The Nature Reader

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.