Reading: The Living Mountain
Sep. 11th, 2018 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI hadn't heard of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain until I read Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks, which devotes a chapter to it (much of which is reprised in the introduction to the edition of The Living Mountain I bought, or perhaps vice versa), a couple of years ago, but when I wandered into the delightful Highland Bookshop in Fort William after a week of walking through the Highlands and saw a copy on one of the display tables I couldn't resist picking it up.
The Living Mountain isn't a long book - barely 100 pages - and I read most of it on the train home yesterday. Each of its twelve chapters examines a different aspect of the Cairngorms, close to Shepherd's home on Deeside, an area she loved and spent long days walking in; she looks at the structures of the mountains, the effects of light and wind and water and weather, and the lives, plant and animal and human, that are intertwined with the mountains' existence, and gradually builds up a vivid picture of the totality of the mountain world. It's beautifully written; Shepherd's prose is lyrical and as clear as the mountain streams she writes about, and each word feels deliberately and perfectly placed to evoke the mountain landscape. It's also full of Shepherd's love of her native mountains, and, more than almost anything else I've ever read, she absolutely gets the joy of walking in the mountains, something that far too many books about walking somehow utterly fail to convey.
The Living Mountain isn't a long book - barely 100 pages - and I read most of it on the train home yesterday. Each of its twelve chapters examines a different aspect of the Cairngorms, close to Shepherd's home on Deeside, an area she loved and spent long days walking in; she looks at the structures of the mountains, the effects of light and wind and water and weather, and the lives, plant and animal and human, that are intertwined with the mountains' existence, and gradually builds up a vivid picture of the totality of the mountain world. It's beautifully written; Shepherd's prose is lyrical and as clear as the mountain streams she writes about, and each word feels deliberately and perfectly placed to evoke the mountain landscape. It's also full of Shepherd's love of her native mountains, and, more than almost anything else I've ever read, she absolutely gets the joy of walking in the mountains, something that far too many books about walking somehow utterly fail to convey.
