Reading Matters (week 42) October 13, 2026

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Etosha Pan, remnant of an ancient inland lake, three times and its desiccated, bleached, white wilderness haunts me still. So A Visitor’s Guide to Etosha National Park by Willie Olivier and Ute von Ludwiger (Struik / Penguin Random House) helped nourish my love of one of Africa’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries.

It’s glossy (not a coffee table book) so you can slip it into your suitcase and it’s packed with info about the park’s natural and historical facts whilst also telling you where to go and where to stay.

I think Dr Andrew Huberman, PhD, neurobiologist, ophthalmologist and psychiatrist should have a more exciting title than Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body (Penguin Random House). For, in spite of its 600 page length, it’s one of the more readable books on how to be healthy that I’ve yet perused.

Huberman has practised nearly everything he ‘preaches’, ranging from sleeping better to nutrition and stress control.

Melinda Ferguson, author and now successful publisher has sold rights to her publication From Drug Mule to Drug Boss (Ride or Die Press) by Meg Rickards, to Egyptian Publishing House Dar Kitab. Result? It will sell in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf Region.

It tells the true story of Taran Eagar who was arrested in Pakistan, skipped bail, lived on the run and mothered three children.

David Bristow, author of 20 books on southern African natural history, writes arrestingly in 21 Best Bush Tales (Jacana) about bush babies, leaping lizards and the sticky fingered birder.

I was fascinated by his story of palaeontologist James Kitching, one of eight siblings from Nieu Bethesda, who ended up having a ridge in Antarctica named the Kitching Ridge. Fascinating book.

I’ll bet you’ve heard the name Liewe Heksie – a children’s story that author Verna Vels wrote two decades ago. It’s now been translated into English Liewe Heksie and the Robber Rats (Human & Rousseau) and has been made into a full length animation film. Vels died, aged 81, in 2014 but her imagination lives on, thrilling children in two languages.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall