Books like River, Coast and Creek — picked by fans

Pub walks books are common enough.

You drive there and tie in a walk with a visit to the pub. This is different. You paddle to the pub.

Over two dozen routes in the southeast of England are suggested, between Cambridge and Southampton, some to popular river or canal destinations, some more off the beaten track. Much attention is paid to the interests of kids.

The trips are graded by scenery, length, time, difficulty level, National Trust properties, castles, and canoe hire availability, with attention paid to people with physical difficulties or needing to rely on trains.

I have to declare an interest in this one, being involved in the layout of the content.

Faced with publishing debts after their boys' adventure magazine failed, two young men, the author, and James Adams, undertook a kayak expedition in the mid-1930s up the Scottish west coast from the Clyde to Mull, raising funds by selling reports to the press.

They learned much of the remote and deprived Highland economy, which stood the author in good stead later, editing the Daily Record and The Scotsman.

A long trip, including helping to take in the harvest in the autumn, it involved canvas kayaks, kilts, and buying provisions from farms, much more onerous than kit for present-day expeditions.

Originally published as Quest by Canoe, this version includes significant extra material, including press cuttings.

In 1983 the 47-year-old fell runner Joss Naylor set a record of 19 hours 14 minutes for touching all 27 relevant lakes in the Lake District.

His astonishing time for this 169km run still stands. This was not on the flat, of course, but often over rough country, involving over 6km of vertical height gain.

He had to prepare his support team, find his own route and have witnesses at each lake in the days before mobile phones or satnav. The author walked the route in 2020 with a photographer and Joss in 10 days, still not hanging about for a man in his 80s.

Joss chose to donate his royalties for this inspirational book to the Brathay Trust, which helps the disadvantaged, match funded by publishers Cicerone.

This autobiography opens looking from the start line at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

A long book with a lot of detail, the pace hardly seems to drop. The author used some unconventional methods in his training, including on the sea, not usual for a sprint kayak racer.

This was on the Ayrshire coast when the M6 was still under construction and regular national squad training weekends were never north of Birmingham. Back home with his family, he also ran a local training group.

The title has a double meaning as he began manufacturing the world-renowned Lendal paddles, with further travel issues. The innovations had to be perfect, again with original thinking.

He produced the world's first GRP shafts and split paddles and handled issues of composite blades, cranks, aerofoils, and curved shafts.

This is a book that says 'can do' and does all the way through.

I have admired Macfarlane’s exquisite prose through book after book, though this book, his second, holds a special place in my heart.

Having lived for 10 years in the UK—on a rather wild peninsula—I have traveled through some of the landscapes the author describes with a passion that is personal, universal, precise, and magical. I share with Macfarlane a love for what he calls “the lost words,” as well as a reverence for words he has “found” in this book: beechwood, moor, river-mouth, ridge, and holloway.

I am drawn instantly to a writer who begins a book with, “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood.” It was a joy to travel with this eloquent writer as he rediscovers wildness, a search I imagine as possible, day by day.

Originally published in 1970, this was another foundational text for me and other witchcraft scholars of my generation.

It grew out of Macfarlane’s doctoral thesis focusing on Essex, which had been supervised by Keith Thomas, whose own great book, Religion and the Decline of Magic (much of which dealt with witches), came out the following year. Even then, the historian Macfarlane was on his way to becoming an anthropologist – a transition visible on every page of this fascinating book.

But its overriding character is that of a work of sociology. Social science models helped to impose interpretative order on the kind of archival information dug up by C. L’Estange Ewen, and connected a rise in witchcraft accusations to a number of strains in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English life, especially economic strains.

Although their interpretations differ in substance and emphasis, Macfarlane and Thomas are still associated with a paradigm… show more.

A small lifeboat is spotted off the coast of Chile in 1821, below the gunnels skeletal men cling to a pile of human bones. Nathaniel Philbrick opens his National Book Award-winning story with an almost incomprehensibly brutal scene and rarely takes a breath for the remaining 300-odd pages. Considered to be the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is the true story of a ship stove in by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the harrowing survival of some of its crew. 

I will read absolutely anything that Richard Estep writes. He has written books about the Villisca Ax Murders, Malvern Manor, and other crazy-haunted places. This one, about a site in his native England, is utterly terrifying. Estep writes with a very straightforward, matter-of-fact style (his writing reminds me much of my own style), and the evidence he presents for this haunted site is deeply chilling -- especially since his team is one of the groups that has investigated the Cage. 

Of all the books written about the massacre of the Bamber/Caffell family in August 1985, none captures the sadness and tragedy of the family dynamic as Lee has here. She delves deep into the troubled lives of June and Neville Bamber and their adopted children Jeremy and Sheila. It’s an extraordinary case – a real puzzle. I don’t actually agree with Lee’s (apparent) assumption of Jeremy Bamber’s guilt – the seven pages of police surmise at the end of her book have a number of holes that undermine the plausibility of their case. In my view, a retrial should have taken place. Nevertheless, Lee has created a truly poignant portrait of a time and a place – rural Essex in the brash 1980s – in which horror does battle with pity.

My favorite thing about magical realism is that it is often used to discuss social and cultural issues, colonialism, the powerful and elite, environmental issues, racism, war, homophobia, genocide, and more. It can also be used to talk about social issues that are equally as important but maybe not as heavy. That’s why I love Melmoth by Sarah Perry – because magical realism is used to cover a gambit of social and historical issues. 

In the novel, Perry focuses on a mythical figure called Melmoth the Witness who preys upon people in the darkest moments of their lives. Through this mythical figure, Perry discusses everything from Nazi Germany to fear, sins, loneliness, and self-loathing with a magical lens. I loved the grit and darkness of this magical realism story and I know you will too.