The Nature Reader

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!