The Three Peaks Training Diary has been following the team’s progress and our next entry comes from Colin MacGregor, TRO volunteer and Managing Director of Alexander MacGregor, who are kindly sponsoring the minibus for the trip.

The Three Peaks Team has just seven weekends left to cram in some serious exercise before the challenge commences on June 30th. Ten days ago, as part of Sam’s carefully programmed training regime, the team conquered Snowdon –albeit at a leisurely pace. All agreed it was a doddle but next time we attempt the climb, on Sunday 1st July at about 1pm, it will be the third and final peak of the 24 hour challenge – and the clock will be ticking relentlessly towards the deadline. It’s just possible that tired legs might be a little less willing (or able) to carry us swiftly up and down the highest peak in Wales.

And so, as the ‘oldie’ on the team and determined to succeed in the mission, a bit of extra-curricular training seems like a good idea. I’ve made the odd foray into the Welsh hills over the past couple of months – in snow, rain and some unseasonably warm March sun. Last Sunday I returned to one of my favourite walks at Llantisilio Mountain, a few miles west of Llangollen. Unlike Snowdon though, I met just one other walker all morning! At just short of 600metres this is not a big climb, but the ridge walk is really rewarding with some beautiful views of the River Dee, The Clwydian range and (on a clear day) Snowdon. And believe it or not, with a nod to the forthcoming adventure, the walk includes three peaks. At the end of the morning’s exertion, a pint of foaming ale at The Sun in the village of Rhewl helped stave off any risk of dehydration – perfect.

So will I be ready for the 3 Peaks? I don’t know. My knees worry me. So for the next few weeks training will step up and Housman’s Reveille, from A Shropshire Lad (and yes I am a Shropshire lad!), will continue to get me out of bed – early:

Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Up, lad, up, ’tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
‘Who’ll beyond the hills away?’

Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.

Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.

Like everyone else on the team, I’m conscious that this is not just about the personal challenge of completing a gruelling 24 hours but more importantly about raising some serious money for The Reader Apprenticeship Programme. So for all our blog readers out there who haven’t yet sponsored the event – please support us now with a donation at http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/trothreepeaks.

If you think capitalism’s bad – mass privatisation, rising inequality, BT adverts – then, before you decide to collectivise your land, buy a tractor and denounce your next-door neighbour to the Securitate, you might first want to read Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums, set in 1970s Romania during Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist dictatorship. Muller was an eyebrow-raising (i.e. not Philip Roth) winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, but LGP’s unflinching depiction of the everyday horrors and banalities of life under the regime is enough to silence any Anglophone complaints about the supposed eccentricities of the awarding committee.

The novel, largely autobiographical, is told from the perspective of a female German-Romanian student who, along with her three male friends, comes to the attention of the secret police and is subjected to harassment, spying and interrogation. The sparse and sometimes enigmatic narration convincingly captures the psychological effects of living within a strictly circumscribed reality, in which individual thought and expression are oppressed.

It’s not a barrel of laughs – the narrative is driven largely by suicide, madness and despair – but the narrator, at once jaded and unworldly, gives the prose a captivating, deadpan quality: her ‘heart-beast’ leaps out of her chest and onto the floor; she observes her ex-SS father hacking at the ‘damn stupid plants’ in the garden; the factory workers in the city produce ‘tin sheep’ and ‘wooden melons’ with their provincial hands. LGPs could be read as a realist counterpart to George Orwell’s 1984, inhabiting a similar world in which your best friend can be your worst enemy, and in which the present tyranny seems to stretch on forever.

Self-expression and independent thought are virtually impossible in The Land of Green Plums, but the characters in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros face identity issues of a more extreme variety – namely, that everyone starts turning into rhinoceroses. First performed in Paris in 1960, seven years after the premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the two main characters in this play don’t have to wait around very long for a mystical appearance. A rhino comes crashing down the street, trampling a cat but leaving the Sunday-afternoon ennui largely intact: one character, asked what he thinks of the incident, remarks, ‘Well … nothing … it made a lot of dust …’

Soon, however, everyone’s at it, and the chaos and destruction intensify; the moral recrimination begins and the remaining humans form a mini-resistance to the violent occupation. The meaning of the play would have been fairly unambiguous to a Parisian audience in 1960, sixteen years after the end of the Nazi occupation of the city; the characters often speak in terms of collaboration and betrayal (‘I never would have thought it of him – never!’), whilst allowing themselves to give in to denial and resignation (‘we must move with the times!’).

Typically of absurdist theatre, the nightmarish and the comic are combined: in one horrific scene, which looks back to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and forward to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the character Berenger witnesses his best friend Jean turning into a rhinoceros; rapidly turning green and becoming hoarse, he renounces humanist values and cries out for ‘The swamps! The swamps!’ Later on, Berenger recognises the straw boater pierced on the horn of a recently transformed ex-human: ‘The Logician … a rhinoceros!!!’ ‘He’s still retained a vestige of his old individuality,’ observes his colleague of the disembodied head bobbing along the orchestra pit.

The characters in the play summon several discourses – logical, legal, medical, relativist – in order to explain and come to terms with their bizarre predicament, but all are shown to be inadequate. Where Rhinoceros ends with a flourish of humanistic defiance, however, no such consolation is offered in the work of the philosopher E. M. Cioran, who in his A Short History of Decay (1949) blames the human inclination toward belief and fanaticism for the sufferings of the world. Such nihilistic sentiments were probably not uncommon after the Second World War, especially if you’d spent most of the 1930s in Germany describing yourself as a ‘Hitlerist’ and expressing your support for the fascist Iron Guard back home. ‘Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his ideas into a god the consequences are incalculable,’ he writes after the war.

For those of us who embrace nihilism as a convenient excuse to sit around shrugging our shoulders and eating crisps, Cioran comfortingly assures us that ‘ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart,’ which, if true, certainly adds a sheen of philosophical respectability to watching Jeremy Kyle on a grey Tuesday afternoon. If you are feeling ennui-stricken and missing the rumble of rhinoceros hooves or of time tearing itself apart, then you could do worse than read Andrei Codrescu’s The Posthuman Dada Guide, written in the playful and subversive spirit of the movement that it celebrates.

The Romanian Tristan Tzara was one of the founders of Dadaism, which came to prominence during World War I – a time when ‘like a spectator watching splendid mannequins being outfitted for the evening by a tailor (Mr. History), Romania gathered the leftover scraps to make its own, rather improvised, suit from the elegant remnants,’ according to Codrescu, referring to its post-war acquisition of Transylvania and Bessarabia and resultant cultural variety. Like Cioran, the Dada artists and writers saw the modern world as inherently meaningless, but they celebrated rather than mourned this fact (which is possibly the crucial – if in this case achronological – difference between postmodernism and modernism). Romanian writers in the twentieth century seem constantly to be staring absurdity in the face, as Europe cracks up and realigns itself, then cracks up again; Romania joined the EU, with its promise of stability, in 2007, and may find itself caught in this cycle once more.

This was one of those book purchases that falls into my – or should I say ‘the,’ perhaps others will empathise – ‘I didn’t know anything about it but it just attracted me’ category. Its procurement from an obscure charity shop made my acquisition all the more mysterious, and the subsequent life experience that the book spilled perhaps seemed even more significant as a result of the lack of any prior knowledge  or preconceptions on my part.  I bought it in the summer holiday between the second and third year of my degree studies, one of the slightly unsettling and thrilling periods of time as a student in which I suddenly had bit of space to read what I wanted, and time to do so. My reading habits have always benefitted from a change of scene, and so back at my family home I sped through the pages of Guo’s novel, which tells the story of Zhuang (or ‘Z,’ as she introduces herself to others, anticipating the mispronunciation of her full name) who is sent from China to London by her parents to learn English.

Indeed, the change of scene I was subject to in moving home for the summer is somewhat incomparable to the experience of Z, who is thrust into the bustle and unfamiliarity of the unaccommodating capital city. Z’s narrative voice is a reflection of her own broken English and journey towards fluency, and although this aspect could potentially jar with some readers, for me it only served to make the book all the more compelling. Any novel that breaks away from conventional prose has often already won half the battle in endearing me just through doing so. Remarking upon the complexities of grammar, Z contests that in China, ‘We are bosses of our own language.’ But the narrative that is delivered undeniably presents her as very much in charge of English, too, albeit in a non-standard way. The unconventional word combinations and comments on everything from baked beans to the pub make the book what it is – an original, amusing, bittersweet understanding of the world and a chapter of a life.

At the centre of the novel is what is essentially a love story between Z and an –interestingly – an unnamed man. This is interwoven with snippets of Chinese history and culture, often told through Z’s accounts and recollections of her family and their life. I particularly liked the structure of the novel, with each chapter title an excerpt/definition from Z’s precious Chinese-English dictionary, which the following chapter is linked to in some way. Through this, the novel explores the relationship between rules, ideas and definitions on the one hand, and real life situations on the other, as Z’s perception of the world expands and is challenged. I found it difficult to bear witness to this, fictional though it may be, and not be prompted to re-assess my own perceptions and understanding on some level, too – one of the many powerful things that reading can do.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo, Chatto and Windus (2007)

All too often classic tomes are reduced in length and detail as to make them more accessible to the modern imagination.  Those who haven’t read Dickens’s Oliver Twist could be forgiven for not having heard of Rose Maylie – the orphan’s long-lost aunt.  Similarly, perhaps it is only Janeites (and those of us who are fans of Austen, but who can’t bring ourselves to use the J-word) who are au fait with Charlotte Lucas’s romantic dilemma in Pride and Prejudice.

Time has a habit of chopping away those fatty parts of a story it deems unpalatable. 

And so, the numerous adventures reserved for Gulliver have been discarded in the modern mind, bar one: his voyage to the land of Lilliput, with its six-inch tall inhabitants.  It is here that Swift employs his most scathing polemic on English society.  The triviality of war, the ineptitude of politicians (some things never change), and the insignificant details that separate church from church are all handled with the author’s typical wit and flair.

Perhaps it is Swift’s critique of the feud between the Catholic Church and the Church of England that is most worthy of mentioning.  Here we read that all Lilliputians originally split their eggs open by cracking the big end, and are subsequently known as big-endians.  But there were those who decided to give the small end a whirl, converting (as it were) to small-endians.  The two factions separated, with the small-endians becoming dominant and their counterparts being denounced and marginalised.  If there is a more accurate or memorable satire on the trifling nature of religion, I am yet to read it.

For those of you who know me already, I do a lot of commuting between Preston and Liverpool to get to The Reader so I can do my bit for the communications team. And put plainly, commuting is the worst. Sitting on tin-can Northern trains and rattling through Lancashire to Merseyside in a cramped, overcrowded carriage can become quite onerous. If it wasn’t for a Thermos full of steaming coffee, Twitter on my phone, and a good book, I wouldn’t make it past Wigan.

I decided that a book would be my greatest ally in such circumstances, and that I’d reread Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to get me through the first few journeys. I’ve read it once before; I was around 15 -16 years old and I read it to look cool mainly. I’d just started listening to real music with meaningful lyrics and began enjoying proper films, the classics. To my pretentious teen-self I looked very cool indeed on the bus to college, head buried in a definitive American novel. That being said, a lot of the novel escaped me, the plot ran rings around me. I was too concerned with the fashion of the novel to understand fully what it really was about America that Kerouac was presenting the world.

So, on the railroad, whizzing back and forth to The Reader, I have been quietly devouring the book and getting reacquainted with Jack Kerouac’s wild, mad America while traversing the wild, mad pastures of north-west England.

On The Road is a blend of fiction and autobiography. It follows Sal Paradise, a fictional representation of Kerouac himself, as he hurries exuberantly across America during the 40s and 50s in search of the American dream. On his travels he befriends a true madman, Dean Moriarty: a man with few limits; a man that finds awe in everything and everybody. Their unrelenting journey on the road to personal release and fulfilment is peppered with drink, drugs, sex and jazz: the ultimate modern, hedonistic cocktail.

“We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess–across the night…”

The novel reads like an outpouring of thought. Words spew off the page with unstoppable force, like thoughts falling out of Kerouac’s mind. He famously wrote On The Road in three weeks on a continuous, 120ft long manuscript made up of taped-together pieces of tracing paper which he called ‘the scroll.’ However, the published novel is the result of a mammoth creative process, the consolidation of the extensive scribblings and observations in Kerouac’s notebooks, which he used to capture his real-life experiences and the people he encountered on the road.

This type of spontaneous prose is the ideal accompaniment for journeys. Guiding myself through the epic sentence structures, the lengthy descriptions of hitch-hiked car journeys, heavy parties and almost preternaturally long jazz sessions carried me from Preston to Liverpool and back again in no time at all.

Sal’s time on the road – the result of a feeling ‘that everything was dead’ – spans years. He settles sporadically, but can’t resist the free life. The novel catapults him across America as if time is subordinate: something that inevitably passes by, but something that mustn’t get in the way of experience. All the themes explored by the characters’ actions converge throughout the story. Isolation and alienation, detachment, possession and freedom: this is all of America, past and present, in 290 pages.

A reading of On The Road will make you yearn for fresh experiences. Rereading the book on a crowded commuter train, leaving Lancashire in my wake, I longed for the wide-open vistas of America; the expansive black roads stretching beyond the horizon; the blistering seats of an old Cadillac; a mad friend, with whom I could experience all that life has to offer…  I don’t mean this literally – because I can’t drive and can be a very car-sick passenger – but in essence. On The Road instils a sense of possibility in the reader, that there are an infinite amount of experiences out there to be experienced. And at this time in my life – degree in hand, internship underway – new and exciting experiences are very much attainable…

On the Road, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Classics (1957/2000)

‘They are honest insects, butterflies. They may get one’s attention with spots and swirls, great flourishes of colour, displays of dazzling brilliance. One does not have to look all that closely, however, to see how fragile that beauty is, how it is held together by the worm that it once was, and will be again.’

This beautifully written book tells of loss, life, love and something approximating love. Set in the north of Ireland in the 1800’s, the story is made up of parts of a fractured whole, brought together through its varied ‘tellings’, its diverse time-zones, its different authors. There is Maddie, speaking to a different generation from her place in a nursing home of her time as a servant in ‘the Castle’. Then there is her Mistress, Harriet, who, despite being the authoritative voice of the castle, struggles with parental authority, particularly in instilling respect and discipline in her children. Trying to teach them ‘lessons’, Harriet takes to locking them in the ‘wardrobe room’ for a time, a windowless room with nothing to do but think – a harsh precursor of ‘time-out’. It is in this room, during a period of thinking on the crime that has warranted the punishment, that her young daughter, Charlotte, tragically dies. We learn of Harriet’s story through the pages of a diary she kept during her incarceration in prison for Charlotte’s murder, but it reappears constantly in the telling of Maddie’s story to Harriet’s grandchild, Anna. ‘It’s an odd thing, isn’t it’, says Maddie, ‘the way the past has no interest for the young till it comes galloping up on the back of the future.’

I read with women at a Belfast prison every Wednesday. There was recently some fascination with a dull humming sound coming from high up in our reading room, which turned out to be a wasp. A really big wasp. It was tired, presumably locked in, a prisoner itself, but faring poorly in its unnatural surroundings. We were wondering, quite selfishly, if it had any fight left, whether it would sting us or not. Despite its intimidating size, it was not interested in us. It merely wanted freedom, and every ounce of its strength went into fighting that battle at a window that will never open. From her own prison cell, Harriet remembers her butterfly collection, her caged little bits of ‘sky’.

‘How hard the smallest of creatures will try for life. Constantly under threat, they devise new methods for survival. Everything they do is for the continuation of the species: to mature, to reproduce, to die. One aim, one goal in mind, so beautifully simple. I wonder, have I succeeded or failed? I am better than what I have done, than the one act for which I have been reviled, will be remembered.’

So too, are the women in that room. I wouldn’t necessarily read The Butterfly Cabinet with my group – not because it’s not a great read, because it really is. I would read it with everyone who has not been in prison. They need it more. It challenges the reader to think from a range of perspectives – same story, different interpretations, different emotions, different readings – The Butterfly Cabinet could metonymically represent the kinds of things that happen in shared reading groups all over, in all environments; the intersections of life stories, the retrieval of all the parts, the identification of the self in them, the fitting of the pieces together, and a need, a desperate need, to make sense.   

 The Butterfly Cabinet, Bernie McGill, Headline (2011)

Orlando Orange and the Big Scary Bear was an exciting story. The story was about a bear and an onion and an orange. Orlando went into the forest even though he was scared and he got the ball back.

I liked it all. There was nothing I didn’t like. I liked Ozzy Onion best because he was really funny when he kicked the ball. The pictures were really nice. I like the stickers best of all.

I would like to read Charlie Chilli next.

By Cameron, aged 6.

Last time we headed to Ireland to learn all about the most famous of saints; now it’s off to a country not that different in name but definitely a little further afield (and even colder): the Nordic European island country of Iceland.

In August 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – better known as UNESCO – appointed its fifth City of Literature. Lining up alongside Edinburgh, Melbourne, Iowa City and Dublin as a centre of culture, creativity and above all, a beating heart of vibrant literary activity (of both writers and readers; past and present) is Reykjavik, the capital city of Iceland. The prestigious title is not given lightly; each City of Literature must be “dedicated to pursuing literature on a local level, engaging citizens in a dynamic culture of words” as well as representing literature on an international scale, establishing and creating literary links within all four corners of the world. That’s a lot of responsibility to take on, even for a nation of voracious readers.

It’s surprising that Reykjavik has not been awarded the accolade much sooner as if there was ever a city whose very foundations were built upon literature, then Reykjavik is it. Indeed the heritage of Iceland as a whole is tightly bound up with works that are considered to be landmarks of literature not only in their homeland but globally. The Sagas of Icelanders -Íslendingasögur as they are known in their mother tongue – have masterfully and rather spectacularly preserved the rich history of the country from its very beginnings, charting the migration, settlement, struggles and triumphs of the earliest inhabitants to Iceland. In turn, the Sagas intricate detail, breathtaking scope and – first and foremost – the great and timeless stories they tell have become just as significant a part of the country‘s heritage as the archiving of the ancestors that are recounted within.

Despite their almost overwhelming breadth – taking in events from the 10th and 11th century and being compiled as written volumes up until the 1500s – the Sagas are a perfect example of pure and exceptionally captivating storytelling, containing several key ingredients and plot twists that are central to any classic piece of literature, retaining all the excitement of fiction within a factual prose history. What makes the Sagas specifically as engaging and emphatic as the fire-and-ice country they are attached to is the fact their ‘characters‘ were all real, living, breathing people. More precisely they revolve around families; you don‘t have to watch Corrie or Eastenders to know that the family unit provides the biggest amounts of heartwarming joy and heartwrenching pain – and the Sagas certainly pack an incredibly dramatic punch. It isn‘t hard to chart the influence of the Sagas of Icelanders upon classic and modern literature alike; surely they are the predecessors of such legendary tales as Lord of The Rings (indeed, Tolkien admitted being greatly influenced by another bedrock of Icelandic literature, the vastly more mythological Poetic Edda) and the recent fantasy family-saga phenomenon A Song of Ice and Fire series. And as they‘ve been deemed “as tragic as Shakespeare, as colourful as The Canterbury Tales, as enduring as Beowulf, [and] as epic as The Iliad”, we can certainly see why the Sagas are regarded worldwide as a literary masterpiece, as enchanting and widely-read today as in centuries gone by.

Another factor that sets the Sagas of Icelanders apart from many vast historical texts that can be hard to get to grips with – instead marking them very much as something identifiable and real – comes with their presentation. Owing to the fact that before they were transcribed and put onto paper, they originated in the most traditional form of storytelling – being told and re-told through speech – the resulting prose has an untarnished clarity and straightforward narrative, making their drama all the more compelling. Icelandic literature has a particularly strong oral-based historical tradition, with both the Sagas and the aforementioned Poetic Edda being passed from generations through literal word of mouth. Iceland has been leading the way in read-aloud revolution for quite some time, and it has had quite an impact: it’s hardly a coincidence to learn that the Icelandic language is one of the most unchanged languages in the world, hardly transforming since the settlement of the Sagas’ protagonists in the country in the 9th century, and this is in large part due to the tradition of Icelandic literature being primarily spoken. The country’s literature – specifically the Sagas, read both in their original form and translated by various sources – goes hand in hand with its language, with each cultivating the other and the two put together cultivating a very strong sense of national identity and pride.

Even though Reykjavik is the heart of Iceland’s literary life – being home to the bi-annual and world renowned Reykjavik International Literary Festival, as well as the majority of Iceland’s publishing houses – a love of literature flows right through the country; hardly surprising when you consider the fact more books are written, published and sold per person per year in Iceland than in any other country in the world. To crunch numbers, five titles are published per every 1,000 Icelanders, double the rate for other Nordic countries [Source: Statistics Iceland; UNESCO]. Not only that, but on average it is estimated that one in ten Icelanders will go on to publish their very own work of literature in their lifetime. Impressive stats indeed, and one would suspect that there’s more than a few successors to Halldór Laxness and Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson in their midst.

Perhaps the nation’s affinity with literature in the modern day can be most closely linked to a yearly reading frenzy that is not specifically organised but has instead grown out of tradition and is now one of the most eagerly awaited reading-related events in the country. Iceland’s already booming publishing industry steps up a few more gears between October and December, heralding the lovely sounding ‘jólabokaflód’. This word translates to an idea that is even lovelier in concept, the Book-Flood-Before-Christmas (doesn’t it put images in your head of cascading waterfalls, gushing geysers and volcanos erupting with books rather than travel disrupting ash? Maybe that’s just me…). The pre-Christmas rush is big business everywhere but it’s in this time period that the city of Reykjavik is awash with a sea of books and all kinds of special events that help promote the act of reading, including writers being temporarily employed as shop assistants in bookstores and public readings taking place right across town. Given that books are clearly for life and not just for Christmas here (although they are the most popular Christmas present in the country), Reykjavik and Iceland as a whole most definitely deserves its award as a country flying the flag for literature love.

Here he is, a pocket sized Ray Mears. Well, ok, a racist, imperialist,  17^th Century version of Ray Mears, who actually, if you go by the picture in my hard-backed copy, looks rather like a distant relative of Lady Gaga. Lord Crusoe, ripped, bearded and wild eyed like Nooky bear, with a tan that makes David Dickinson look as though he bathes daily in the milk of a very white ass, is resplendent in goat-fur culottes, with matching gilet, sporting on top of his head what looks like a coconut squashed into a furry pencil case.  To accessorise, he carries a gun, which let’s be honest is bigger than Friday, the grateful ‘native’ who prostrates at Robinson’s hobbity toes, in thanks for being rescued from … Oh, I can’t tell you that! The gun is probably the contemporary equivalent of a man driving a Ferrari.  However, since Freud hadn’t been born by then, we can dispense with the phallic symbolism.

Daniel Defoe’s grand title for this ripping sea-farer’s log is that of ‘The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe –Mariner.’ This is highly misleading and should be changed for ‘Robinson Crusoe -Marooner’ for in the grand scheme of things, he really doesn’t do that much sailing. I’m not going to spoil it for you, you will probably need some sea-sickness tablets at the start. However, you really should read this book for a freeing picture of life without twitter, mobiles, Google, or people!  You can instead catch your own parrot and teach it to talk and if you like you can also maim a few goats and keep them as pets. As a vegetarian, I did not like this book; as a thinking, feeling human being, I loved this book. Crusoe has a way of sharing his thoughts and feelings with you, that at times it was like a crab of emotion had pincered my heart. It was gripping, sudden and made me gasp.

On one of his dark night(s) of the soul (there are quite a few), when he finds a footprint in the sand, he is thrown into a bubbling swamp of paranoia and fear:

“… I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.” 

I knew exactly how he felt on my own dark Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, when a guy tried to break into my house at 2.00 in the morning. (Funnily enough, he had un-nerving Nooky bear eyes too!) I mean, dear reader, I live in the countryside, where these things don’t happen… I stared out of the window long after he had gone, convinced that the dark, strange outline of my wheelie bin was him, hunkered down, underneath the kitchen windowsill, waiting to pounce.  Crusoe became my new BFF as we joined together in the warmth of a soothing bubble bath the next day and merged our doom-laden cogitations of our demises.  He really was a good guy to have around, because whilst I went and stayed on my friend’s sofa for a couple of days until the heebies had found the jeebies and left.  Poor ole Robin had to stay on his own, with no escape from the Island and sweat it out. I drew strength and inspiration from his courage and wondered if it was humanly possible for me to dig a moat in 24 hours? In the end, it turned out ok for me, and for Robinson? It turned out – sorry, can’t tell you that either!

This is a story of survival, ingenuity, resourcefulness, hope, desperation, faith and adventure. Read it to escape, read it to wonder, read it to despair at the brutality and horrors of slavery, read it to make friends with the faithful Friday and see the world through his eyes, but most of all, read it for the description of Robinson’s inner island –a modern day metro-sexual is our Crusoe –you will not be disappointed. (If you are, boo ya sucks! There is always Heat Magazine for ‘Castaway-Chic’ inspiration)

 Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, Penguin Classics (1719/2003)

I bought this book about two years ago and it has been rising and sinking my slush pile of books ever since. Over the Christmas break I finally sat down to read it.

This book tells the story of the town of Oran, in Algeria in the 1940s, and the struggle of its citizens to combat an outbreak of bubonic plague. Although the clue is very much in the title, and from the first page you may feel as if you know what is coming next, each chapter still manages to build surprise and suspense.

The novel is narrated by an unknown person, who is recounting the effect of the plague upon the town. It brings together straight narrative with information from the notebooks of the mysterious Tarrou, a visitor to Oran who happens to be caught up in the outbreak.

As the people of Oran become prisoners placed under quarantine, each must deal with the separation from those they love, caused by both physical distance and by death. Each must come to terms with what life was like before the plague and what it may be like afterwards.

The largest and most imposing character however, is the Plague itself, which develops its own relationship with those living within its grasp and those that are absent, transforming what may at first seem to be a predicable story into a deeper meditation on life, death, separation and the passage of time.

It is a novel which holds up a mirror up to how we may choose to live in sickness and in health. Not a light read, but one that I would certainly recommend.

The Plague, Albert Camus, Penguin Classics (1947/2002)