Reading: Landmarks
Jun. 25th, 2016 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI bought Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks because there was a whole tableful right next to where I was queuing in Waterstones to buy a birthday card, and picked it up to read last weekend because I was looking for a book just after coming back from a seven and a half mile walk and it seemed appropriate.
It was a good book to be reading this week, as the actions of so many of my compatriots appalled and distressed me, because it reminded me of the things I actually love about my country. I'm deeply suspicious of patriotism and don't feel any more commonality with someone born five miles from me than I do with someone born on the other side of the world, but I love the landscape of Britain and I love the English language, and MacFarlane's book marries the two. It's a study of the way the English language shapes our sense of place; chapters discussing the work of particular writers are interspersed with glossaries of words describing different types of landscape; woods, mountains, moorland, coasts. I found it a fascinating, entertaining and gentle read, by and large. The glossaries are particularly delightful to read, and I found myself reading them slowly, savouring the sounds of the words; the chapters on particular authors are more variable, and I think I would have preferred a more general survey of writing about the different landscapes rather than the particular focus on individual writers. In particular, I felt that the chapter focused on John Muir, whose work led to the creation of America's first national parks, seemed out of place in a book whose focus was otherwise on British landscapes, and was deeply disappointed that a chapter entitled "Stone-books" didn't mention Alan Garner (who is actually not mentioned at all, despite being a writer whose work is absolutely steeped in place, but then most of the works discussed are non-fiction, rather than landscape in fiction). On the other hand, I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, which I may have to seek out, and the one discussing the work of Peter Davidson, who was my tutor at university and who is now a member of my faculty.
I have the paperback edition, which includes an additional glossary of words sent to MacFarlane by readers following the book's original publication. I'm not sure this really adds much, especially as quite a few of the words seem to be people's personal terms rather than anything more widely used; there are a lot of terms tagged as "Childish", as if children's babble was a universal rather than an individual thing, which I have to admit I found particularly irritating, and I rather wish I'd stopped after the original postscript, despite the inclusion of some interesting additional regional words.
It was a good book to be reading this week, as the actions of so many of my compatriots appalled and distressed me, because it reminded me of the things I actually love about my country. I'm deeply suspicious of patriotism and don't feel any more commonality with someone born five miles from me than I do with someone born on the other side of the world, but I love the landscape of Britain and I love the English language, and MacFarlane's book marries the two. It's a study of the way the English language shapes our sense of place; chapters discussing the work of particular writers are interspersed with glossaries of words describing different types of landscape; woods, mountains, moorland, coasts. I found it a fascinating, entertaining and gentle read, by and large. The glossaries are particularly delightful to read, and I found myself reading them slowly, savouring the sounds of the words; the chapters on particular authors are more variable, and I think I would have preferred a more general survey of writing about the different landscapes rather than the particular focus on individual writers. In particular, I felt that the chapter focused on John Muir, whose work led to the creation of America's first national parks, seemed out of place in a book whose focus was otherwise on British landscapes, and was deeply disappointed that a chapter entitled "Stone-books" didn't mention Alan Garner (who is actually not mentioned at all, despite being a writer whose work is absolutely steeped in place, but then most of the works discussed are non-fiction, rather than landscape in fiction). On the other hand, I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, which I may have to seek out, and the one discussing the work of Peter Davidson, who was my tutor at university and who is now a member of my faculty.
I have the paperback edition, which includes an additional glossary of words sent to MacFarlane by readers following the book's original publication. I'm not sure this really adds much, especially as quite a few of the words seem to be people's personal terms rather than anything more widely used; there are a lot of terms tagged as "Childish", as if children's babble was a universal rather than an individual thing, which I have to admit I found particularly irritating, and I rather wish I'd stopped after the original postscript, despite the inclusion of some interesting additional regional words.
