Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is a daring and endlessly inventive portrait of the iconoclastic composer. Penman’s skill lies in his total disregard for tired cliches and tropes of music criticism, while perfectly combining the highbrow and the lowbrow – a digression on Les Dawson shows why he might just be our greatest writer on music.
The Book of Bogs, edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw, draws together many environmental writers and poets – Amy Liptrot, Robert Macfarlane, Horatio Clare – in response to threats against the Walshaw Moor peatlands of West Yorkshire that inspired writers such as Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes (and yours truly). Most here agree windfarms are a good thing; Saudi companies indiscriminately plundering richly biodiverse landscapes less so. It’s an essential celebration of something that once gone can never be recovered.
Silliness is important in life, too, and the 1956 novel The Ascent of Rum Doodle by WE Bowman is very silly indeed. A satire on the machismo of mountaineering and colonial British arrogance, it outdoes Monty Python before it/they even existed. (Rum Doodle, incidentally, is the mountain in question, measuring precisely 40,0001/2 ft.)
