The Page Count

Category: Non-Fiction

  • Grey Skies, Green Waves

    Tom Anderson

    Read: October 2025, re-read December 2025–January 2026 

    Edition read: Summersdale Publishers, 2010, 270 pages 

    Travel writing 

    Living in southeast England, friends, family and well-wishers in general (you’d be surprised) are often alarmed when I mention that you can surf in the British Isles. Isn’t it cold? they ask. Yes, I say. Bring a wetsuit. Embrace the pain. The truth of the matter is that there is a lot of surf to be had; it’s just very much a geography-determined past-time. However, wherever you do go to catch a wave, they will be right about one thing: it will be cold. 

    As such – although only partially for this reason – surfing in the British Isles is sometimes seen as the poor cousin of what’s to be had internationally. And thus, the premise of Grey Skies, Green Waves is partially set up: our narrator and author, Tom Anderson, has come to realise that he doesn’t really like surfing in the British Isles anymore, given how much warmer, sunnier and, er, wavier, the rest of world is. He has fallen into a slump of surfing locally only half-heartedly. 

    The other part of the premise – and actually, given that Anderon grew up with the niche but all-consuming hobby of surfing, the more important part – is that he has hit a slump of entering surf competitions, only to drastically underperform. He sets out to remedy this case of ‘I don’t like the things I use to’ by taking more opportunities to surf in more domestic locales, and herein he accounts several surfing trips around the British Isles, extending from south to north Wales (including a secret spot in Cardiff), Devon, Cornwall, John O’Groats, the Outer Hebrides, the River Severn and County Claire. 

    Anderson is clearly a Good Surfer (surfing triple overheaders near John O’Groats is not for beginners, nor for improvers), and at points he captures the various sensations of being in the water vividly (‘A thick slop of heavy, cold, dark water is the surfing equivalent onto several feet of powder on a snowboard, or a big, smooth tarmac slope to a skater […] To bury your board onto its edge and then throw all your weight through an arcing turn, knowing the water below will bear everything you throw at it, it a feeling of at-oneness with the ocean that rivals any tube ride.’) As a surfer’s lexicon will attest, a wave is not just a wave: it has speed, height, depth, shape, direction and length. Anderson does this well, although certain passages merit a bit of secondary reading (for example, what is a ‘wedge’?). It is at its most engaging when describing being in the water in good conditions, and the more enthused about that particular session he is, the better that Anderson writes about it. As the book goes on, the stoke improves., and as such, the last quarter of the book is the best. 

    The other element of this book is back on dry (well, damp) land, capturing the ennui that accompanies not just surfing, but many outdoor pursuits, in the British Isles: early (cold) mornings, waiting in (cold) carparks for the right conditions to materialise (if they do), drinking away (cold) afternoons in pubs, disappointing competition results and late (cold) night drives home. Whilst overall I appreciate the inclusion of this other side of surfing, there were a few non-surfing sections that did not exactly make for compelling reading, such as the passage where he retells someone else’s story about accidentally trapping someone in an automatically cleaning French toilet. 

    It is written in the first person, which while fitting for a piece of travel writing, could have included fewer conversations recounted word for word via direct speech. Although sometimes this does place you in the moment, at other times it could have been a bit terser and not lost anything. Sharing the same past-time, it would be remiss not to mention William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days as a simultaneously accompanying and contrasting read, but given their different focus. 

    Worth reading? Yes – persevere through the discouraging sections. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes, for the passages in the water in particular. 

  • The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

    Tariq Ali, 2021

    Edition read: Verso, 2021, 244 pages

    Non-fiction

    Read: October–November 2025

    The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan is a collection of twenty-six essays (and one exchange of letters) on the various occupations of Afghanistan, penned by the left-wing journalist Tariq Ali. It dates from 1980–2021, critiquing the Soviet occupation, the Afghanistan–Pakistan–US relationship (as well as the involvement of China and Saudi Arabia), through to the NATO withdrawal and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. 

    Despite its disastrous ending, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is widely considered to have been a justified war (certainly compared to the invasion of Iraq). Ali gives this outlook short shrift, arguing that the NATO occupation repeated the mistakes of the Soviet one, such as installing unpopular puppet rulers (indeed, the subtitle is A Chronicle Foretold). 

    Looking at the occupation of Afghanistan in retrospect, and how badly it was managed and ended (and what life is now like for Afghans), it’s somewhat hard to argue that Ali doesn’t have prescient points to make. With hindsight proving him accurate on several matters, he regularly refers to his detractors’ contemporaneous criticisms that he is a cynic with a dark sense of humour. 

    He writes eloquently and his arguments are sophisticated. Because sophistication necessitates complexity, I would advise reading these commentaries one at a time, rather than treating this as a whole book: they’re not always the easiest pieces to read and digest, and being a series of essays, it’s not as comprehensive as a history book. There is plenty to learn, just not always in a straightforward format, and the bias is obvious (although I’m sure Ali would argue that these are just the facts). 

    However, a lot of the strength of his argument is drawn from how badly the occupation was managed (which he primarily believes was due to the corruption of the United States’ choice of new Afghan leadership and the failure to address elements within Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that supported the Taliban). This is slightly different to whether Afghanistan should have been invaded post-9/11, and there is a distinction to be made between ‘Was it justified?’ and ‘Was it well handled?’. If the occupation of Afghanistan had been successful (i.e., led to a reconstructed nation), would the invasion of it have then been justified? 

    As such, I wasn’t fully convinced by Ali’s argument that Afghanistan shouldn’t have been invaded post-9/11. He argues that Bin Laden should have been arrested and that the Taliban were ready to hand him over to the US: 

    It need hardly be added that the bombardment and occupation of Afghanistan has been a disastrous – and predictable – failure in capturing the perpetrators of 9/11. This could only have been the result of effective police work; not of international war and military occupation […] According to the official 9/11 Commission report, Mullah Omar’s initial response to Washington’s demands that Osama bin Laden be handed over and al-Qaeda deprived of a safe haven was ‘not negative’ […] but while the Mullah was playing for time, the White House closed down negotiations. It required a swift war of revenge. Afghanistan had been dominated the first port of call in the ‘global war on terror’, with Iraq already the Administrations’ first target […] Predictably, it only gave al-Qaeda leader the change to vanish into the hills. 

    My doubts come down to whether the Taliban would have actually done so, on which there are a myriad of conflicting sources. In The 9/11 Wars, author Jason Burke states that this was never going to happen. 

    I was also dubious about his argument that ‘What is really required in the region is an American/NATO exit strategy from Afghanistan, which should entail a regional solution involving Pakistan, Iran, India and Russia. These four states could guarantee a national government and massive social reconstruction in the at country.’ Given his own criticisms of Pakistan’s vested interests in its neighbour, I doubt that this measure would have led to a successful reconstruction. 

    Ali did, however, make me challenge my assumption that if Iraq hadn’t been invaded, the invasion of Afghanistan would have been successful. He argues that this occupation was mismanaged from the outset, criticising NATO’s selection of new, incompetent, corrupt leaders for Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai in particular.  

    While reading this, I tried to keep in mind whether I was reviewing a book or reviewing the justification and success of the Afghan war. Although not taken in by all of its arguments, Ali does ultimately make a convincing argument that the invasion was a misadventure and that the quality of lives for Afghans – perhaps the most important metric of the success of the invasion – has only gotten worse. Reading this in 2025, it is a saddening fait accompli. 

    Worth reading? Yes. Ali has a fairly rare opinion on the matter and it is interesting to read his arguments, whether you ultimately agree with them or or not.

    Worth re-reading? Yes, due to how detailed it is.

  • Persian Fire

    Tom Holland 

    Read: August 2025

    Edition read: 2005, Little Brown, 448 pages

    Non-fiction, history 

    Tom Holland’s Persian Fire details the attempted invasion of modern-day Greece by modern-day Iran, including the battle in which roughly 7,000 Greeks held the Thermopylae Pass against circa 100,000 soldiers of Emperor Xerxes’s invading army for 3(ish) days, in 480BC. 

    In providing the context of the Greco-Persian Wars, it challenged a somewhat unconscious preconception I had that eras start and end. Rather, they bleed into each other, passing on parts of culture and splitting along the way. It also provided a few rude corrections to the artistic liberties taken by Frank Miller in 300*, not least that the Persian army did not include divisions of ghouls and elephants. 

    It also altered my understand of what decides history: I was expecting more on the Battle of Thermopylae, but Holland outlines how this was only part of the Greco-Persian Wars, which were years in the making in themselves. Case in point, the Greek alliance – and not just the Spartan army – also made other decisive stands – these one successful, such as the Battle of Salamis and the Battle of Plataea, which ended the Persian attempt to conquer Athens and Sparta. Holland’s writing style is easy to follow, despite the plenitude of names, places and people and the vast scope of time that Persian Fire covers. The narrative is detailed yet well-paced and at points feels like an action story: Holland has a sense for what is engaging and what is the right amount of context. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes. 

    *Review forthcoming. 

  • Leviathan or, The Whale

    Philip Hoare, 2008 

    Edition read: Fourth Estate, 2009, 421 pages 

    Read: August 2025 

    With a somewhat freeform approach, it is not immediately clear which category Leviathan falls into. At times possessing the discursiveness of a long essay, it reveals itself to be a mix of memoir and history, documenting both the relationship between humanity and whales and the author’s ambivalent perception of the sea. Besides being highly informative on the natural history of whales, the book takes on a confessional tone, with Hoare exploring universal themes such as loss and loneliness. It is poetic without losing grip of the subject at hand and in its broadness draws upon that lodestone of cetacean-related literature, Moby Dick*, as a cultural and literary reference point. As a book upon a naturalist interest projected outwards, it fits alongside titles like The Old Ways and H is for Hawk. As a book of obsession, it will certainly interest you in whales. 

    Worth reading? Yes 

    Worth re-reading? Yes 

    *I wouldn’t say a review is forthcoming per se, but I do intend to reread it at some point, with a particular focus on the chapter that is 100% about chum. 

  • Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

    Sudhir Hazareesingh, 2020

    Read: 2020–24

    Edition read: Allen Lane, 2021, 464 pages

    Non-fiction, history

    Take #2 (or #3?)

    Toussaint Louverture (or, if you like, the slightly more dashing Toussaint L‘Ouverture) led the only successful slave revolution since, well, the other Spartacus, freeing Haiti from French slavery. Nonetheless, he seems to have remained a generally unknown figure until this book came out in 2020 to much acclaim (I found out about him via a Swans song, which doesn’t exactly scream ‘well known’ either).

    I found this a hard read. There is a narrative, but it feels more like a loose structuring tool/device for details about Louverture and the ideas surrounding him, rather than a narrative-driven piece of history. 

    Although I appreciate that ideas and events can drive history as much, if not more so, than people, it ends up feeling academic.

    Louverture and the Haitian slave uprising is one hell of a story – it’s just how it is told. I am still interested in Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, but think I will try a different book next time. I even tried to read it via a set number of pages per day, but, ultimately…

    …DNF

    Worth reading: No

    Worth re-reading? No

  • March: Book One

    John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, 2013

    Read: March 2025

    Edition read: Top Shelf Productions, 121 pages

    Non-fiction graphic novel

    Part 1 of 3

    I read this – the opening volume of an autobiographical graphic novel of the American civil-rights activist John Lewis – a coincidental 60 years after the Selma to Montgomery march.

    It moves between the two narratives of Lewis’s day on 20 January 2009, and his life as a child on a sharecropper farmer in Alabama, establishing how one man’s story transformed into history.

    In a style best described as sober (although it is not without creativity – the panes change shape, with content often spilling over outside of them), it has the feel of a documentary (the black and white shading further adds to this), to tell Lewis’s story, including how the civil-rights movement largely worked not in rivers but in drops. The US civil-rights movement – at least in the UK – can sometimes be told in a reductive manner that is reduced to just Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, with Lewis not a particularly well-known figure (‘Big Six’ was not a term I was familiar with), so this was an educational read. As much as March tells Lewis’s story, it’s also about the story of the civil-rights movement, combining the personal with history, making it as much a memoir as a history book. As volume one of three, it ends with the story and struggle still very much in motion. 

    So – why a graphic novel, especially given that Lewis already has a couple of published memoirs? The dramatic devices, such as the contrast between opening with the civil-rights activists beginning to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March 1965 and Lewis waking up in Washington D.C. on 20 January 2009, as well as the aforementioned black-and-white feel, are powerful, but the references by Lewis and his co-authors to the 1958 comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story are instructive; where we were, where we are, and where we might be in another 60 years.

     

    Worth reading? Yes.

    Worth re-reading? Yes.

  • The Outlaw Ocean

    Ian Urbina , 2019

    Non-fiction 

    Read: May–June 2025 (re-read from 2021)

    Edition read: Vintage, 2020, 544 pages 

    Investigative journalism 

    Illegal fishing and whaling; under-resourced coastal authorities; vessels not fit for sea; human-rights abuses; abortions provided outside of national jurisdiction; stowaways castaway in the middle of oceans; slavers, slaves and unpaid mariners; repo men for stolen ships; oil explorations and environmental campaigners; waste disposal at sea and territorial disputes: Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean covers a litany of crimes and otherwise legally unclear practices at sea. 

    This is a highly readable book, combining an exhaustive approach towards small details with careful analyses of the big picture, which, chapter by chapter, rarely turn out to be black and white. Even when presenting a morass of details – sometimes legalistic, sometimes moral, sometimes technical – Urbina knows how to structure a story in a way that makes each of these 14 chapters captivating. 

    The chapters tend to fall into one of two categories: slightly more rote – but still highly engaging – matters, such as Palau trying to police fishing in its huge seas with limited resources, fishing vessels not fit for service sinking when trying to take in huge catches, people being trafficked to work at sea (there are a couple of chapters on this), oil exploration and environmental campaigning against it. The other category could be roughly phrased as ‘the unusual’ – the formation and continuing existence of Sealand, an organisation which provides abortions at sea on a dedicated yacht and the repo men who specialise in retrieving stolen ships. 

    Although it could have started with any of the chapters, Urbina plays it smart and starts with the thriller of Sea Shepherd chasing the illegal fishing vessel The Thunder through the Southern Ocean for nearly four months. Given that Sea Shepherd can be a polarising group, it was more nuanced than I expected, showing how groups of all shades sometimes chose to work with the law and sometimes outside. 

    It’s a chunky book but it’s never slow going; this is a re-read on my part, and should Urbina write any other books, I would read them based on the quality of this one. A bit of sailing on my own part has imparted the knowledge that the more time you spent at sea, the greater the sense that you know even less about it. In a kind of parallel to this more philosophical musing, one of the recurring themes from Urbina’s trips to sea, and present throughout Outlaw Ocean, is how easy it is to hide crimes and questionable behaviour at sea. Here be monsters. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes. 

  • The Sweet Science: Boxing and Boxiana: A Ringside View

    AJ Liebling, 1956

    Read: January – April 2025 

    Edition read: Penguin Modern Classics 2018, 232 pages

    Non-fiction 

    Liebling was a sports correspondent and this book was originally a series of articles for The New Yorker.

    Liebling covers a multitude of fights spanning – from what I could figure out – 1951 to 1955, over 18 articles (it’s hard to say how many fights exactly, because he refers to historic fights – some of which predate him – on a regular basis). These fights include boxers who are considered to be some of the best ever: Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Willie Pep, Sandy Saddler and Joe Walcott.  As such, this is widely considered to be a classic of boxing literature.

    The old-timey, black-and-white quality comes off the page; sometimes this is charming, sometimes it feels dated. Liebling, as befitting a writer for The New Yorker, has an elaborate vocabulary, which at times comes across as archaic (such as the use of ‘milling coves’) or stuffy (just because you can use a French phrase, doesn’t mean that you must*). He does also write with great sarcasm at moments. Largely set in New York, many of the figures read like a Looney Tune character; this is not necessarily a criticism of the writing, but at points some of the dialogue reminded me of Bugs Bunny (‘waidle you read the papers tomorrow’), which does make it hard to take seriously. 

    Nonetheless, The Sweet Science remains a valuable insight into a particular period and captures what Liebling accurately believed to be a vanishing world. By the fourth paragraph of the introduction, he has already raised his contention that TV was killing off boxing for the sake of advertising (hence his repeated references to beer and razor blades at any opportunity). With that said, he regularly goes to what he readily depicts as sold-out fights, such as Rocky Marciano versus Archie Moore – as captured in his many descriptions of crowded New York streets, bars, venues, restaurants and gyms. These pieces also show his obsession with boxing; no dilettante, he goes to sparsely attended fights as well as the sold-out ones (hence the subtitle). 

    Liebling takes on the unenviable task of describing different boxing styles, although he perhaps reads a bit too much into the physique of fighters. As with Norman Mailer’s The Fight, this always extends to covering the exact shade of black fighters’ skin. 

    Of course, Liebling didn’t know that he was writing in what is now considered one of boxing’s golden ages, and often seems somewhat underwhelmed. It is interesting that Liebling denounces aspects of this era.  

    Ultimately, its dated nature made it hard to read at points. If you stick with it, it is an interesting snapshot into boxing and where it sat within society. In this sense, because of these flaws, it is comparable to Mailer’s The Fight. 

    Worth reading? Yes, although it is dated. 

    Worth re-reading? No. 

    * Besides boxing, apparently Liebling loved eating and writing about French food. An improbable pairing.