2007-03-19 Travel without leaving your armchair

I love books that take me somewhere I wasn't expecting to go. I also like personal recommendations about which authors to explore next. There are too many books to choose from (and so few of them represented in high street book shops) so it's lovely to have Penny Williams introducing me to the work of Bill Tilman (whom she met when she was ten years old) or Tim Rich make me want to order a copy of Hilaire Belloc's collected works. I'm also reading 'Lost in Music' by Giles Smith because Tom Wilcox was so passionate about it in his Common Ground chapter (which is so funny that you'd best not read it in public). As a northener moved south, I lapped up Roger Horberry's chapter on Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar and his own poignant tale of shifting from the top England to the bottom and back again.
With each chapter you never know what you're going to discover. Some are the kind of reviews you'd expect to read in literary supplements. Others are fiction. Still more explore territory which borders on performance art. Some tell fascinating personal stories. Each one gives you something new to consider. This is a book which makes me want to see more of Britain, reducing my carbon footprint and spending all my holidays taking the train to parts of my country that I've missed so far.
Perhaps it'll even encourage you to visit Middlesbrough, once you've read the chapter on FW Lister. (I wrote that one.)