The science writer and broadcaster reads 'to escape the confines of her own lived experience'. From a Booker longlisted novel to an exposé on eugenics, here's what's been on her bedside table recently.
Recommendations
What I'm reading: Gaia Vince
Gaia Vince. Photo: Phil Fisk
Environmental journalist Gaia Vince wanted to experience the impact of globalisation and a rapidly-increasing population on the environment first hand, so she bought a ticket to Kathmandu in Nepal.
A trip that was meant to last six months turned into two-and-a-half-years travelling through over sixty countries, backpacking and documenting examples of human ingenuity from all corners of the world.
The book based on what she saw, Adventures in the Anthropocene, won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books in 2015 becoming, incredibly, the first woman to do so in its near 30-year history. Vince's latest book, Transcendence, looks at how human culture enabled us to become the most successful species on Earth.
Here, she discusses her latest book pile with us.
On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming
This is a biography that reads like a thriller. The beautiful, almost claustrophobic story of Cumming’s mother, who was kidnapped as an infant, is told through an art-lover’s lens. The archival detail and the empathetic portraits of ordinary people living a century ago make it utterly compelling.
Lanny by Max Porter
What a treat of a book! This is a fairy story for grown ups with a cast of delightfully authentic children living in a magical countryside in which wordplay, poetry and artworks combine.
Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini
A brilliant and timely exposé of the absurdities of race science and how eugenicists used the emerging tools of genetics and evolutionary biology to assert (false) biological categories for people that persist today.
This delightful book, about seven ‘wonders of the natural world’, is a foray into remote communities around the globe, exploring the kind of improbable natural materials that people infuse with cultural value, from sea silk made by mussels to coffee pooed by civets.
This Land Is Our Land by Jedediah Purdy
A beautiful, powerful polemic essay on a new kind of social and environmental commonwealth that might arise out of the American landscape, created from the fragments of racism, class division, poverty and degraded nature. A hopeful and important work.
And two that I’m looking forward to finishing:
This is published in March 2020 and deals with that all-important question: how are we going to feed our growing global population into the future. Eating is not just a necessity, it’s one of my greatest pleasures, so I’m hoping for answers.
Figuring by Maria Popova
Figuring is a mammoth book exploring the search for meaning in science and art, featuring a cast of mostly women (many of them gay) through history. Perfect for dipping into.
Gaia Vince's latest book, Transcendence, is out now.
