A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 4000 unique visitors each month. So far 212 book reviews have been published.
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 We have just come back from The Black Forest, having driven across France from Dieppe to Strasbourg and then into Germany, staying for a week in a very comfortable rented house in Titisee-Neustadt – a place I would recommend to anyone who appreciates wonderful scenery and all the facilities of a lakeside resort.
Before I left I borrowed a copy of Germania by Simon Winder. I was intrigued by the subtitle, A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, as I tend to enjoy quirky travel books. However, while this book is definitely quirky, it is also a vast compendium of German history and culture, combining anecdote, travelogue, history and personal reminiscences in a very readable style, amounting to about 450 pages.
Simon Winder seems to have acquired all the information contained in this book the hard way – by slogging through the country from north to south, year after year, visiting castles, cathedrals and museums wherever he went, collecting as much information as he could. Whereas most of us would look cursorily around such places before moving on to the next location, Simon seems to have made a personal study of each site, obviously buying the guidebooks and then working out the connections with other places and other times – in other words he is a “synthesiser” who has brought together a vast array of information in order to create this substantial volume.
His background reading was also about as comprehensive as one could expect (seven pages of bibliography), and this has led to a book which while being in places very funny (in the humorous sense), it also seems authoritative.
Continue reading Review: Germania – Simon Winder
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 Ever since Jerome K Jerome had such a phenomenal and long-lasting success with Three Men In A Boat, other travellers have written humorous accounts of their exploits, increasingly so in recent years. There seems to be a vast market for these books, and I enjoy reading them from time to time, usually as light relief from my heavy schedule of more serious books. The range available is vast: there are accounts of going to live in foreign countries (e.g. Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde), taking on ridiculous challenges (e.g. Tony Hawkes, Round Ireland With A Fridge) or just humorous travel journals (e.g. Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice).
Chris Stewart’s books are firmly in this category, and I can say they are among the best. Ever since his hugely successful Driving Over Lemons, Chris has charmed us with his light-hearted approach to seemingly impossible challenges. I remember reading “Lemons” during a period of commuting to London in a cold winter and turning away from views across Battersea to Chris’s descriptions of Andalucia, which helped me forget that I was about to join the “I did not know death had undone so many” hoards scurrying over Waterloo Bridge.
Chris Stewart is a little like Michael Palin, in that he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, an ideal travel companion, even on the printed page. John McCarthy interviewed him on Radio 4′s Excess Baggage last week about his new book Three Ways to Capsize a Boat and clearly Chris is a generous-minded man, given to self-deprecation and complete lack of boasting. I had this book on my “to be read pile” at the time, and as I injured my knee last Sunday and was pretty much bed-ridden from Monday to Wednesday, I decided to promote “Three Ways” to the top of the pile and see if Chris could lighten my mood as he did those years ago while on the commuter train.
Continue reading Review: Three Ways to Capsize a Boat – Chris Stewart
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 For those who like in-depth accounts of epic journeys, Shadow of the Silk Road is perfect. No Bryson or Palin-style humour here, rather a serious traveller of the old-school, who does it the hard way, pushing into remote, forbidding regions, taking risks in a way which suggests he has given up on life itself, Colin Thubron provides us with adventure by proxy, and draws us into his travels, making us feel we are catching glimpses of places no Westerner has visited before.
It goes without saying that Thubron writes well. This is literate travel writing which does not attempt to woo the reader with humour or pointless anecdotes. Every word is there for a purpose, and this is a book to be read slowly and savoured.
The journey is fascinating. Through northern China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, then through Iran and into Turkey, we visit places which are definitely off the tourist trail. Thubron had to work hard to get past border posts and pushed his luck with renegade officials to a startling degree, in order to get into the heart of tribal lands, where the reader feels he will find it hard to leave in one piece. His descriptions of landscape are magnificent – we can feel the desolation of the Gobi desert, and he uses more adjectives to describe mountain ranges than I would have thought possible. We read of the time of change which has come to these lands, but frankly, this is nothing new for them, for Thubron tells us of their troubled pasts, with marauding armies constantly laying waste and altering boundaries until the rise of the next dispensation. The people he describes seem to have survived constant massacre and genocide, and yet retained their culture, their language and their physical characteristics.
Continue reading Review: Shadow of the Silk Road – Colin Thubron
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