-1849.
54. The Ministry of Bodies, Seamus O'Mahony (2021). Witty, poignant, wise reflections on his life as a doctor in the Health Service, in Cork, Ireland. Written shortly before his retirement. Author of Can Medicine be Cured?' (2019). Very readable.
55. The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist (2009)
A massive (588pp.) opus on the 'Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.' Fascinating overview, with the thesis that in the West our left hemisphere view of the world has largely overtaken the right hemisphere's way of perceiving and knowing, contributing to the ecological crisis, amongst other crises. The authors sometimes refers to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes in the late 1970's, with more respect than agreement. McGilchrist refers to many authors and research papers, both historical and contemporary.
56. The Art of Patience, Sylvain Tesson. Translated from French by Frank Wynne
A beautifully written book by one of France's leading nature and travel writers. The writer sets off for the high plateaux of Tibet in search of the snow leopard, with wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and two other companions. He learns, perhaps again, the art of patience, mainly from Munier. I'd like to find his Consolations of the Forest.
57. All the Lives We Never Lived, Anuradha Roy (2018)
This was rich, rewarding reading in the summer of 2023. Poignant, tender, set in India in the 1930's, it's the story of 'Myshkin' and his mother, Gayatri, who leaves her home and marriage, seen mainly through Myshkin's eyes and through Gayatri's letters.
58. Becoming Pakeha - A journey between two cultures, John Bluck (2022)
Reflecting on his own upbringing in Nuhaka, Northern Hawke's Bay, Aotearoa New Zealand, John Bluck uses his own experience of living and working alongside Maori people to suggest a path ahead for Pakeha, in conversation with Maori. The book is never strident but nonetheless is clear about the need for Pakeha to bend, to reflect, to see their own privilege for what is and has been, and to change. Bluck refers to his own ecumenical experiences, to protests, to pastoral care and to friendships, all with a theologically informed mind and a gentle human spirit. While he refers to the Christian church and faith in some depth, the book is accessible in style and content to everyone, whatever their background. It can be seen as in continuity with Michael King's Being Pakeha (1985) and This Pakeha Life (2020), by Alison Jones.
59. Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham (1915). The longest book I've read for many years (700pp), this novel may not be in the top tier of novels in the English language, but in telling the story of Philip Carey (with some autographical inspiration), Maugham held my attention. He has penetrating insights into the sometimes irrational and agonizing dimensions of human love.
60. Gilbert - The man who was G. K. Chesterton, Michael Coren (1989)
An excellent biography of the author of Orthodoxy, All Things Considered and many other books.
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) - The author James Parker, in The Atlantic, gave this appraisal:
In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate...Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot's "The Hollow Men"; he was an anti-modernist...a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true...for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius. Touched once by the live wire of his thought, you don't forget it .. His prose ..[is] supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) "earthquake irony". He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.
