Reading: Rain

Melissa Harrison's Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is another of the "random walking books I picked up while browsing in the travel section of Blackwells" (a category that accounts for a fairly substantial proportion of my TBR pile). It's exactly what it says on the tin; four short essays describing four rainy walks taken across the course of a single year, one each quarter. Each essay blends description of the walks themselves and the varied landscapes and rain Harrison walks through, which range from the flatness of Wicken Fen to the tors of Dartmoor, and from steady winter rain through spring showers to a summmer thunderstorm, with meteorological detail about the causes of the different types of rain storms and showers which are such a feature of the English weather, notes on natural history, quotes from other writings about weather, and snippets of memoir. It ends with a glossary of regional terms for rain and another of meteoroglogical definitions for different types of rain (I now know the precise difference between light, heavy, very heavy and extreme rain, although alas there's no waty to work that out without standing still holding a rain gauge for an hour). It's a lovely little book, which evokes each different setting and type of storm perfectly, and I'd particularly recommend it to anyone who is longing to get out into a different bit of countryside, or any countryside at all, after weeks of lockdown.

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I then took a look at legionseagle's copy of Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers, which reached me (via lilliburlero) just before the lockdown at a point where reading about Tolkien's ideas of Oxford in the late 80s seemed less of an entertaining prospect than it had done when I'd asked to borrow it. It's a curious fragment which seems to blend a future version of the Inklings with bits of what would become Middle-Earth's mythology and an Anglo-Saxon timeslip story thrown in for good measure (and to demonstrate the continuity between Middle-Earth and Old English). Tolkien's Oxford of 1987 appears to have remained a curiously male affair, and I'm a bit concerned about the mentions of the academic who was a leader of the Queer Metre movement and the undergraduate who is much attached to him, which sounds like very much the kind of thing we should be discouraging. Also, the occurence during the narrative of a catastrophic event (in this case the Great Storm of 1987, only a few months earlier than the actual Great Storm of 1987) which means that all summer exams have to be moved to winter was, frankly, a bit too on the nose right now.

Reading: Spellswept

Stephanie Burgis's novella Spellswept is a prequel to Snowspelled, which I read and enjoyed last year. It's set some years before Snowspelled and focuses on Amy Standish, a young woman whose political ambitions in which make it vital for her to make a good match. Set in a single night, during a ball in a fabulous underwater ballroom, this is a delightful romance which features a brilliantly competent, confident heroine, delightfully supportive family relationships and a fantastic mentor/mentee relationship which conveys a really strong sense of mutual respect and liking and doesn't falter for a moment despite being stressed by events. I thought this was utterly charming, and despite the fact that I'm struggling to read at the moment I managed to read it in an afternoon.