Reading Matters (week 36) September 1 2026

I attended the launch of internationally acclaimed SA journalist Kimon de Greef’s book about psychedelic toads at that jewel of a bookstore, Love Books in Melville, last week. The Ego Trip (White Rabbit/ Jonathan Ball) is about the Sonoran desert toad that lives on the border of Mexico and Arizona. American Otavio Rettig, who presents himself globally as a practitioner of indigenous medicine, began smoking its dried venom some years ago and claims it replicates the effect of years of therapy in just half an hour.

The book is subtitled, A Trail of Deaths and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. When De Greef questioned Rettig’s attitude to the deaths, “he shrugged them off.” At least one major pharmaceutical company wants to use the toad’s venom. The book has been described as “part true crime, part cult story, part investigative journalism,”

“Some people wake up at 4am, run 15 miles and meditate in an ice bath. This book is for the rest of us”, writes American author Steve Kamb in How to Try Again (Macmillan). He writes entertainingly and informatively about how to come back from crashing. He uses himself as the model of someone who overcame failure when his life fell apart, spectacularly.

If you’ve heard of Yesteryear (4th Estate London) a debut novel by Caro Claire Burke then you probably know about the furore its created about the role of a Tradwife (traditional wife). She has several children, never questions her handsome husband and smiles endlessly. But in Yesteryear the tradwife wakes up one day in a strange and horrid version of reality back in the 1800s where she’s milking cows and hardly recognises her children.

I read this book in one go, transfixed, amused and questioning. It helps that it’s excellently written.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall