Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms What are you reading?

The Ghost Of Flight 401.

A true story about the crash of a Jumbo Jet (flight 401) over the Everglades and the apparitions seen by flight crews including pilots, in planes where salvaged parts were fitted.

Re reading the Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan" series, in chronological sequence, rather than publishing sequence.
Sobering, particularly his novel on the fall out between Japan and the USA - today read China and the USA and his novel on the consequences of a modified Ebola virus attack on the USA by Iran, today read a modified corona virus.

Ah! Terry Pratchett. Sorely missed.

I think I have read the entire Discworld series. I used to buy one every time I borded a plane. If I didn't finish it on the outward flight I did on the way home. I always looked in the airport bookshops to see if a new one had come out. Sadly I don't still have them all but I probably still have 20 or more, the rest I have either given away or lost along the way. I must start reading them again, particularly the early ones that I have not read for a long time.

The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs by Tristan Gooley (pseudonym?). Fascinating book on how to read the environment you're walking through. It's got us looking at things very differently and taking much more notice when out walking.

Hotel California; Singer- Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons, 1967 - 1976
By Barney Hoskyns

The definitive guide to the West Coast music scene. Interviews and eye witness testimony detailing the intertwining careers and lives of
Joni Mitchell, CSNY, Eagles, Jackson Browne et al

Fascinating stuff.

The Last Hundred Days, a novel about Romania and Ceausescu. By Patrick McGuiness.Also The Woman Warrior. Maxine Hong Kingston

Isabel & the Sea by George Millar. A voyage through the Canals of France to the Mediterranean. The thing is Millar and his wife Isabel took their 30 ton ketch on this voyage from England to Greece in 1946 when Europe was a war ravaged wreck. If you've read Maquis or Horned Pigeon then this is what happened next to our war hero. Good writing and great for those of us who want to escape into another's adventure. Out of publication but you can pick up a copy on Amazon.

It's been a while since I read the book "The Rings of Saturn" by the German-English author W.G. Sebald. Wikipedia writes:

The Rings of Saturn. An English Pilgrimage[1] is a prose work by the German-British author W. G. Sebald from 1995. The theme is a 6-day walk in August 1992 through a region on the east coast of England, which is connected in various ways with historical events and biographical developments not only in England. One year after the journey, the first-person narrator begins to complete his notes and to bring together the research conducted before and after the journey. The result is a travelogue which, while also following tourist, above all historical and biographical contexts that link the march landscape of Suffolk with "calamities" of world history[2] on almost every continent on earth.
The rings of Saturn connect the visible with the almost invisible, with the repressed, forgotten and under the weight of the present. This work, together with Sebald's novel Austerlitz, which pursues a similar aim, is one of the main works[3] of the author, who died in 2001. In them, the literary figure of the journey and the research connected with it became the "generative principle"[4].

Here is the link to the shortened English version of Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rings_of_Saturn

I want to share it because it is one of the most beautiful and impressive books I have read. One gets between reading and daydreaming.

And on that recommendation I have just ordered a copy, Heinz. Looking forward to reading it.

I’m a big fan of Millar too. You can follow that one up with his other two sailing books - A white boat from England and Oyster River (which is about his beautiful boat Amokura in the Morbihan). See here as a Brokerage boat when she was for sale through Sandeman’s http://www.sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk/yacht/79/50ft-Fred-Shepherd-Yawl-1939