Today, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds
Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds
DARA McAnulty from Fermanagh was singled out by writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce earlier this week, where in true summer tradition, books are hot topics.
The Today programme’s children’s book club was about nature books. Writers Cressida Cowell and Cottrell-Boyce were guests and Dara McAnulty’s nature diary won high praise.
His Diary of a Young Naturalist is “incredibly detailed”, written with both enthusiasm and precision, and is “a wonderful book about the power of paying attention to things to make you happy,” said Cottrell-Boyce.
The writers lamented the lack of books about nature closer to home – there are lots about faraway places.
Where are the adventure books when children went out into nature, they wondered?
Cottrell-Boyce’s other recommendation dates back to the 1960s: My Side of the Mountain is about a boy from a cramped flat in New York who goes off to the Catskills to see if he can survive.
“We don’t let our children play unsupervised in nature enough... in the 70s you just went out and played,” said Cowell, pointing to the explosion in fantasy adventure aimed at children who would love to play unsupervised.
Cottrell-Boyce quoted Jonathan Haidt – that we have left our children very over-supervised in the real world while leaving them completely unsupervised online.
Still on books, Broadcasting House looked at the top-selling books of the last 50 years and asked listeners for a one-line summary.
Number one on the best seller list is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and no, I haven’t.
It’s a brilliant book, said James Naughtie, but he wondered just how many people had bought it and not finished it because they disappeared, as it were, into a dark black hole.
Second on the list was Men Are From Mars, Woman Are From Venus and yes I have, guilty m’lord.
There was a proliferation of Delia Smith cookery books on the list as well as a certain hip and thigh diet.
Listeners obliged with one-line summaries.
For A Brief History of Time someone merely said, “Tick!”, while another said: “Don’t Waste Yours.”
Delia got summed up with: “DS teaches your grandmother how to boil eggs.”
But surely the best was for Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, neatly summarised as: “Last of the summer crime.”
