The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Southwest Coast path

My wife and I spent our holidays in Cornwall a few years ago. We traveled from the north through Plymouth to the south of Cornwall and back up to Minehead, passing places named Lizard’s End, Mousehole, and Land’s End. We walked parts of the Coastal Path. The landscape is rough and beautiful.

I got a novel about this area, The Salt Path, a week ago. It has become a famous book. I read it on the back and then on the Internet. I loved the book. Immediately after finishing it, I bought its sequel, Wild Silence.

In The Salt Path, Raynor Winn tells how she and her husband walk the coastal path of Cornwall that I had seen parts of that summer. They follow Paddy Dillon, a travel writer and experienced hiker who followed the path a few decades before them. Dillon wrote a book about his trip, South West Coast Path—Plymouth to Poole.

Winn and her husband Moth have just gone bankrupt and lost their house to an untruthful friend, and Moth has been diagnosed with an incurable disease of the nerve system.

Their view of life changes as they follow the path. Strangely, Walking seems to improve Moth’s health.

Fowey, Cornwall
Fowey

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? – Raymond Carver

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

I was thinking how to formulate what it is that makes the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? so special. It may be the way Carver tells a story without making a point. Something is in the air but you don’t know what it is. Maybe it is similar to Haruki Murakami’s work, in that sense. Nothing is happening, but something is. Carver walks around it. You sense something. It becomes increasingly clear that there is something. But what?

Photo-nerd PS: the picture on the cover of the book is by Todd Hido.

Haruki Murakami – Een kat achterlaten

Haruki Murakami - Een kat achterlaten

Abandoning a Cat / Een kat achterlaten is een prachtig boek waarin Murakami over zijn vader schrijft. Af en toe zie je typische Murakami-thema’s terugkomen in de herinneringen die hij vertelt. De ietwat verloren mannen, een verwarrende oorlog in het verre en veel te grote China, sociaal onhandige personen, … veel stof voor de trouwe Murakami-lezer. Zeer mooi vormgegeven Nederlandse uitgave, gebonden op Japanse wijze, prachtig geïllustreerd door Marion Vrijburg.

A Curious Mind – Brian Grazer

I was not just a little annoyed when I finished A Curious Mind. I wrote a summary on the title page: “Summary: Be curious and do a lot of names-dropping.”

A Curious Mind

The book is quite entertaining but far from the books that normally get a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Grazer tells us about his curiosity process: his inexhaustible drive to visit people he admires, mostly very famous people, and have inquisitive conversations with them. (Except with Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, who does not want to talk to Grazer and it portrayed as a single minded unpleasant person.)

A huge pile of names-dropping forms the basis of Grazer’s stories. He meets the greats of the world and all of them becomes his friends. It is annoying at page 30, and becomes unbearable throughout the rest of the book.

If you are interested in movies and Hollywood, you may find it all interesting, but for someone searching for the curiosity learnings it is hard to digest.

Curiosity gives meaning to life. It makes you pay attention to others. I gives you a determination to act.