MUST READS
Out now in paperback
A LIFE IN PARTS
by Bryan Cranston (Seven Dials £8.99) ‘ MY PARENTS met like most people do: in an acting class in Hollywood,’ writes Bryan Cranston. So acting was in his blood, but celebrity came quite late, with the role of Walter White, the chemistry teacher-turned-crystal meth mastermind in Breaking Bad.
Bryan grew up in Hollywood, but when his parents’ marriage failed he and his brother went to live on their grandparents’ Californian chicken farm.
His early CV included stints as a security guard, ordained minister in the Universal Life Church and docker. But the urge to act was irresistible.
He had roles in Seinfeld, The X-Files and Malcolm In The Middle before he was offered Breaking Bad.
Cranston emerges from this candid and richly entertaining memoir as an actor equally devoted to his work and his family — and a thoroughly decent bloke: he even thanks his old school teachers in the acknowledgments.
WHAT A FISH KNOWS
by Jonathan Balcombe (Oneworld £9.99) WHEN you bite into a battered cod, you probably don’t pause to consider the feelings of the creature that gave up its life to become your dinner.
But Jonathan Balcombe has been thinking about the inner lives of the finny tribe since he made his first fishing trip, aged eight, and worried whether his catch felt pain from the hook that pierced their mouths.
Years later, studying for a biology degree, he became fascinated by how fish feel and experience the world.
There are accounts of remarkable piscine behaviour, from the tool-using orange-dotted tuskfish to the incredible sense of smell that enables salmon to return to their home stream years after they have left it.
Balcombe’s book makes a persuasive argument that fish are not merely a commodity, but individuals whose lives have intrinsic value.
FAR AND AWAY
by Andrew Solomon (Vintage £12.99) ACCORDING to Andrew Solomon there are 196 recognised countries in the world (the UN gives the figure as 195). Whichever it is, Solomon has been to 83 of them.
In the introduction to his collected travel writing, he traces his love of journeys to a Kleenex box his mother bought when he was a child, decorated with people from around the world in native costume.
Inspired by the pictures, and by his childhood reading of Indian fairy tales and Russian folk stories, Solomon wanted to visit every country in the world.
As he began to make trips to destinations as various as Cambodia, Mongolia, Rwanda, Indonesia and Antarctica, he found that ‘travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits’.