Lord of the Flies by William Golding

This is a harrowing story that has as its central idea that we western humans are not the civilised beings we imagine ourselves to be. In the story, an aeroplane of schoolboys – no girls – crashes. Only the children survive and find themselves marooned on a tropical island. They have to work out what to do to survive. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.

I read this book when I was in Year 9 and although I have seen some amazing acts of kindness and selflessness in the years since then, I have also seen enough to make me think that William Golding is probably right in his assessment. This is not a fun read but it might make you resolve to work harder at being helpful.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransom

“BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN”

I was born in Barrow-in-Furness but left before I could talk. We moved round the country regularly. The only fixed thing in my life was coming to Barrow and the Lake District two or three times a year. This book helped me to pretend that I had a home here. It concerns 2 sets of children on holiday in the south of Cumbria between the wars and the adventures they got up to in the days before iPads and Facebook. You wouldn’t be allowed to do what they did – too dangerous. But the telegram quotation at the top in which their father gives them permission to sail on the lake on their own could be applied to anybody’s life, in my opinion. This is a book for younger children but I still go back to it. I want to live like they did.

They made a film of it this summer that also included aspects of Arthur Ransome’s amazing life. He was a spy during the Russian revolution, but was he working for us or them?

Warped Passages by Lisa Randall

So you understand 3-dimensions – up and down, side to side, in and out. Now add in time as a fourth dimension. That’s what you need to understand Einstein. He showed that these dimensions, including time itself, can be stretched. Now Lisa Randall, one of the world’s top Physics professors, has done research that shows that the maths that describes our universe works better in many more dimensions. String Theory seems to need an 11-dimensional universe. Lisa Randall’s own theory has us on a 4-dimensional membrane surrounded by a fifth dimension in which gravity can operate. It all sounds like Science Fiction but the theory predicts the existence of particles that might appear soon in the CERN experiment in Geneva. Lisa Randall is a great writer who explains difficult ideas with great clarity. She uses stories and allegories to get the ideas across. Don’t expect to understand it all at once but do let your mind be opened to the cutting edge of theoretical research in Physics.

A Month in the Country by J L Carr

At only just over 100 pages long, this novel is really an extended short story. It is set just after the First World War and is about an ex-soldier who was wounded in the war. As part of his recovery process, he is employed to travel to a village in the Yorkshire countryside. His job is to chip away at the walls of the church to find a hidden Medieval painting. In a way, this is a metaphor for him peeling away the layers of mess in his life to find his old self. I loved the book. It is about redemption and so is uplifting, but at the same time there is a sort of nostalgic melancholy feel that has a part in English culture. I love both aspects. 

Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss

This is a fabulous and entertaining book about punctuation! She starts with a problem set out in the title of the book. The addition of a single comma can totally change the meaning of a sentence because the words “shoots” and “leaves” have two meanings in English. Plants have leaves for photosynthesis and trees grow by sending out shoots which develop into branches. Pandas are vegetarians and so you can say that a panda eats shoots and leaves. But now add a comma: a panda eats, shoots and leaves. So a panda turns up, has a meal, fires a gun and walks out. The book is full of humorous examples like this.

Poems by R.S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the Anglicisation of Wales. The turning of Welsh culture into English culture is what is meant by the word Anglicisation here. He died in 2000 aged 87 having worked as a vicar all of his life. He was born into an English-speaking family and only learned to speak the Welsh language when he was 30 years old. His poetry is all in English. He was convinced that Englishness was ruining Wales.

I love his poems because they are blunt and terse. They are not jolly or fun. He paints a picture of a hard life – he and his wife lived without modern electrical appliances – but he seems to see a purity in that. His Welsh landscapes are like the Cumbrian farming landscapes (and remember that Cumbria gets its name because its inhabitants used to speak Welsh – Cymraeg – 1500 years ago). That purity made him think about his spiritual life.

So don’t read these poems for entertainment. Expect to be challenged and maybe changed. They are short so they can be read several times to help you to digest his ideas.

Supersense by Bruce Hood

This book is of particular interest to people studying Psychology, RE, Sociology and Biology.

Professor Bruce Hood has written a very accessible book trying to address the issue about why people have religious beliefs, written from a scientific point of view. He doesn’t just mean organised religions – most of the book focusses on superstitions that are common to so many adults. He argues that we are hard wired towards such beliefs and that we learn to be more rational and scientific as we grow up. But don’t go thinking that he is going to defend religion – he points out that people like me will be reading the book hoping that our religious beliefs will be justified scientifically. He is trying to understand why people believe and whether there is a biological advantage to such beliefs.