One of the bookshelves
in my study. As it’s closest to hand, there’s usually a lot of research related
books on it, which are ever changing depending on what I’m working on. The
permanent features are the Oxford English Dictionary and trusty Thesaurus. My old desk was
rescued from a junk shop and the fully operational Bakelite phone was a find at
the Imperial War Museum. Mosey’s in charge of stationary (no make that stationery which he excels at) and
there’s usually a price to pay if I want to make use of the Moleskine notebooks
- nuzzling/grooming/treats, preferably all three and before his sister Bea gets
back.
A mish-mash of fiction
and non-fiction, if there’s a system to my bookshelves I’ve never figured out
what it is. A reaction perhaps to having once run a bookshop in Brighton where
it was my job to know the location of everything in stock. Perhaps I’ll sort
them one day. Having said that, this motley bunch snapped at random are all
(almost all) like ‘The Savage Kingdom’,
thematically related to the environment and/or the mysteries of our universe,
and include some really thought-provoking stuff: Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’, Coats’ Living Energies, H Mortimer Batten’s wonderful ‘Red Ruff’, and a very dog-eared ‘Alchemist’ (see below) which I first read in Sri Lanka in the
early 90s. And veggie or no, I think everybody should read ‘Eating Animals’ by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Also on the shelf, J G
Ballard’s ‘Vermilion Sands’ which I
adapted for TV (for the wonderful producer Jane Tranter) only to spend 10 years
watching it gather dust as no-one else ‘got it’. Jim loved my scripts however,
and I’ve a fax (remember those?) from him framed on my study wall. It’s there
to remind me to always try to enjoy the creative journey, as quite often you don’t get to actually reach the
intended destination! Jonathan Carroll’s
magical ‘The Land of Laughs’ is in there too. Another project I had hoped to
adapt for the big screen. Who knows, maybe one day I still will. Are you
listening Alex Kitman Ho? :)
Never tire of revisiting
Coelho’s classic. Deceptively simple, deliciously profound.
The Popular Science
Educator in 2 volumes. I spent many a winter’s night curled up with these as a
kid. Absolutely brilliant stuff covering everything from how clouds are made to
the internal workings of a combustion engine to ‘termite romance’! Do they make
‘em like this anymore? They should!
The giant keys are a
prop from my last stage play, a musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s
‘The Little Match Girl’. The books…
more H G Wells than you can shake a stick at. 24 titles in 12 Volumes for 35
shillings back when the printing press was still steam powered! OK. Not quite.
They were actually printed by Odhams in the 1920s and my dad brought a set in
the 50s. But given he was working two jobs just to pay the rent and keep food
on the table back then, it was quite a bold investment. ‘The Invisible Man’ was probably my first brush with sc-fi/fantasy,
so maybe that’s when the seeds were sown for my ‘Animalian’ novels. Thanks dad!
This blogpost was part of Simon's blog tour for the release of his new book The Savage Kingdom
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