Winter: Set a Course for the World with "Off the Map"

Let’s go on a journey – to the ends of the earth and the other side of the street, as far as we need to go to get away from the familiar and the routine. Good or bad; scary or wonderful: we need unruly places that defy expectations…. We are heading for uncharted territory, to places found on few maps and sometimes on none. They are both extraordinary and real.

- Alastair Bonnett

A great book is filled with ideas and passages you find yourself wanting to read again and again. Not to mention great quotes like the one above. Each month I will highlight just the bare essence of a book and suggest you give it a read. If you read even one book a month you will see improvement in how you write and in what kind of introspective writing you can produce. Inspiration comes from reading. Writing well comes from reading more.

Alastair Bonnett is a Professor of Social Geography at the University of Newcastle.

This book offers a divine view of the world. It would be insulting to say it is easy to read, but imagine that he has made bold strokes prose accessible to all readers. With highly elaborate phrases and magically written socio-political, socio-historical, geographical-anthropological, moving and amusing travelogue gold. He is a great writer.

He will change how you understand the idea of a place or a time or the sense of what any of that even is – and he does it all over the world, including in his own hometown. The quote above defines my aims for all of our students this year and so I wish you happy reading.

P.S. Just imagine that if you opt to study at this proud top-20 university in northern England, then you can even take his lectures: Newcastle University.