Update to the summer reading list

Verity

How could I have forgotten one of the best travel books I've ever read? I'm looking at it right now. "A Fez of The Heart" by Jeremy Seal. One mans wanderings through Turkey looking for the banned fez and the people he meets along the way. You won't want to put it down, I guarantee.

Also, Gavin Young's "Slow Boats to China" and "Slow Boats Home". What a compelling writer he is!

Augustus

Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown. The author returns to Sweden after having lived there in the 1970s.

Sweden, one of the first modern bureacratic states, was always efficiently run from the centre, while until recently, most of its people were only a few generations away from living off the land, so the disciplines of frugality and solidarity were still ingrained. But nowerdays, social cohesion is wilting under the pressure of consumerism, mass immigration and globalisation. Obesity is a problem for the first time.

Brown has written an idiosyncratic and enjoyable memoir of the fall of the New Jerusalem of the Left. More a cult book than one just for anglers.

Max Kaye

The Wind in the Willows should be read every couple of years or so.

If you haven't read it for some time, enjoy it this summer by the Windrush, the Avon, or some other lovely river bank in this green and pleasant land.