The Nature Reader

A thread for discussing Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin et al.

Have recently enjoyed Deakin's "Notes from Walnut Tree Farm" and now reading Frank Fraser Darling's "Island Years, Island Farm". Particularly appreciated the anger that cut through the former.

Does Deakin's Waterlog count? Because that is one of my favourite books ever. I don't know Island Years, Island Farm but it looks interesting. I have also enjoyed Robert Macfarlane's Wild Places. Fnar fnar.

This is a good place to start for newcomers.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41iL3sGBWcL._SL500_.jpg

I love the Roger Deakin books!

This thread might be useful too btw:
is there a burzum of nature's geat cathedrals?

Waterlog also one of my favourite books. I didn't read it for ages on the grounds that I'm unlikely to ever "wild swim" but it was one of the most evocative books I've ever read. If anything is ever going to convince me to jump in a cold river it is Waterlog.

I've had a pretty good strike rate with Little Toller books including re-issues of the Unofficial Countryside, Letters from Skokholm and Four Hedges. The only one to disappoint so far has been Edward Thomas's The South Country - could barely get past the first chapter. Journal of a Disappointed Man is on my must read list.

Have just ordered Four Hedges - looks totally My Kind Of Thing. Thanks for pointing that out.

Amusing to read about the harvesting of gannets/gugas by the islanders of Ness in "Island Years, Island Farm" (written in the late 1930s) a week after seeing the same subject on the BBC's Coast.

Likely to buy Caught By The River's "On Nature", despite the slightly luke warm review in the Guardian.

"Island Years, Island Farm" runs out of steam a little but still very powerful.

On my shelf to read: Mabey's "Beechcombings", Cohu's "Out of the WoodS" and Lowe's "Fields" (the latter two bought very cheaply in a garden centre). "Edgelands" is on the shelf too but I've previously started it and found it too annoying.

Will Cohu's "Out of the Woods" was a breezy read but strangely irritating in lots of places. I've just noticed from the dust cover that it was to be filed under "Nature/Humour".

Reading Mabey's "Beechcombings" after the Will Cohu book, I'm struck by how many *ideas* Mabey crams into his text, how many tangents he takes.

Having a second attempt at getting into Edward Thomas' The South Country. Find it kind of ... cluttered. Worth persevering with?

Didn't much like the Cohu book either. Some of the tips for identifying trees were useful enough (the dirty fingernails of the ash!) but it didn't do much for me beyond that.

This is a good one if you haven't read it:

http://images.word-power.co.uk/images/product_images/9780954221744.jpg

Have ordered Caught By The River: On Nature while it's as good as half price on Amazon. Tempted to pick up Journal of a Disappointed Man. Quite intrigued by Henry Williamson's Salar the Salmon.

Enjoyed - no, that's not the right word at all - Journal of a Disappointed Man. Not quite "nature" enough for my current mood/reading interests, perhaps. Sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing.

Anyone read ...

Jefferies' Wild Life In A Southern County
Bells' Men and the Fields
Bates' Through The Woods
Hudson's A Shepherd's Life

?

What did you make of Four Hedges, Ned Trifle II?

It's my bedside reading right now. Enjoying it greatly. A calming contrast to current events.

Aye, it's *lovely* isn't it?

Racing through Mark Cocker's Crow Country.

Pondering what to read next.

Fancy something similar to Four Hedges.

Yes, me too. Mrs Trifle is enjoying that now - and she is a very rare reader. I can't (offhand) think of anything like it. I haven't read a lot of gardening books but I've certainly never read one as sensual as this. There's a great chapter on scything that is just beautiful.

http://media.ft.com/cms/c80e4bd6-9ac2-11df-87e6-00144feab49a.jpg

Doesn't seem to be much else by her, readily available.

Came home from the library with Stephen Moss's "A Sky Full of Starlings", Richard Mabey's "The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn" and Martin Wainwright's (ed) "A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary".

Not finding the Moss book particularly gratifying. Feels a bit ... tossed off inbetween other projects.

Mildly tempted to pick up "Nature Tales: Encounters with Britain's Wildlife" to see if it tempts me to pursue the writing of any of the contributors.

Is Elford's "A Year In The Woods" any good? Ditto Mabey's "A Brush With Nature"?

.

"A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary" is very good. Will start reading the column in the actual paper.

No thoughts on these?

Jefferies' Wild Life In A Southern County
Bells' Men and the Fields
Bates' Through The Woods
Hudson's A Shepherd's Life

?

(The four books above are from Little Toller's aesthetically pleasing series of re-issues - pondering which to buy next).

I was reading through the Hudson book in A Well Known Cambridge Bookshop to-day funnily enough. I was obviously enjoying it because I forgot that the rest of the Trifles were waiting for me outside.

Possibly my next purchase although I ought to see what the library has first ...

Am enjoying Annie Proulx memoir Bird Cloud about building a house in the middle of a Wyoming nature reserve which i picked up in a discount store. It seems to have annoyed her fans by being too concerned with the minutiae of building the house and there is a little too much Proulx in it but there are some good passages about the local flora and fauna (and geology). Not sure it really fits in with this thread exactly but it's worth a look. Would also be at home in the quiddities and agonies of the ruling class thread though.

Mabey's "The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn" is a curious thing. Short, for a start.

Ah, just noticed three forthcoming Little Tollers ...

Kenneth Allsopp's In The Country.
Jocelyn Brooke's The Military Orchid.
Robert Gibbings' Sweet Thames Run Softly.

Damn that Press - all of those look interesting, esp. the Gibbings which I have a feeling I read years ago. I'm going to have to find a way to earn more money.

Have to confess that I'm not familiar with any of these three but the hit rate has been high so far. And they are beautiful.

Just finished Stephen Moss's Birds Britannia: How the British fell in love with birds. Readable (ie. raced through it in a couple of days) though with some annoying stylistic quirks. Missed that sense of "ideas" that comes with Mabey 'n' Deakin books.

Liking Bells' Men and the Fields a lot though do wish it was still light enough to read in the garden in an evening . . .

About to start on the Hudson book ...

Allsopp's "In The Country" is good. Feels incongruent that it is derived from Daily Mail columns (I wonder whether the Daily Mail has changed or whether it felt incongruent at the time).

Had high hopes for "Sweet Thames, Run Softly" but Gibbings seemed so easily side-tracked as to be annoying.

Now on Jocelyn Brooke's "The Military Orchid" with Richard Mabey's "Selected Writings" also on the book shelf.

The Military Orchid is A Grade. Are you reading the Trilogy or just the first one?

Brooke also wrote a book called The Flower in Season ("a book about wild flowers for those who like wild flowers") which is excellent.

Hadn't *planned* on reading beyond The Military Orchid but may well do.

The shift to writing about being in the army, in this, is incredible.

Just started Richard Jefferies' Wild Life In A Southern Country.

See these are coming up from Little Toller:

Adrian Bell - Apple Acre
Ian Niall - Fresh Woods, Pastures New
John Wyatt - The Shining Levels

all of which sound tempting.

Will possibly end up reading them all but any recommendations out of those three?

Sort of wish I hadn't started on Wild Life In A Southern Country - largely because Jefferies is happy to shoot the animals he has just been admiring.

Hello, yes! I am interested in Mabey's Beechcombings. What a delightful book that was. You're right about how crammed full of things it was, the sheer scale of ideas touched upon, how many different areas he took in - that it wasn't just a book about trees, it was a book about history and ecology and anthropology and art and even a bit of etymology thrown in, just for fun. It really was, for me, the kind of paragon of a book which purports to be about only one narrow subject (beeches) but ends up being about the whole panoply of human history instead.

I suppose my particular interest is more about the intersection of humans and nature - my ur-book for this kind of thing is Hoskins' Making of the English Landscape. (Found things like Lie of the Land by Ian Vince diverting recently, as well, even though that is ostensibly about geology, it's actually just about the whole of the landscape.)

Don't particularly like gardening books, though, they tend to be... hmm, a bit blokey. Don't want anything involving the observations men make out of their sheds. I suppose I like these things sweeping, but with good attention to the way that one can go from very fine plant to plant scale and zoom out to the whole panorama. Also no shooting things. At all, ever.

If you like Beechcombings, I'd reckon you'd enjoy any of the Roger Deakin books. Waterlog is probably my favourite though I really enjoyed Notes from Walnut Tree Farm - compiled from his diaries, it's more unguarded and angry.

Four Hedges - mentioned upthread - is un-blokey and about gardens.

Ploughing, slightly grumpily, through Wild Life In A Southern Country. Bought partly for the beautiful cover and partly because it has a forward from Mabey. I resent the shooting though.

Had high hopes for "Sweet Thames, Run Softly" but Gibbings seemed so easily side-tracked as to be annoying.

― djh, Sunday, February 5, 2012 6:01 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So true, didn't quite ruin my enjoyment but came close.

I'm keen to read the Adrian Bell books in this series. I read his (Martin Bell's father fact fans) books a long time ago when they had already long been unfashionable. His novels would fit well in a fictional version of this thread.

Gibbings: had been looking forward to reading about places I'd been (having walked the Thames Path) but it didn't really happen. I thought the impending war would have added something to the writing but it just felt like "there's a war coming so I'll skip the next bit" (which, thinking about it, is fairly rational).

x-post. Am sure fiction on a nature theme can fit on this thread.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/apr/06/kathleen-jamie-life-in-writing

Looking forward to reading this:

http://caughtbytheriver.net/2012/04/the-shining-levels/

(Answell's book vaguely on my radar to read, too).

This makes me realise I've been reading Jefferies' Wild Life In A Southern Country for an age. Determined to finish it, having paid for it, but it's not really doing anything for me.

Are the Robert Macfarlane books any good?

I am finally reading Deakin! The only one I could find was Wildwood but I am enjoying his deconstruction of all the contradictions of Oak Apple Day. There's a kind of sadness to his writing, though. A sense of things which are being lost. Bittersweet.

Claire Leighton's Farmer's Year being repressed this year.

imo, the best nature writing stays well away from descriptions of sunsets, how fresh the air smelled, and how glorious a sight is the bird on the wing. I can (and do) go out into wild places often and I do not need to know all about an author's emotions in the face of nature, whether they are rapturous or just meditative. A very little of that goes a long ways for me. Almost any nature writing that is cast as a 'the diary of a (blank)' I find immediately suspect.

For my tastes, the best nature writing is informative and bears the same relationship to scientific writing that a good narrative history bears to academic history writing. It is less rigorous and comprehensive, but still informed by a love of accuracy and facts.

I can see nature and feel feelings all on my own. I want to add depth to those feelings by adding a greater knowledge and understanding of what I am seeing.

I seem to have ordered a Robert Macfarlane book.

The one about the sunken lanes of Dorest. This one: http://holaweg.com/

Well, he kept coming up in conjunction with Deakin, and there was a brilliant review in the Guardian a few weeks ago, and now I found out that Stanley Donwood has done the illustrations for this one and if you call your book after an Old English word for Holloway, well, it just seemed like it was a conjunction of things I could not resist, that I should explore.

Sounds intriguing.

Haven't read any Macfarlane yet but keep hearing Deakin's name mentioned alongside his (Deakin is probably my favourite writer on nature) but also Edward Thomas's (I can't stand him).

Enjoyed John Wyatt's "The Shining Levels" - remarkably un-twee for a book that involves rescuing a roe deer. Lovely illustrations from Norman Ackroyd, too.

Loved the Macfarlane piece in the Granta collection mentioned in the second post of this thread. The first Macfarlane piece I've consciously read (I may have read pieces without thinking "it's Macfarlane"). More "rural writing" than "nature writing" but a beautiful piece nevertheless.

Also finished the recently repressed Adrian Bell. Started off well but the writing style seemed to change and it became less interesting.

just received the new macfarlane and the new kathleen jamie in the post

Are they good?

New series to tempt us:

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/pages/searchresultstitles.aspx?sdt=1&page=2&objaid=11226

Currently reading Neil Ansell's "Deep Country - Five Years In The Welsh Hills". Found the first quarter really enjoyable in a jaunty, light-read sort of way but then suddenly lost interest. That might be me rather than the book, though.

Have also got the "Nature Tales: Encounters with Britain's Wildlife" compilation on the go - I've been carrying it round in my work bag and read it when people are late for appointments. Was hoping to be inspired to find some new (to me) writers. Have just got to an extract from Edward Thomas' "The South Country". Find him unreadable.

I started the Macfarlane (The Old Ways, not Holaweg, which is too hand-printed and delicate and beautiful to take out of the house) while on a train journey (where I forgot to bring along the book I was currently reading - the Tom Fort book about the A303 - really rather confusing as they often cover the same ground, quite literally) and so far am finding him enjoyable.

But I think that I really rather like "rural writing" rather than "nature writing" per se. That I like nature writing when put in the context of other things, social histories and the like, rather than just on its own and stripped of context.

Several of the books I've read recently have been stanning for Edward Thomas, and I am curious, but it seems that the reactions on this thread are not positive, so maybe I should avoid him?

To be fair, I think it is just me saying I'm not getting anywhere with Edward Thomas ... repeatedly. The only other book I've abandoned, without finishing, recently is Farley & Robert's "Edgelands".

Is "Holaweg" a thing of wonder?

It is absolutely beautiful to look at, the etchings of the tree tunnels are utterly lovely - I sometimes wish Donwood would abandon being an album cover designer and just go full time nature illustrator but I don't imagine there's any money in that. Haven't done more than skim through as it's hand printed and I'm afraid of breaking the spine but it looks great and it is a none-more-WCC subject.

A phone conversation with a friend. He admitted he'd gone swimming in a fuck-fuck-fuck-freezing lido because he was inspired by Deakin.

I wish I were more into swimming. Some of those swimming holes looked lush. I must admit I was tempted by the one at Porthtowan. I'm just not much cop at swimming.

Thomas's prose always used to be dismissed as hackwork (he called it that himself iirc) - a real burden that got in the way of the poetry. Seems like it's been reclaimed as his reputation has ballooned over the last few years but I'm still a bit suspicious. I read a bit back in the day in the old penguin Selected Poems and Prose, but it didn't stick with me. (a great poet though, obvs).

Not much of a reader of natural history, nature writing, but I like T H White – England have my Bones, The Goshawk.

I do not like poetry at all, so perhaps I should try the hackwork.

Did anyone watch Dr Alice Roberts' new series Wild Swimming, talking *a lot* about Roger Deakin's Waterlog? Not necessarily my kind of thing, but kind of relaxing non-brainwork TV watching.

The Ansell book picked up again towards the end.

This sounds intriguing (although poets writing such things gives me the fear):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/17/otter-country-miriam-darlington-review?INTCMP=SRCH

Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn's The Road North is a fascinating and beautiful exploration of various Scottish places, inspired by Basho's The Road North. Combination of prose, minimalist poems (haiku, renga, Cagean mesostics etc), and photos, with the occasional bit of music or video. There are contributions from their companions at various stages: poets, artists, walkers, musicians, gardeners etc. A bit different to some of the new nature writing in that the focus is on artistic interventions in the environment rather than a search for wilderness. An inspiring project, one that encourages an active engagement with nature. Loads of fantastic stuff here: a visit to folk singer Anne Briggs's island home, a celebration of the huts at Carbeth, and a consideration of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta from the pov of someone who knows it as the family home, Stonypath...

http://the-road-north.blogspot.co.uk/

Robert Macfalane actually made me do a little cry on the bus this morning. I think I'm going to have to develop a crush on him. Like every other Guardian-reading fanboy in the world. Sigh.

Which bit/part of book?

It was in The Old Ways (the book about paths and walking.) His grandfather died while he was writing the book, so he decided as a memorial to him, to walk to his funeral in Scotland, over the Cairngorms, through a route his grandfather had known and loved. And it was just the way that he interwove descriptions of the geology and the flora and fauna of the mountains interspersed with stories of his grandfather - who had used his position of being a diplomat to explore and walk the mountain ranges of the world. (And indeed it was walks in Scotland with his grandfather that inspired Macfarlane's love of walking and inspired his first book, about mountains.) And talking about how he had retired in the Cairngorms because he loved mountains so much, but then describing his slow physical and mental decline in metaphor by how the range of his hikes shrank smaller and closer to home, and finally stopped altogether, until all he had was the reported rambles of his grandchildren. And it was just so beautiful and poignant and I'm not giving due credit to the dignity of his prose, but just... BAAAAWWWWW.

I have succumbed and ordered some Edward Thomas.

But I seriously do not want this Robert Macfarlane book to ever end. It feels like one of those books I might read, and then go right back to the beginning and read over again.

Good luck with the Thomas - perhaps you will like it?

Have just bought The Old Ways as holiday reading.

I kinda reached the critical mass of reading Thomas quotes in 3 books I have read recently, and just decided "hey actually this guy is pretty good" so I might as well give him a try.

Really hope you like The Old Ways. (Though everyone who reads it seems to end up wanting to go on strange walks along the Broomway, to the Chanctonbury Rings, etc. etc.)

(It was the essays I bought, though, not the poetry. Hope this wasn't a mistake.)

Still got The Old Ways on my shelf unread, really looking forward to starting it now :)

I should just start a thread of outright Robert Macfarlane love.

Just noticed that Richard Skelton/Autumn Richardson (The "classical" music you buy from Boomkat (2010): a thread to discuss Sylvain Chauveau, Johann Johannsson, Peter Broderick, Olafur Arnalds and others) get a mention in The Old Ways.

Edward Thomas is my man!

"And so it is alone and for themselves that the beeches rise up in carven living stone and expand in a green heaven for the song of the woodwren, pouring out pearls like water."

See ... that does nothing for me.

Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside:

http://vimeo.com/46869854

Loved most of "The Old Ways". Would definitely make me want to read some Edward Thomas (if I didn't find "The South Country" so unreadable.

I just got done with Thomas Eisner's For Love of Insects, a scientific memoir that goes into beautifully non-technical detail about his experiments in insect chemical adaptations.

I've also taken out a copy of Waterlog, very much looking forward to it.

Waterlog is incredible. It made me want to swim in rivers.

Starting to wish I'd ordered a copy of Holloway.

If you really want Holaweg, look on Thomblr, I'm sure that one of the more obsessive RH fans has PDF'd it by now.

Does Nick Papadimitriou fit in here? "Scarp" looks quite interesting.

Oh god I am reading that RIGHT NOW and I keep wondering if it fits or not, because it's way more psychogeography than nature writing, but there is a lot of nature writing in it.

Either way, I am finding it a fascinating and fantastic book, though deeply strange. But strange in all the ways I love. So I can't decide if I love it or hate it?

I have to confess, I would like to walk the Broomway.

I think it's impossible to read that book and not want to walk The Broomway.

We should have ILX Broomway Walk and Possible Tide Death FAP at the next convenient low tide.

Anyone pick up any of the (Macfarlane-introduced) Collins Nature Library books?

https://twitter.com/LittleToller/status/248803543090352128/photo/1

^ new (old) Clare Leighton.

Reading Macfarlane's The Wild Places and Niall's Fresh Woods, Pastures New. Reading the former when I want to feel awake, the latter when I don't. Niall's book is a curious one: another writer whose initial interactions with nature seem to have been shooting it.

More on the Leighton book:

http://littletoller.co.uk/?p=5599

Kenneth Allsop: http://littletoller.co.uk/2012/10/the-cutting-of-the-cherry/

Macfarlane and Chris Watson 12": http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2012/10/rivertones-2-the-sea-road/

Oh, I did see that. I wanted to listen to the Soundcloud but I was a bit taken aback by the sound of MacFarlane's voice? I think I expected him to sound weather-burred and creaky like an old sea captain telling tales around the fire, but his voice sounds unexpectedly like an over enthusiastic sixth former.

Mostly I got obsessed with the Nick Hayes artwork. Caught By The River always have the most exquisite engravings and illustrations and things.

I keep getting completely sucked into the CBTR site. My friend Amy (who I stayed with in Orkney a few weeks ago) does a column for them. There was some talk she was going to turn her column into a book? When she does, that will be the most amazing thing ever and I will be all over this thread stanning for it.

I am still persisting with the Edward Thomas book, The South Country. It's odd because I really am enjoying it, and I love his writing, but it is very... dense. It's quite slow going. Partly because reading it is so evocative, and I will read a little bit, and the imagery will send me into a little reverie and my mind starts wandering off in memory through landscapes I've encountered that are like the ones he is describing. Which is good and wonderful, and I'm glad that it does that, because it captures the things I like best about country walks and sends me back to happy memories. But it does mean I'm getting through the book very slowly.

Beautiful illustrations, too. By someone called Eric Fitch Daglish. They remind me oddly of the engravings in The House At Green Knowe, the same kind of delicate scratchiness to them.

Amy Liptrot's column should definitely be a book ... particularly loved the one about whale vomit.

Actually, a few of the columns could happily morph into books.

On the last few pages of Ian Niall's Fresh Woods & Pastures New. Another one that featured too much killing/poaching for me to really enjoy and which started to feel like a chore. Have Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter on the bookshelf and have ordered the new (old) Claire Leighton but any other recommendations?

Never did see Holaweg but walk past the printers to work everyday and keep meaning to say hello.

Not quite in the mood for the grimness of Tarka ... recommendations appreciated. Maybe I should try The South Country again ...

Any good books about nature/the coast?

The Clare Leighton book looks lovely. Her etchings are right good.

The chapter in Robert MacFarlane's The Wild Places on Roger Deakin's death ... made me feel sad.

I think it's having a new camera that has had me looking at things like trees more closely than in a while. Been fascinated by the presumably fractal array of growth of twigs out of the bodies of older trees. Presumably so that they can feed from as many directions as possible, like presumably each new twig is there to grow a leaf from to reap chlorophyll from sunlight or whatever. Particularly interesting when you see a wild array of twigs from all parts of what presumably had looked like a dead tree for a couple of years.

I read a book a few years back that a girlfriend had about a guy who had set up a natural tree plantation/wildlife reserve in Canada somewhere. fascinating book, showed the patterns of the way trees grew branches in tandem with each other among other stuff. Would love to read it again

Probably more likely to be autumn divesting said twigs of the leaves that have made them less visible up to now though.

New (non-letterpress) version of Holloway out in May 2013. Print from Holloway now on sale at Stanley Donwood's site (slowlydownward.com).

About two thirds of the way through Tarka the Otter. How was this ever considered a children's book?

Tarka was an odd one. Horrible to read at some points and with a curious ambivalence about otter hunting. The introduction suggests that Williamson hero-worshipped his brother in law who was involved with the local hunt. You never get the sense that the hunt is being celebrated but nor do you get the sense that it is being overtly condemned (although it's difficult to read about an otter being hounded for 10 hours and believe this is a good thing, in any respect).

Is Adrian Bell's Corduroy any good?

Revived for recommendations (Xmas book voucher to spend).

Loved JL Carr's "A Month In The Country", although its possibly more accurately described as rural rather than nature writing. Bemused it was made into a Colin Firth film.

Have bought Olivia Lang's To The River ("gentle, wise and riddling," according to Robert Macfarlane) and Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.

New Richard Mabey: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/15/richard-mabey-unpredictable-power-nature

Second hand book shop purchases:

Fraser Darling - Wild Country
WH Hudson - Hampshire Days
WH Hudson - Birds and Green Places
RM Lockley - The Way to an Island
Henry Williamson - Tales of Moorland & Estuary

Nice(ly written) review:

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/02/reviewed-field-notes-hidden-city-esther-woolfson

Macfarlane in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/15/robert-macfarlane-household-rogue-male

Exhibition/e-book of Macfarlane's Broomway chapter;

http://www.silt-exhibition.com/

Not quite the right thread but it is available in book form:

http://www.campdengallery.co.uk/catalogues/kjackson1.pdf

This was very good. Some of the pictures prompted a strange sense of "This is okay" and then seconds later I'd see them a different light and suddenly it was "Wow, this is fucking wonderful".

New version of Holloway out next week.

There's also been a short run version of Rogue Male with a Stanley Donwood cover.

Anyone read Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape?

The intro to Hoskins book: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/11/rereading-making-english-landscape?INTCMP=SRCH

http://thequietus.com/articles/12233-holloway-dan-richards-robert-macfarlane

Glugged Holloway like pop. Should probably have savoured it more.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/23/making-book-lump-lead-holloway

Currently reading Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape (at home) and Henry Williamson's Tales of Moorland and Estuary (carry around in my coat pocket and read at opportune moments).

There are signed copies of Holloway in the bookshop in Bicester.

(Just an excuse to bump the thread for recommendations etc).

Enjoying Tales of Moorland and Estuary (and picking out its relationship to Tarka the Otter) in the same way I might enjoy hearing a band's very early demos.

Really enjoying the way taht the areas along the sides of the closest main road have grown wild. There were beds or at least demarcated margins that were presumably set out so taht the council could organise some kind of plant growth. Since they haven't been maintained there are plants growing there that presumably just blew in and are thriving. So there are several types of wildflower,plus some things that are presumably thought of as weeds in other places growing very healthily. But it is refreshing to see plantgrowth and splashes of colour instead of just the grey of urban layout.
Also I find the sight of plants breaking/growing through the concrete/asphalt to be a really healthy sign which I'm aware that other people don't share.
Have noticed taht people are mowing the areas of naturally growing plantlife that appear elsewhere on roadsides around town so hope it isn't inevitable that it happen everywhere.
Leaves me feeling like cultivating dandelions and thistles to see how large I can grow them.

& thoughts about weeds and wildflowers thriving has me thinking about this book
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ecological-Imperialism-Biological-Expansion-Environment/dp/0521546184/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1370027206&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=ecological+imperialism
Ecological Imperialism that I read back in 2005 and talks about how every time man expands his territory by travelling to a new continent he tends to take seeds of weeds with him unitentionally which leads to the ground being reformatted. Book mainly focused on European expansion, a lot to the Americas and Antipodes but also talked about earlier migrations by other races to similar places having similar effect.
I thought it was a really interesting book and I'd like to reread it.

Would also like to reread The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson which I read about the same time & had some very interesting comment early on but then goes into lauding the approach of G.M. technology towards the end. Major shame because the detail he goes into in the early chapters like how thinning the density of a woodland has disproportionately adverse effects since it opens up interior sections to wind damage taht it would have been protected from by the very presence of exterior trees. I think it's also him that was talking about reducing breeding areas for birds was also adversely disproportionate to the expected since choosing a mate is not a simple equation where 1 of each sex = offspring. Since individuals may not be compatible which isn't as anthropomorphic as it might sound.

I need to read more in the area. I also have to read a lot more of the books on other subjects I've already started which are lying around my bed unfinished.

Any recommendations for Norfolk reading?

Macfarlane on the radio:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02qnk88

Kathleen Jamie: if I was going to buy one, should it be Findings or Sightlines? (To read on holiday on the Isle of Mull, if this makes any difference).

Anyone read anything good recently?

Still reading Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape. Hadn't quite realised I'd been reading it for so long. Finding parts of it fascinating and parts a complete slog.

(More "Landscape" than "Nature" but it's convenient to mention it here).

Apparently books by George Ewart Jones and Rowena Farre are next to be published in Little Toller's "Nature Classics" series. Not read anything by either.

Irritated to discover that Mabey's "The Ash and the Beech" is just "Beechcombings" with a different cover/title.

I've just got round to The Old Ways, which I'm not enjoying as much as The Wild Places. Too many meetings with local artists.

Finally reading Jamie's "Findings", which I'd consciously avoided - largely because I hated Farley/Roberts "Edgelands" and was studiously avoiding books by anyone I knew to be a poet. Very readable.

Anyone read Worpole & Orton's "The New English Landscape"?

Or George Ewart Evans' The Pattern Under The Plough, Rowena Farre's A Time From The World or Joseph Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea?

The Mirror of the Sea not really doing it for me (though it is a nice edition).

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/altered-states/on-the-lonely-midnight-trail-of-orkneys-corncrakes/

Hello beautiful thread, I have missed you!

I read Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, which was amazing (as if I need any more incentive to dream about far-flung islands in the North Atlantic with only cursory ties to Scotland... St Kilda, Rona, Sula Sgeir... even their names are magic.) And not just for that "I'm going places you can't ha ha" travelog but for connecting farflung islands with cancers and whalebones and the brief essay link bits are as necessary as the chapters which make up the bulk of the book. Is Findings as good as this? (I picked up Edgelands in Waterstones yesterday and dropped it quite sharpish on investigating the text.)

I read Macfarlane's The Wild Places recently, and though it was indeed wonderful as his prose always is, halfway through, it was like I suddenly *saw* straight through his schtick and saw the schtick more clearly than the writing, and it kind of spoiled the magic a bit for me, like seeing the strings of puppets. i still think he's great, and I'm going to read Mountains of the Mind after I finish my current book (more on that book later) but I just can't. stop. seeing. the kind of macho-poet schtick and I yen, but I also kinda laugh when I read another chapter that amounts to "I walked 47 miles o'er t' moors and slept in a snowdrift on a Scottish mountain, and recited the poetry of Edward Thomas to keep myself from freezing to death while admiring the sharp, glittering sky, and here is a fact about night vision and an Enlightenment poem about scientists discovering stars then I carried home a piece of gneiss to give to *insert famous nature writer here*..." etc and so on. I do love him, but it is schtick.

NOW.

I give you all warning. If any of you EVER consider reading a book called How England Made The English by Harry Mount, I have but one word of advice: DON'T.

I picked it up for £1.99 in Oxfam and it might actually be the worst book on Natural/Social History I have ever read. Do not take my word for it, if anyone is the slightest bit curious, do not buy it, give me your postal address and I will put it in a bag and mail it to you to get the noxious thing out of my house. It's riddled with inaccuracies and schoolboy errors. The man's political biases show through so transparently that he runs rampant over the most basic of facts (and others, it's like he just doesn't even bother to check: e.g. Gilbert Scott's iconic phone booth... oh, something to do with the John Soane museum, maybe, perhaps the ceilings? (Though the photo credits actually manage to get it right, clearly they weren't written by him.)) I didn't even know who the man was before I started reading, it was an Second Hand Bargain Bookshop Bonanza Impulse Buy, but halfway through, after him not even knowing who built the London sewer system (private investment, clearly! because it is conceptually The Best! And also the most English - this guy has a serious case of the Real Englands, and *please* stop with this "we" in your writing, I resent being forced-teamed into your bigoted worldviews. Africa, by the way? Continent, not country, with a coastline significantly longer than Britain's.) I looked up who he was - Daily Mail writer and former Bullingdon Boy. All I can say is, it shows.

Someone - Mark S? Fizzles? started a thread a long time about things you read in books that cause you to completely lose confidence in the author, and I'm going to revive that thread for this book's worst offences, but at this point I'm basically just hate-reading it to see how many more errata there are. It's not even the political biases, I mean, I grew up reading Country Life, I can ignore political bias if the architectural writing or natural history writing is good, but this guy just doesn't even bother getting basic facts right. Sigh. If you want a book on the social history of the English, read Watching The English by Katie Fox. If you want a good layman's natural history of Britain read The Lie Of The Land by Ian Vince. If you want to know about Great Houses and landscape design and aristocratic pursuits written by someone who is not a total prat, read Mark Girouard. Avoid this book like a DMV laid low by plague.

"Phone booth?" What is this, Superman? Been hanging out with too many comics geeks. Phone box.

Ha, I picked up that Harry Mount book from the library a while ago, and had a similar reaction to yours. I gave up early on, after a completely gratuitous dig at Tony Benn.

I've just read Nick Papadimitriou's "Scarp", which is entertainingly odd, but ultimately rather frustrating. And I'm familiar with the area he's writing about. If I weren't, I'd probably think he'd made it all up. As it is, I'm still not convinced.

haha, OK, oh god, yes. That Tony Benn swipe! Especially at the start of a chapter on the "North-South Divide" which begins "there is a divide between North and South" and then goes on to talk about The South for 30 pages It gets worse and worse from there, e.g. the characterisation of post-industrial land usage as being "pleasant" (only ever in the South of course) and that which is "ugly" (only ever that in the North) e.g. Cornish Engine Houses are picturesque but any industrial building past the Watford Gap is "blight." I almost want to start a thread to go through it line by line and demolish both it and his weird concepts of "Real England" (this man genuinely, honestly believes that the real class struggle in this country is the Middle Class vs the Upper, and of course favours the latter in all things.) but don't want to give him the oxygen of publicity. It swerves repeatedly between perplexing and angry-making on the basis of "that's your opinion and no accounting for tastes" vs "that fact is actually demonstrably just. not. true. The Metropolitan Board of Works, you may have heard of it."

Scarp, yeah, "entertainingly odd" was my reaction to it, but definitely worth reading if you are at all familiar with the terrain. Oooh, I lent my copy of that to someone and should really at some point do the hostage-book-exchange to get it back.

ty for putting in the hate-read & confirming my instincts about Mount - I subbed an article by him a couple of years back, horrible sort of handwavey 'Englishness', new tory twee feeling.

The irony of irony is that "twee" (meaning middle class or - god forbid - working class ideas of prettiness or niceness) is one thing he spends a great portion of the book railing against!

This book! I can't even! I finished it last night and it was one of the hardest things I had ever had to drag mine eyes over.

His whole last chapter on "Why England Doesn't Look Like England" was him ranting about all the things he thinks are ugly in England, with the usual examples of tower blocks, fly-overs, brutalism, "glass boxes", housing estates (snorrrrrre!)

All framed within him bemoaning this vanished breed of "bohemian" (based on this idealised image of Jeffrey Bernard, soho alcoholic slacker, as typified by... a man, possibly homosexual, that he saw in a pub a few times, in Oxford, when he was a student. No, *really*.) And how terrible that this (vaguely patrician, of course, male, of course) bohemian/intellectual/wastrel was this vanished breed that the housing crisis in London and the Southeast has completely destroyed with property prices, oh noes, will no one weep for them. To which, I just wanted to say: HACKNEY. HAVE YOU BEEN THERE. Of course he has not, because, ugh, housing estates and poor people. Working class people priced out of London by the same housing pressure? Oh, fuck 'em. Council housing is the actual worst. Because it's "ugly" and therefore "un-English." Direct quote: "Whatever you think of an unfair land ownership structure, it does make things more beautiful."

Someone actually typed that sentence out, and someone else considered it worthy of publishing it in a book.

I am not normally a violent person, but if this book had a face, I would knee it in the groin and beat it violently (preferably with some "good" English iron) until it was dead, and no court could convict me. It's been a long time since I hated a book this much.

"In June 2013, Bloomsbury published The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, edited and introduced by Mount"

I shamefully admit I own a couple of books by B.Johnson (either charity finds or ~hilarious gag gifts~ by friends) but to be fair, I've never tried very hard to read them!

Macfarlane on Nan Shepherd:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/27/nan-shepherd-vision-cairngorms-robert-macfarlane

My fam gave me the printed version of that at lunch today. <3

I'm turning into such a Macfarlane stan I might even listen to his Radio 4 programme on Monday. Save me!

Enjoying Monbiot's "Feral" more than I'd expected (had picked it up in shops a few times and put it back but was bought as a present). His writing on (preventing) floods is interesting, his hatred of sheep also intriguing.

I have not read Feral (LOL @ Oxford don types, in the cosy den of civilisation, fetishising the "feral" but then again, aren't we all) but Monbiot's war with the sheep has many, many historical precedents, dating back to the middle ages. Most of the literature I've read indicates that sheep cultivation laid the waste to nearly as man Deserted Medieval Villages as the Black Death did. Does he go into that, or is it just farming subsidy baiting?

Damage to the land(scape) plus an economic argument.

There are bits of the book when I could imagine Monbiot having a "man off" with Macfarlane.

There are bits of the book when I could imagine Monbiot having a "man off" with Macfarlane.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA oh god

Apologies if I traumatised anyone with the image above.

Currently trying to decide if I am enough of a Richard Mabey fan to try this: Dreams of the Good Life, a biography of Flora Thompson.

"This is the story of the author of a classic of English literature, who is far less renowned than her crowning achievement, Lark Rise to Candleford. While Flora Thompson’s much-loved portrait of life in the 19th century countryside has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself."

Tempting: http://littletoller.co.uk/products-page/monographs/herbaceous/

Kurt Jackson illustrations, too.

Not enjoying Conrad's "Mirror of the Sea". Stuck around half-way, determined to finish it, unmotivated to pick it up.

Chris Yates' Nightwalk is quietly charming.

http://littletoller.co.uk/products-page/ebooks/the-unofficial-countryside-ebook/?utm_source=Newsletter+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=f0d5367be4-Herbaceous_Newsletter_Spring_2014+5_6_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0dcb495de1-f0d5367be4-39911381

"For all our newsletter readers we have a limited time offer of 50p for our first ebook

The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey

Add the ebook to your basket and enter the Voucher code - ebook2014

This will add the discount to the total amount

This offer ends midnight Sunday 11th May"

http://davidhaskell.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/theheartbeatofatwig/

Not really sure how I feel about ebooks but for 50p ...

http://littletoller.co.uk/products-page/ebooks/

... for the next three days, apparently.

Thank you!

It's not really in the remit of this thread but Journal of a Disappointed Man is ALL TIME great. Have always been meaning to get a reading copy.

I bought it and the Mabey; will look through their list & find something to buy & funnel some actual money to the press.

Guys, I am totally in love with this book:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EhENgddYlyg/TDAztvV5fKI/AAAAAAAAMEI/S4K5RznNYRI/s1600/Concise-British-Flora.jpg

(The Concise British Flora In Colour by W Keble-Martin, which I inherited from my botanist Grandmother, and reclaimed on my last family visit.)

But is there an *actually* concise, or better yet pocket one, suitable for taking with one on walks, in order to establish the difference between e.g. Borage, Bugloss and Green Alkanet while in the field? Because concise the Keble-Martin may be, but portable it is not!

I quite like New Holland concise guides or Collins gem guides which are cheap and cheerful (though might not quite be detailed enough). I haven't looked at the flowers one, though.

Ooh, Collins gems is a good call. Thanks!

Ooooooooooooooooh:

http://littletoller.co.uk/bookshop/new-books/home-country/

So I'm really, really, really chuffed about this:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/05/ghosts-of-the-great-north-wood-pt-1/

Still not entirely sure how that jump from "Nature Reader" to "Nature Writer" (or rather, Nature Illustrator) happened but I'm quite proud of this series!

Nice one.

Thank you! (really really glad ILX doesn't have a "worst nature writing" thread haha)

Finally reading HE Bates' "Through The Wood". Strangely feel like I'm reading the words without really caring what they say. Best chapter is about his aunt's pub. Contains a very good rant about pheasants, too: ... "precious tame pheasants who destiny in life it is to be cared for more tenderly than babies and to be massacred a little more brutally than most soldiers."

New Macfarlane, spring next year: "Landmarks".

Yeah, I saw the news about the new Macfarlane, and feel a bit of nervous trepidation about it, in terms of, how long is he going to keep being golden / how long before I get sick of that thing he does.

In other Nature Reader news, the good news is: Amy Liptrot has just signed with Canongate for her book, The Outrun. The bad news is: I don't think it's coming out until... 2016 or something? Eeep! I don't want to wait that long.

I'd happily read a compiled/expanded version of her CBTR column:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2012/03/curious-islands-life-on-orkney/

MOAR 4 U -> http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/06/ghosts-of-the-great-north-wood-pt-2/

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/20/laurie-lee-centenary-birth-english-travel-writer-walking-robert-macfarlane

Gavin Maxwell

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/gavin-maxwells-bitter-legacy-was-the-otter-man-the-wildlife-champion-he-appeared-to-be-9595629.html

Macfarlane

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/11/john-mullan-book-club-old-ways-robert-macfarlane

(Note that there is a chance to stalk him, Branwell, at the bottom of the article).

Ha! The Guardian missed a trick. Instead of having him give a talk, they should have had him lead a walk. Mass trespass on ... somewhere. I'd have gone to that.

Can you imagine Macfarlane leading a walk and everyone trying to be his best friend and/or have a Monbiot-style "man-off" with him?

Watching that, to be honest, would be half the fun!

http://littletoller.co.uk/2014/07/the-ash-tree-by-oliver-rackham/

Ooh, that looks good!

More MacFarlane:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/01/robert-macfarlane-old-ways-book-club

Helen MacDonald's "H is for Hawk" is getting a lot of love, isn't it?

That Macfarlane, he turns up everywhere! he turned up in a chapter of Gossip From The Forest by Sara Maitland (which is also a good book if you like forests and fairy tales and is relevant to the interests of this thread*.)

*Though she gets points off for a couple of schoolboy errors about The Great North Wood, I'm sure her knowledge of Scottish forests is far better.

But is there an *actually* concise, or better yet pocket one, suitable for taking with one on walks, in order to establish the difference between e.g. Borage, Bugloss and Green Alkanet while in the field? Because concise the Keble-Martin may be, but portable it is not!

don't know if you found one or not but all the marjorie blamey books are great. the one that really helped me was this...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ZHB1GKNVL.jpg

... though obviously the downside is that it's not that useful when the plant isn't in flower. sizewise, it's unfortunately a bit too big for most pockets, but it is slim enough to slip in yr bag

woah wait up - congrats on yr cbtr thing! looks great

Hey, thanks, yeah, it's been a lot of fun doing it.

In the end, I got a Bloomsbury pocket guide, but it wasn't actually that helpful. Partly because it's arranged by family; not helpful when you don't even know the family. there is a pull-out sheet of "common plants" by bloom colour, but this leads to the second problem: a lot of these books are wide-ranging "flowers of Britain". And I don't know if they're primarily aimed at people who live in the countryside, and therefore feature a lot of meadow plants. What I'd really like is a super-localised "London weed guide" which features the stuff that grows round here a lot (which may not be as common in the rest of the country because 1) it's several degrees warmer on the Urban Heat Island or 2) so many garden escapees).

The best thing that happened for my flower knowledge recently, though, was meeting Roy from the South London Botanical Institute - he does a lot of guided wildflower walks all around the commons near my house. And he is highly knowledgeable and endlessly patient with over-bouncy new enthusiasts demanding "What's this? What's this?" over and over again. Doing three of his walks on local commons taught me more than any of the books. (I took copious notes, with mine own descriptions, too.) But his combination of folk tales and bizarro facts that you are not likely to forget ("It smells like mice!") has been super helpful.

oh that sounds fun! and it's definitely the quirky descriptions and alternative names for things that help them stick in yr brain i think

"It smells like mice!"

lemme guess - herb robert right?

Nope - hemlock!

And I'll never forget Stinking Tutson - bushy plant, yellow flowers, smells like "a goat."

oh, hemlock's a toughie to i.d.; all those umbillifers are a nightmare, but i really ought to get to grips with the nasty ones

eeek, this sounds terrifying:

Though somewhat similar in appearance to other plants with 'hemlock' in their common names, Conium maculatum is distinguished by its action of killing from the outside in as numbness of the extremities slowly becomes paralysis of the lungs. It has no effect on the brain.

my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock i had drunk

Purple patches on the stalk (plus mousey odour) are your giveaways that it's the nasty one. I always thought (because of Romantic poetry etc.) that it was rather a nice, languid, dreamy death but apparently not!

Roy Vickery has written a "Book of Unlucky Flowers" (hemlock v unlucky, I would imagine!) which I need to try to find.

Picked up R Jefferies' Nature Near London, with MacFarlane intro, today. Not sure the Collins Nature Library series ran for more than three books but they are nice editions. The New Naturalist series is also lovely but phenomenally expensive.

That was a bizarrely truncated series, wasn't it? It went pretty much nowhere.

Reading a book about a hill I will never walk up, despite it being less than 50 miles away.

What is the hill, and why will you never walk up it?

jefferies was one of my literary heroes when i was a teenager. once spent a week walking the ridgeway path with just his book 'the story of my heart' for company, sleeping rough near all those neolithic hill forts etc. an intense experience at the time, maybe kinda sad in hindsight - i'm sure i should have been out raving instead.

new naturalists are expensive but they're great books that only go up in price after they go out of print. the oliver rackham woodlands one is really really good if you're into woodland ecosystems, makes me want to tunnel into the undergrowth and get all wild and fungal

Why would you say those experiences are "kinda sad"? They sound actually kinda amazing, to me. What experiences would you have had raving that you did not have walking the Ridgeway? (Drugs? Sexual partners? I dunno.)

Been thinking about mine own isolated teenage years - how much of my years 13 to about 18 I spent exploring the woods of the Hudson Valley with no company but a dog. And yeah, maybe I should have been going to see the Jesus and Mary Chain at CBGB's or whatever it was that the direct contemporaries I would later become friends with were doing. But I think that exposure to landscapes and habitats and the appreciation both of "nature" (not sure what that means in an environment that has been worked as long as the Ridgeway has, but this is the essential conundrum of this whole thread, isn't it?) and Deep Time (seeing layers of human habitation, and how they get swept away - I didn't have hillforts, but I certainly had abandoned Colonial era homesteads) is surely a meaningful educational foundation for a human life?

(mutters something about uncool rural upbringings and learning the concept of self reliance, and the ability to manufacture one's own entertainments or diversions etc blah blah blah)

need to mull this over really, but... well i was rather socially unfulfilled due to shyness etc, and i think that disappearing into the countryside was kind of my attempt at forging some small bond with the world outside of my bedroom walls. i dunno, i was a daft and dreamy teen with no real clue about life outside of what i found in books and records.

x-post.

Silbury. You're not allowed to walk up it any more (visitors were causing too much damage).

Finding it quite a weird experience but it's not as if I've had plans to walk, say, all Macfarlane's paths (aside from the "dangerous" beach one).

Thoroughly enjoying Waterlog at the moment, thanks to this thread. It's a nice escape from having spent the entire year in cities with populations of 1m+. I can barely remember what the countryside looks like.

Also picked up A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes, Remote Britain by David St John Thomas and Four Hedges yesterday.

Ah. But Silbury Hill isn't ~really a hill~, says I, it's an ancient monument! It's totally manmade! (I thought; maybe I should read the book to find out.) And generally Wiltshire don't allow you to go wandering about ancient monuments any more.

I mean, often when I read these books, I get the urge to go and investigate the places, but they're never really ones that are actually accessible to me to start with, so I just google them and look at photos of them and aerial photography of them, and just pretend, what it would be like to be there. So this is rather a familiar feeling, rather than an odd one.

Now I keep seeing H Is For Hawk advertised and reviewed and interviewed and praised everywhere. And though I do generally get the impression that it's very good, I don't know why I can't bring myself to read it. (Might be simple vegetarian squeamishness; don't know.)

Just noticed (having finished "On Silbury Hill") that Little Toller have commissioned a monograph from Richard Skelton ("Fen Wall").

Yes, I've got a similar resistance to H is for Hawk.

Just enjoyed Mabey's "Home Country" - an easy, enjoyable read. Had a vague feeling that I'd read lots of it before (presumably in his other books).

Oh my god, I'm doing a book!

How the hell did this happen?

!!! oh wow - congratulations! can you share any details?

Well, it's an expanded, printed version of Ghosts of the Great North Wood.

More details once we hammer them out.

I'm swinging back and forth between wild excitement, mild disbelief and total "OMG who decided I could do a book? ~Ha!~" impostor syndrome and wondering when they will find me out.

hot damn, that's great! well done indeed :)

Nice one.

(Don't forget us on the Nature Reader thread when you're hangin' out on the Nature Writer one).

I heard some very funny gossip about a nature writer oft discussed on this thread, but obviously, I cannot share it. ;-)

Well, it's an expanded, printed version of Ghosts of the Great North Wood.

More details once we hammer them out.

I'm swinging back and forth between wild excitement, mild disbelief and total "OMG who decided I could do a book? ~Ha!~" impostor syndrome and wondering when they will find me out.

― Shugazi (Branwell with an N), Thursday, 18 September 2014 09:59 (3 days ago) Bookmark

Delighted to hear this - it will be a book *worth having*.

Go on, tell us your R-Mac story ...

It is not my story to tell.

Oh well.

Any books to recommend?

Currently reading George Ewart Evans' The Pattern Under The Plough. I've run out of steam with it a bit but notice that Richard Skelton lists it in his top ten favourite books (for those also reading The "classical" music you buy from Boomkat (2010): a thread to discuss Sylvain Chauveau, Johann Johannsson, Peter Broderick, Olafur Arnalds and others).

I'm not reading a nature book right now, but I am reading Noise by David Hendy, which is turning out to be a lot more interesting than anticipated. A social history of sound and human attitudes towards it. (All kinds of sound, music, natural sounds, speech, annoyances, mechanisation, shamanism, medicine, technology.) It goes a bit too fast, and covers so much ground so quickly I do sometimes wish he'd expand each individual subsection into a longer chapter, but I suppose it'd be 700 pages long then.

Probably outside the remit of this thread, though.

Currently undecided about whether to re-read "The Journal of A Disappointed Man" (for lifestyle tips) or to start Rackham's "The Ash Tree" ...

Simon Prosser on reading Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks

Hamish Hamilton Publishing Director Simon Prosser describes his experience reading Landmarks, the forthcoming title from bestselling travel writer and author of The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane.

“When I finished reading the first draft of Robert Macfarlane’s new book on landscape and language, I found that my vocabulary had notably and delightfully expanded:

I now knew ‘rionnach maoim’ (a Hebridean Gaelic term for ‘the shadows cast by cumulus clouds on moorland on a sunny, windy day’); ‘smeuse’ (Sussex dialect for ‘the hole in the base of a hedgerow made by the repeated passage of a small animal’); ‘af’rug’ (a Shetland word for ‘the reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore’); and ‘wind-fucker’ (the perfect East Anglian dialect nickname for a kestrel), along with ‘blonking’ (snowing), ‘babbing’ (fishing for eels) and ‘jirglin’ (playing about with water).”

All of these words, and thousands more, collected over a decade by Rob from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from Pembrokeshire to Suffolk, and from old Norse to Romani, appear in Landmarks, in the nine glossaries which interleave the ten chapters of the book. (Landmarks also describes Rob’s journeys into the mines of Cumbria, the moors of the Hebrides and the corries of the Cairngorms, as well as his meetings with glossarians, poets and word-collectors up and down the country.)

Landmarks is a book about the power of language – ‘strong style, single words’ in Rob’s phrase – to shape our sense of place. It is both a field-guide to the literature he loves (Nan Shepherd, Barry Lopez and Roger Deakin and more) and also a ‘Word-Hoard’, to borrow the title of the opening chapter. Over the course of the book we can chart a kind of love-affair between writer and language. The authors Rob is most drawn to tend to write with an exact and committed intensity about their chosen landscapes, in styles strong enough to revise our imaginary relations with places. They aim, in the words from Emerson which Rob quotes in the book, to ‘pierce…rotten diction and fasten words to visible things’, They are celebrants of the specific – and so too is Rob.

Over the book’s course, via its chapters and its glossaries , we come to realise that words and language, well-used, are not just a means to describe landscape, but also a way to know it, and ultimately to love it. If we lose the rich vernacular, regional, demotic lexis of these islands, developed over centuries, then we also risk losing our relationship to nature and the land. What we cannot name, we cannot in some sense see.

In the first chapter of Landmarks Rob writes grippingly about the battle to prevent a farm of 234 wind turbines, each 140 metres high, being built on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis. To some, like the writer Ian Jack, arguing in support of the planning application, Lewis was simply ‘a vast, dead place’; but to the majority of others concerned, it was a landscape full of life and particularity. How to express this? The answer lay in part in language, in the scores of ‘precognitions’ – statements of evidence – submitted by islanders, which included love-songs, poems, ballads and personal stories. As Finlay Macleod, a Hebridean friend of Rob’s active in the campaign concluded: ‘‘What is needed is a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ – a lexicon to banish the vision of Lewis as a ‘vast, dead place’. Happily, incredibly, the campaigners eventually won their battle – a victory for both place and place-language which may of course be only temporary.”

In some sense, Landmarks is a step towards just such a phrasebook, rich in language which sings, touches and affects, ‘offering glimpses through other eyes, permitting imaginative contact with distant ways of being, and habits of perception that might be valuable to save and to share’.”

Landmarks will be published in March 2015 by Hamish Hamilton. Image credit, Stanley Donwood.

^ Makes me think of Richard Skelton's work, that.

Do you ever have the sense that you're being marketed to so strongly that you just want to cross your arms across your chest, narrow your chest, and say "hmmmmm"?

Like, Robert Macfarlane mixes nature writing, linguistics and obscure, legacy hyper-local languages?

I'm feeling v v marketed to right now.

I think you'll find we're "bang on trend".

Apparently, Skelton actually features in the book.

It's gone a bit quiet, here.

Good Robert MacFarlane fronted TV documentary on Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain on the BBC Iplayer just now. MacFarlane is an insightful reader of Shepherd and it's wonderful to see some of the places she wrote about.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-30277488

Finally read "H is for Hawk". I'd have preferred it if the hawk could have lived off Quorn pieces but it is stunning. Very good on grief/grieving.

^ Costa Book of the Year, apparently.

Chris Yates' Nightwalk is quietly charming.

8 months too late but...yyes - it is. I loved it. I am building up a collection of night themed books some of which overlap this thread and are well worth looking at. Latest is The Darkness is Light Enough, an out of print book about badger watching in the early 80S written by a woman (Chris Ferris, a pseudonym apparently) with a bad back who can't sleep and so wondrrs around the woods befriending badgers (I an NOT makinhg this up) and confronting those who eould fo damage to them. You can buy a copy (and her other books) v.cheaply in the normal places. Also worth getting (and not mentioned as yet?) is Patrick Barkham's Badgerlands which is where I heard about the aforementioned Ferris.

Crap...the typos in that last post are numerous. You'll get the gist though...

Love the description of The Darkness is Light Enough. Will hunt it down.

Strangely, bought Badgerlands last week.

Something about Badgerlands slightly irritated me but I can't put my finger on it. I think it's just a bit too balanced, reasonable? There's a lot of TB stuff in it - understandably - and not quite enough badger. I enjoyed it but I wasn't quite satisfied!

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/28/helen-macdonald-h-is-for-hawk-costa-prize-six-nature-books

Macfarlane's shoes, apparently:

http://greenshoesblog.tumblr.com/

^ I realise this was a step too far for my fandom.

Anyone excited about "Landmarks"?

http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Events/Detail.aspx?eventId=2466

I missed that Oliver Rackham, of Woodlands / The Ash Tree fame, died last week.

http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/8274

Had seen that. Have only read The Ash Tree, which I wasn't particularly fond of. Other recommendations?

Currently reading TH White's "The Goshawk". Obviously I have been inspired to do so by "H is for Hawk". Surprised the latter hasn't prompted more comment on this thread. It really is very good. Anyone read any of Macdonald's other books?

I think I'm about to go on a Sara Maitland binge, having read two of her books, both of which were exquisite. (except I think there are only 3 of them.)

the "nature" in this thread is Very British

My "nature" reading undeniably tends to be UK-based. I don't think its an unwelcoming thread, though, Benbbag.

Didn't say that. Just that what "nature" means to me is quite "different to" as you say what it means in a kingdom lacking a desert (or desert canyon), a whitewater (or even wild?) river, a glacier, contemporary volcanic activity, or a mountain peak more prominent than that of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, whose summit most people visit by car or cog railway. For better and worse to varying degrees, it seems a "mild" sort of nature just as I find what little I've experienced of the country (ok, London)'s weather, culture, and food.

And that difference seems very much expressed in the literature vs. American nature writing by people like, to choose a somewhat extreme example, Edward Abbey.

Ah, I'd read your post as having a go.

"I don't think its an unwelcoming thread, though" < By which I meant ... aside from me mentioning Mabey and Deakin in the opening post, there's not been any attempt to set parameters for "nature writing" and there has been nothing at all to stop anyone posting about any not Very British writing.

What Maitland do you recommend, Branwell? Only really seen "Gossip from the Forest" and didn't fancy that.

Why didn't you like Gossip From The Forest? because if you don't like that, you're not going to like Maitland.

(Obv I thought it was great, but the combination of nature writing and folk tale study was totally up my alley. I liked the structure of the book, too, the way it was divided up into 12 woods she visited during 12 different months, with an appropriate folk tale between each chapter to break it up.)

It's something I particularly like about this thread, and the current thread of Nature Writing discussed within it, is the idea that Nature is, actually, everywhere. There's this kind of thrusting, macho Nature Writing which is all about Glaciers and Mile-High Mountains and Great Barrier Reefs, and it seems to promote this idea that capital-N Nature is something you have to go, well... *elsewhere* to experience.

I like this (perhaps very English) idea that Nature is, in point of fact, everywhere you look. It's in hedgerows and the overgrown bits of railway lines. You can find it on bombsites and vacant lots in London. You can find it in cracks in the pavement as well as in deserts and ice fields and lava flows.

The progression of Robert MacFarlane really shows the movement from one style of nature writing to the other - that his first book was a history of Mountain Climbing, and of course that was all macho travel and crampons and Grand Scenery Nature Writing. And then halfway through The Wild Places, he seems to experience this very definite and important shift - that he went looking for Nature - for The Wild. And he spent a night on top of a glacier on a mountain, and actually found it a horrible experience, totally remote - not wild, just alien. Contrasting that with the Burren, which is a more small-scale, not-remote, almost domestic kind of place - there he found Nature and The Wild in all its lush profusion. And the more he shifts from these Awesome Feats of Sublimity to these small, more personal, more familiar, more pastoral impressions of nature, the better his writing gets. Or at least, the more I like it. (True, he has the gift of writing to make strolling a Holloway seem as thrilling an experience as a corrie on the Isle of Skye somewhere.)

I didn't get beyond the mention of "fairy tales" in the title, so didn't give it a proper look ... and nothing has pointed me back in its direction until your post.

I love "The Unofficial Countryside" but hated "Edgelands" - for the most part, I just prefer Mabey's writing but I did feel that the authors of the latter were somehow trying too hard and were somehow unconvincing.

I could be confusing authors but isn't there a point in one of Macfarlane's books where he acknowledges walking around a mountain as being as valid as walking to the summit.

(Sorry, that's bullet point-y and half-formed).

Macfarlane on The Living Mountain *now* on BBC4.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04tqk1n/secret-knowledge-12-the-living-mountain-a-cairngorms-journey

Best email of the day: "Landmarks" has been dispatched.

Going to wait and savour it but for those that don't want to:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape?CMP=share_btn_tw

Melissa Harrison on Landmarks, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/56015218-bc3c-11e4-a6d7-00144feab7de.html#axzz3T26srVjF

http://www.campdengallery.co.uk/catalogues/kjackson3.pdf

Ouch > http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/14/boundless-tracing-land-and-dream-in-a-new-northwest-passage-kathleen-winter-review

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/15/landmarks-robert-macfarlane-digested-read

I recently read a description of "H is for Hawk" that appeared to suggest that it would prompt lots more Nature Writing but I do have a sense of feeling like I now don't want to read another book that is partial personal autobiography, partial biography (of a historical Nature Writer) and partial "journey". This isn't a criticism of "H", which I adored, but more a vague feeling that it was good enough to feel like a "full stop" on this kind of writing. I'm not at all surprised to read a review like that of the Kathleen Winter book. Disclaimer: Obviously I will appear on this thread in a few months time having been enraptured by a book that is all these things.

The Macfarlane book is one of three books I've got on the go at the moment. I'm skipping the glossaries as I was becoming overwhelmed by them (I'll enjoy them more reading them in short bursts). It's a good book but it does feel slightly like the literary equivalent of a b-sides collection, with lots of previously "released" work albeit re-written (or "re-recorded", if persisting with the analogy).

Apparently there's an "exclusive extra chapter" in the Waterstones paperback edition of "H is for Hawk". Is it socially acceptable just to read in-store?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/22/nature-writing-literary-gold

“I have very mixed feelings about what is happening,” Mabey said. “I’m delighted that there is more writing about nature going on, but I’m increasingly confused by what this genre tag actually means. Nature writing ought to be writing about nature. I’m not sure books about pets ought to qualify, nor do I think books that are principally about the nature of the self ought to qualify.”

Is Mabey referring to H is for Hawk as a book about pets?

Humans aren't part of nature; I always forget that. Sounds like a grumpy dude that has his nose out of joint that another writer win a bunch of nice awards. Do not want.

It feels a bit odd in a ... one of my favourite writers disses my favourite recent book ... sort of way.

I was reading a book the other week (Ramble On by Sinclair MacKay) and while at the same time, I found it a good read, interesting and informative, I was also thinking "hmmm, this is, in structure, form and topic very, very 'Robert Macfarlane" and also suddenly very conscious that I was reading a work within a Genre. Each chapter had a thrilling walk, a specific Place, a bit of history and some biographical details about a figure associated with the rambling movement.

At the same time, I was thinking "ah, this is a Genre I like" but also "hmmm this is a bit derivative."

So I don't know if there is a point at which a literary genre codifies or calcifies into a Genre "The Robert Macfarlane Nature-Travel Book"; or just a point where one becomes AWARE of the genre's forms (and limitations). But I feel like one has a choice where one can say: hmmm, this book is not very good (granted, in this case, that the book is good) or just concede, "oh, this is a Genre now, not the special, exceptional case I thought the first one I read was."

Sorry, bus typing, not expressing myself very clearly.

Holloway film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hchlQmws93o

He's taking over the world. Macfarlane's sleeve notes for Grasscut:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/04/robert-macfarlane-landscape-grasscut/

& http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane

A good article, that. Covers lots of ground and a bit "listy", at points, maybe (and I came away with a list of names to explore) but I enjoyed his arguments pulling these disparate authors/artists etc together. Always feel I'm missing something with These New Puritans, mind (like them rather than love them).

I have to admit to having enjoyed Macfarlane's introduction to Shepherd's "The Living Mountain" more than the text itself.

Has anyone read Melissa Harrison's "At Hawthorn Time"? Or "Clay"?

Have mentioned on the dedicated Skelton thread (not sure how much crossover there is between threads) but his "Landings" has been reprinted: http://corbelstonepress.com/landings.htm

Not read but looks intriguing:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/04/little-toller-llewelyn-powys/

(Re-reading this thread, I can't diss anyone for being listy).

Started At Hawthorn Time but gave up after 50 pages - characterisation as trite as John Lanchester garlands with awfully pious, facile Fotherington-Thomas nature writing. Don't know she persuaded MacFarlane and Macdonald to blurb it.

^how she persuaded...

It's on my to-read list. But I have a kind of cautious approach because she's kind of in my social circle, and it's awkward if you read someone you're becoming friendly with's novel and don't get on with it, that kind of influences how you come to think of them as you're getting to know them. (It's different if you read the novel of someone you've known a long time; or if you read a novel first, then get to know someone much later.)

I dunno; I fully admit that I am probably tinged with more than a fair bit of envy. (We live very near one another, and it's annoying when she's all "Lookit this great new place I discovered!" when she's talking about a place I've been writing about and drawing for years, and it's like Streatham only has room for One Nature Writer, and her career is taking off and mine is totally stalled, so of course I'm going to feel a bit weird) but also she is Very Good At Social Media and I know really given all that I should beat down my complicated-German-word-for-feelings but I think sometimes the way to deal with feelings is just to acknowledge them. Any interactions I have with her or her work are tinged with envy. So it's hard to have any kind of objective sense of her work.

I will shut up now before I say something I regret.

I can see that completely.

Anyone read any Llewelyn Powys?

Just coming to the end of Conrad's "The Mirror of the Sea" in the Little Toller Nature Classics Series - have found it a bit of a slog.

Not particularly enjoying Nan Shepherd's "The Living Mountain".

i could've sworn I'd posted something on Llewlyn Powys on this thread, but I haven't - mentioned him on one of the what are you reading threads here:

Llewelyn Powys - Earth Memories (essays on nature, his tuberculosis, and a superb essay on Pieter Breughel - 'There have appeared from time to time in all countries certain artists who have discounted that whole field of religious and metaphysical experience which to many sensitive natures would alone seem to render the rudeness of life tolerable')

I really like the Earth Essays in fact - lovely late summer evening reads. I liked his phrase, that i stumbled across elsewhere - 'to be out of the grave, the great exemption'. At that time it seemed like a pleasant corrective to a maundering nihilism, which I have a weakness for, hopefully more internal than expressed, but finding out since that he was tubercular and reading some of the essays, it has additional force.

haven't any time to post recently, but I read the rob macfarlane essay on the eerie in pastoral a few weeks ago. it was good to see so many things I like put in one place. i found myself quibbling with it a lot though. some of that was probably the quibbling where two people have opinions in an area they know well, hair splitting - the sort of thing you see in books pages, sympathetic in interests if not always in manner - but i keep feeling there was something a bit 'off' about it. made some notes as i went, but it was a while ago now and i was on a plane, but will try and reconstruct some of my responses here.

One of the descriptions of A View from a Hill is described as 'the pinnacle of pastoral,' which suggests pastoral is a single type of expression, but there have been too many different versions of pastoral for it to have a pinnacle I think. it stands alongside comedy, tragedy, satire, romance and latterly realism as a persistent form of expression in western art. what's important to distinguish are its variants, whether that's marvell or de la mare, ballard, betjeman or capability brown, æmilia lanyer or christina rosetti. i think more restricted genres only can have pinnacles of that sort - MR James would in fact be a pinnacle of ghost story writing for me. it may seem picky, but i think this 'singlenness' underpins RM's essay, and causes some missteps.

'Important to distinguish its variants' because pastoral is defined by both uchronia and utopia - we use it as an area of projection (past) and desire (future)- so it represents both passively and actively (in terms of our configuration of it - archtitecture, landscaping, national parks etc), hidden aspects of our psyche and society *at a given time*. It is particularly flavoured by national self-identity. Distinguishing the threads helps untangle some of what makes us who we are.

i have a gut aversion to psychogeography - which I rationalise (how successfully i'm not sure) as a feeling that it is something that is bad at continuous history, at linking its artefacts to the present. it flattens the world around us, it lacks perspective, it gothicises the now with its disjecta membra. i don't mind that as an æsthetic, i do mind it as a heuristic. it has the same singleness as 'pinnacle of pastoral'. I would be interested to tackle this a bit more with someone who is a fan, as I don't really want to chuck it out of court - there's a lot there that I feel I should like, just seems to me that it's been jumbled the wrong way.

I don't agree with his categories - 'eerie' is doing too much work to yoke MR James and pastoral, though I agree with his attempt to divide horror from it. My definitions would be something like horror - the evil is described and is visible, and ghost stories - a less tangible fear, the evil is hidden, only partially described, and in the dark. ‘Eerie’ suggests to me something unrealised but destablising, something that can prompt a psychological unravelling. MR James’s beings do generally make their way into the world, but not until after a series of frames or narrative seals have been removed. They come from within books or pictures, are disinterred, enlivened from cloth and wood at the touch or presence of evil or evil intent, unintentionally bidden into material being. Eerie is empty.

My prefered term would be 'malign' pastoral. There is something in the apparently edenic that wishes us harm and I *think*, though I'm not sure, that this is p much a continuation of portrayals of the marginalised and oppressed Celt, shorter and darker than the incoming Anglo-Saxons, or perhaps the earlier mysterious switch from prehistoric cthonic pastoral, to the sky and sun worshipping period. Puck, the Little Folk, fairies generally, Jack o' the Green, hobbits and hobgoblins too, lurk in uncertain cultural spaces between evil, mischief, merriment and disruption. This thing that wishes us harm is licentious and priapic, so particularly threatening to periods of constrained morality. so there's also an element of 'daphnis and chloe gone bad' or at least more sexualised than manners would previously allow in more coy depictions. Men are innocent and virginal, often seen as victims, woman are strongly desired and idealised, as well as being despised and reviled for being 'tempresses'. John Cowper Powys' Wolf Solent is a great portrait of this, but then of course so is The Wicker Man. (Penda's Fen remains the most remarkable analysis of post-war pastoral i know, where the innocence is that of a youth discovering his gay sexuality in a heavily manichean pastoral setting). (Just on that 'marginalised Celt' thing, I think one of the things that distinguishes US pastoral is that the marginalisation, partial destruction and displacement of its aboriginal natives is comparatively recent. It is a process that can testify against the present, and is available as an existing force rather than being purely symbolised by its remnants (folk or actual - eg stone circles).

In fact MR James is not even particularly pastoral. His method is usually retribution deliberately placed or designed into human artefacts - curtains, mazes, books, choir stalls, mezzotints etc - and little of his writing evokes pastoral elements (not even the bit Macfarlane quotes as the pinnacle of pastoral - it's more a sort of picture postcard pastoral (which, yes, *is* a form!). This is the form of category error that i think psychogeography makes, and RM makes in the essay - too much is indiscriminately aggregated into one place, linking by piling in a congeries of stuff ('eerie') in this case. Arthur Machen is a much better bet for his argument, tho slightly less canonical.

Some more fragmented thoughts in my notes:

I think this may be my problem but things like 'James is one of only two writers who has caused me to wake myself with my own screaming' have me going 'oh come *on*'. Frankly I don't believe him, but as I say, I think maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part. I remember first reading The Rings of Saturn by Sebald, where he gets lost in a maze and makes it seem mortally inextricable, and then has a diagram of the maze on the next stage and scrawling ru fuckin srs in the margin.

-

RONG - Everyone knows Greenwich is the eeriest Cooper Dark is Rising text! Not the Dark is Rising itself. [and for several of the reasons already cited above - the way it violently wrenches the role of the woman in malign pastoral from male perspective into female, it's strong jack o'the green elements, and by far the strongest sense of unaligned primal force, rather than the moral good and bad.]

-

‘We are very far from nature writing’. This is true. Tho see Walter de la Mare (very strong on nature writing), Jocelyn Brooke’s seasonal writing and Denton Welch, all with links to the uncanny and malign pastoral.

-

Why is the civil war so important? Again, lack of detail leads to rongness, saying it’s appealing because it was a ‘radicalised period’ as current writers etc wish ours to be ignores the: Puritanism, land in common, non conformism nexus. Also, the beings that shift over time as a consequence of religious/cultural changes – Dymchurch Flit.

-

His attempt to explain the appeal of 'military and security' (i'd add 'communication' to that) within all this is interesting. Though he got a wholehearted nod from me with 'The monumental era of 20th-century detection technology, when structures needed to be vast in order to see further, has proved especially attractive' I was less certain when he linked it with current fears about state surveillance. It's still something i'm struggling to get a sense of really, though there's no denying its force. My current theory would be something like 'fear of nuclear annihilation resulted in speculation about a society that would have to return to the very rudimentary possibly prehistoric pastoral. The structures that signified these powers (electrical, nuclear) in the landscape symbolised this fear or expectation. This has resulted in a specific 'science+pastoral' aesthetic':

Plutonium waste
Eking out in drowned steel rooms a half
Life of how many million years? Enough
To set the doomsday clock - its hands our own:
The same rose ruts, the red-as-thorn crosshatchings-
Minutes nearer midnight. On which stroke
Powers at the heart of the matter, powers
We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake,
Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath
And speak new formulae of megadeath.

Something of the Ozymandias about them maybe too, in this light. Something something space travel new pastoral old civilisations something. Anyway, interesting essay, always nice to see lots of good things mentioned in one place. Tho smdh Iain Sinclair.

I meant to respond to your post wisely, Fizzles.

I'm still *stuck* on Shepherd's "The Living Mountain". I'm determined to finish it but it feels like hard work, particularly as it is only 100 pages or so.

I bought Powys' "Earth Memories" and might appear on this thread to talk about it but judging from previous experience might just whinge about finding it a slog ..

I meant to respond to your post wisely, Fizzles.

i really do think in cases like this it's the thought that counts.

Anyone buying the Richard Skelton book?

What's been great this year?

Feel like I've given up on/put aside more books than usual this year.

Looking forward to Marcus Sedgwick's "Snow" and Cheryl Tipp's "Sea Sounds" monographs in 2016, though.

And Amy Liptrot's "The Outrun".

Oh ... from the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/05/best-nature-books-2015?CMP=share_btn_tw

(Made me intrigued about "Fish Ladder" and "Inglorious").

"The Outrun" is very good. Beautifully observed. Loved the chapter about ambergris (a version of which appeared on Caught By The River).

Also, really enjoying Fred Kitchen's "Brother to the Ox". What I've read so far is pretty much "farming memoir" though I think that changes.

May be of interest: http://richardjefferiessociety.co.uk/

The Outrun is seriously amazing but I'm obviously personally biased on that regard. It's one of those books where I didn't have to sugar-coat my reaction at all, but I thin I embarrassed Amy a little by how much I responded to it haha. :-/

Less than a month into the year ... I nominated it for the above.

Tempting:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/26/landskipping-painters-ploughmen-and-places-review-anna-pavord-constable-hardy

Just noticed Amy Liptrot has written an intro for RM Lockley's Dream Island.

Really enjoyed Kitchen's "Brother to the Ox" - it was very much a "read a chapter each night before sleep" sort of book. It was very matter of fact about the hardship of farming life, in a way that really worked.

Finally reading Gilbert White's "The Natural History of Selborne". Very much along the lines of "I saw a rare bird. It was beautiful. And then I shot it and preserved it in brandy".

Was quite tempted after reading this:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/15/britains-got-talons-the-writer-raised-on-raptors

Less so, after reading this:

http://markavery.info/2016/03/06/book-review-raptor-james-macdonald-lockhart/?platform=hootsuite

(I must confess I quite enjoyed the latter review as - despite the "But is it nature writing?" beefs - I often imagine that reviews of such books are those of friends writing about each other's work.)

"Do you ever have the sense that you're being marketed to so strongly that you just want to cross your arms across your chest, narrow your chest, and say "hmmmmm"?"

Strangely, I've just read Robert Seethaler's "A Whole Life" - the best book I've read in a long while, not a "nature book" and one that I thought I'd found fairly randomly (it was a local bookseller's favourite book of last year). I liked enough that once I'd finished it I Googled it and what comes up? It was a Robert Macfarlane "recommended holiday read" in The Guardian.

Also, can I just say I've always been a big fan?

Amy Liptrot's column should definitely be a book ... particularly loved the one about whale vomit.

Actually, a few of the columns could happily morph into books.

― djh, Wednesday, 17 October 2012 19:45 (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*stuffs great bonxie in mouth to stop from saying the really exciting thing*

Your book?

Just say it.

Ha! No.

My "nature reading" has stalled a bit. What've I missed?

Just read 'The Running Hare: The secret life of farmland'
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1109213/the-running-hare/
It's mostly great but I had to break my own rule about never commenting on books on Amazon after reading the exclusively 5 star reviews of it. It goes on a bit (lists of lost flowers comes off more as some kind of litany and just made me drift off) but more mystifyingly it suddenly lays into Monbiot and rewilding. Now, I have issues with both those as well but this is a book ABOUT REWILDING A FIELD for God's sake...the guy virtually forces hares to live in his field, and about the evils of agrochemical farming, I mean aren't him and Monbiot essentailly on the same side? Also I found myself being irritated by the way he seemed more like a weekend farmer than anything - instead of a second home he had a second field. Having said all this it is beautifully written and contains something of interest on every page. It made me more determined than ever to get out in the English countryside more. Worth having for sure.

Anyone buying the Richard Skelton book?

Just ordered it. Loved Crossings.

Oh sod it - I mean Landings...!

Strangely, I love the "Landings" album but have never read the accompanying book (although I have it), for some reason.

Enjoyed "Beyond The Fell Wall" and have been reading his poetry retrospective, "The Pale Ladder". Both are the kind of books you need to read in small doses - savour words and re-read paragraphs - rather than settle down for a long session.

I can't think what but I'm sure I've read something that put me off the Lewis-Stempel book. (If it wouldn't lesson anyone's enjoyment of the book) Having just read your review on Amazon and a review in the Guardian, what's his issue with Monbiot and how does he explain having hunted foxes and having sabbed fox hunts?

I was about to say I've never been convinced by Skelton's prose (if that's what it is) but I wonder if it was just that I'd had my Skelton fill and stopped reading and listening around the same time. Glancing at Landings, I can still feel the latent power in it. It vibrates and resonates in the same way as his music.

Nice thing on Annie Dillard in the latest LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thats-inspiration-rereading-annie-dillard/

I would say I'm far more moved by Skelton's recordings than his writing (though can find time for both).

Just pre-ordered RM Lockley's Dream Island in a moment of weakness (Had intended to read a pile of books before I bought anything else).

http://wainwrightprize.com/2016/06/30/the-wainwright-prize-2016-shortlist-revealed/

Common Ground, Rob Cowen (Windmill)

The Outrun, Amy Liptrot (Canongate)

Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane (Penguin)

The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy (John Murray)

The Fish Ladder, Katharine Norbury (Bloomsbury)

The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks (Penguin)

Now in its third year, the prize awards £5,000 annually to the work that best reflects renowned nature writer Alfred Wainwright’s core values of celebrating the great British outdoors.

This year’s shortlist draws a spotlight on the continued resurgence of nature and travel writing in the UK and the staggering breadth of personal issues explored through the genre.

Memoir features strongly, with Amy Liptrot’s experience of alcoholism and recovery explored through her wild Orkney homeland (The Outrun), Rob Cowen’s journey into parenthood set within his exploration of a square-mile of Yorkshire woodland (Common Ground), Katharine Norbury’s life spent walking Britain’s glittering rivers (The Fish Ladder), James Rebank’s account of life as a shepherd in the Lake District (A Shepherd’s Life), and Michael McCarthy’s moving memoir of childhood trauma that offers a rallying cry for protecting our environment (The Moth Snowstorm). Meanwhile, Robert Macfarlane rounds off the shortlist, earning his second shortlisting with his meditation on words and landscape (Landmarks).

http://www.commonground.org.uk/leaf/#

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/05/wainwright-prize-goes-to-amy-liptrots-searingly-honest-the-outrun

Did anyone read Monbiot's "How Did We Get into This Mess? : Politics, Equality, Nature"?

Hasn't seemed as prominent as "Feral"

Ned Trifle - have you seen there's a newly published Claire Leighton, "Country Matters"?

Richard Jefferies Society writing prize 2016:

Nominations for the 2016 award are now closed. The winner will be selected in May and announced on 3 June 2017. The long list under consideration is:

•The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
•Landskipping by Anna Pavord
•The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel
•Wild Kingdom by Stephen Moss.
•A Sky Full of Birds by Matt Merritt
•Rivers Run by Kevin Parr
•The Art of Falconry by Patrick Morel
•The Tree Climber’s Guide by Jack Cooke
•Nightingales in November by Mike Dilger
•Walking Through Spring by Graham Hoyland
•Ladders to Heaven by Mike Shanahan
•Six Facets of Light by Ann Wroe
•Island Home by Tim Winton
•The Remedies by Katharine Towers
•How to Read Water by Tristan Gooley
•The Wood for the Trees by Richard Fortey

Leighton's "Country Matters" not really doing it for me (though I loved "Four Hedges").

Quite enjoyed Horatio Clare's "Orison for a Curlew", about his search to see a slender-billed curlew ... particularly as he notes on the first page that he doesn't see one and it is probably extinct.

I stall on Gilbert White's "The Natural History of Selborne" but have picked it up again - I hadn't realised until flicking back through this thread that I started it over a year ago.

Not strictly a "nature" book but a combination of writing about an allotment and a memoir about growing up in the foster system but Allan Jenkins' Plot 29 is well worth a read.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/31/plot-29-a-memoir-by-allan-jenkins-review

Not strictly a book at all, but a lovely documentary on BBC2 about Helen Macdonald getting and training a new goshawk: Natural World, 2017-2018: 7. H is for Hawk: A New Chapter: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09b68wy

It treads some of the same fine, slightly mawkish, lines as the book but that's OK.

Any "river" book recommendations? It will be for a present for someone who potters in a canoe.

Weirdly, I haven't read any of this year's Wainwright Book Prize shortlist.

The Last Wilderness by Neil Ansell (Tinder Press)

Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler (Hodder & Stoughton)

Outskirts by John Grindrod (Sceptre)

The Dun Cow Rib by John Lister-Kaye (Canongate)

The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton)

The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson (William Collins, HarperCollins)

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (Michael Joseph)

This is probably a bit shameless, but I've been writing this on and off for a few years; I stopped writing for various reasons (work, purpose) but put something up today:

https://somesmallcorner.co.uk/

Any nature book recommendations for pre-school children?

According to their Twitter account, a distributor handling Little Toller's books has gone into administration, losing them fairly horrendous amounts of money.

I think they'd appreciate purchases from their website, right now:

https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/

Anyone read Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life? (Sheldrake appears in Robert Macfarlane's Underlands.)

I'm a couple of chapters in. It's fascinating. Been reading his dad's The Science Delusion too, tangentially

Thanks or something. The bits in Underland are fascinating too - was intrigued if this translated into a good book of his own. Will buy!

Had a scan through this thread and wondered ... how did I actually find the time to do anything else?

"Amy Liptrot's column should definitely be a book" made me laugh, though.

Really enjoying Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time, sort of about her own garden ... but wonderful on other people. It sort of feels like something that could be featured in "House & Garden" magazine but contains some great (and angry) writing about, for example, the slavery that funded some of the UK's gardens.