Transition Book Week

Summer is here!  The sun is shining, the holidays are coming, and whatever we've got lined up for the (hopefully) hot days ahead, here on the blog, we're all thinking about that favourite subject of the glossy magazines and sunday supplements - the ideal holiday read!

This week on the blog, we have a hand-picked selection of hot summer books - do let us know via the comments box if you've enjoyed any of the books we've chosen, or if you've got a favourite of your own you'd like to share.

I'll start our book week with three of my contenders.

I'm a restless reader and need to have a few books on the go at any one time - possibly because my children rarely let me have very long to really get into any single book.  But later in the summer we'll be going to Ireland to see the family and there will be enough aunts, uncles and cousins around to entertain the kids and I'm hoping to finish Molly Scott Cato's challenging Green Economics.  If that sounds like an unlikely holiday read, you have to remember that I'm a bit of a fact-geek and this will be ideal for me, especially in the first few days of the holiday when I haven't yet fully wound down from work.  I described the book as "challenging", not because it's difficult or academic - far from it - but because I'm hoping that she will convince me that a different kind of economics can and does exist.  If she does, I'll come back fired up and ready for action!

I'm also taking Mark Thomas' Belching out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola, just the kind of funny-angry polemical ranting I really love.  The way of life we take for granted is often built on a kind of fairy tale, where everything we do is without consequence and we can do what we like for ever.  Scratch under the surface, and the truth behind what we take for granted can really shock us.  It's books like this that really shake us out of our complacency, and will probably be full of good stories for winning arguments too!

After a week on the west coast of Ireland though, I'll be totally chilled out, and that's when I'll be bringing out Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist, or more specifically his poem "Lovers on Aran".  We were married in a tiny church in the wild Burren landscape of County Clare, one of the most beautiful places in the world.  This poem was read instead of a more traditional scripture reading, and as the title suggests is both about the geography of landscape and of human emotion.  Sometimes a book and a place together make up more than the sum of the parts, and for me, this is one such alignment.

So that's me packed and ready.  Now, where's that suncream gone...