My Dad has a new book out on 24th April 2008, called Living on purpose. I was back over at my parents a few weeks ago and Dad was kind enough to give me a copy which I have read already. It’s really excellent and if you are interested at all in life’s bigger questions, [...]
John Hill of A Daily Dose of Architecture Tagged me with this meme;
1. Pick up the nearset book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book on page 123.
3. Find the Fifth Sentance.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
Due to my daughters age and strong hands, all books which I used [...]
Junichiró Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows
In the West we chase light, air and openness, as naturally as a flower turns towards the sun. However Junichiró Tanizaki writes about a Japanese sensibility for shadows, or the interior in its widest sense. He writes with the touch of the great writer he was and with [...]
The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa
Rarely is a book about Architecture able to transcend its subject and become a poetic trip that re-evaluates human experience. Rarely as you read, particularly an architecture book, can the ideas as well as prose peel away a fog from your mind. Only a precious few books [...]
Northern Shores by Alan Palmer, A history of the Baltic Sea and its Peoples.
This book covers a potentially fascinating topic. The Northern Sea of Europe the Baltic compared to the more famous and glamorous Southern Sister the Mediterranean gets overlooked. But Its a worthy topic for a book to try to redress this balance a [...]
The scale and velocity of world population increase over the last fifty years has been unprecedented in human history. Urbanisation, with over a billion people living in cities has become the key signature of this growth, with the urban population for the first time greater than in the country. These facts are startling, if common [...]
The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt takes place in Venice, Berendt arriving just after the fire in the Fenice Opera House. The story of the burning down of the Fenice provides the backbone of the book, but other stories are intertwined, and much like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is [...]
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, is a beautiful novel about a grandaughter and grandmother living on an island in the Finnish Arpelago. This is one of Tove Janssons’ adult novels although she is much more famous as the creator of the moomins. This book however really deserves to be held up as a [...]
The Priest of Evil by Matti Joensuu The third of my reads from my Finnish reading list. This is classed as a crime thriller or maybe more accurately a police procedural. Set in Helsinki and written by Matti Joensuu who was actually a policeman with Helsinki Police force until his retirement. A series of [...]
Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi is a funny bitter-sweet story of a boy growing up in the town of Pajala in the Arctic circle. The coming of age story of Matti in which each chapter is a short story or vignette which stands up to reading on its own. However when combined together [...]
