My apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson whose grave high above Vailima in Samoa I visited in 1978, and whose epitaph has stayed with me ever since. As has my love of his books and of books generally, and I've just returned with another armful from our trip to our favourite dentist in Ulladulla.
If you want to continue where "On the Origin of Species" left off, read Simon Barnes' "Ten Million Aliens" which takes you on a wild white-water-rafting trip through the entire animal kingdom. The book brings together the works of Darwin and James Joyce, Barnes's own don't-try-this-at-home adventures in the wild, David Attenborough and Sherlock Holmes. "Ten Million Aliens" opens your eyes to the real marvels of the world. As it says on the dust jacket, "Life on Planet Earth is not weirder than we imagine. It's weirder than we are capable of imagining."
As for the other books, I found a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"; a beautifully-bound copy of Ruth Cracknell's "Journey from Venice"; another lovely edition of George Orwell's "Burmese Days" (to replace the much-read one on my bookshelf); and another one by my favourite South African writer, J.M. Coetzee's "Youth".
And, for a bit of light relief, I put down another goldcoin for a small volume of Michael Leunig's "Poems":
