![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Recent reading
Sep. 24th, 2019 05:22 pmTrying to read things in the middle of a new obsession is always difficult. At the moment I'm dealing with it by reading largely unrelated non-fiction—later this week I have a couple of long train journeys and will probably take the opportunity to re-read a Discworld book.
When I want new random stuff to read my first tactic is often to raid the natural history shelf at the local library, and this time I found Bowland Beth: The Life of an English Hen Harrier by David Cobham and Raptor: A Journey Through Birds by James Macdonald Lockhart. Writing a biography of an individual bird is a very compelling way of portraying the plight of hen harriers as a species and their upland habitat in general, and I enjoyed Bowland Beth, although I thought the writing wasn't quite as vivid, or the political message as strongly sustained, as they could have been in a book along these lines. Raptor is one of the best pieces of nature writing I've read in ages. It follows the author's journey across Great Britain from north to south trying to see all fifteen breeding bird of prey species, set in the context of the history of the places he visits and told in parallel with the story of another north-to-south journey made by the naturalist William MacGillivray in 1819. The writing is really beautiful throughout, and the different strands of the book—the author's observations and experiences looking for and seeing the birds, the human history of the places and how it interweaves with their natural history and the history of raptors in particular, and the exploration of MacGillivray's life—are brought together very skilfully indeed. Highly recommended.
And now I'm reading Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Langford (so maybe not that unrelated, this obviously dealing in places with the Jacobites). It's interesting stuff, although for something that's presented as an 'introduction' it takes a great deal of background knowledge, sometimes more than I have, for granted: a lot of the time the author is presenting interpretations of events he assumes the reader already knows about rather than really introducing the period. In any case, I must read more about this period, also for general interesting history reasons, and this seems like a good place to start.
When I want new random stuff to read my first tactic is often to raid the natural history shelf at the local library, and this time I found Bowland Beth: The Life of an English Hen Harrier by David Cobham and Raptor: A Journey Through Birds by James Macdonald Lockhart. Writing a biography of an individual bird is a very compelling way of portraying the plight of hen harriers as a species and their upland habitat in general, and I enjoyed Bowland Beth, although I thought the writing wasn't quite as vivid, or the political message as strongly sustained, as they could have been in a book along these lines. Raptor is one of the best pieces of nature writing I've read in ages. It follows the author's journey across Great Britain from north to south trying to see all fifteen breeding bird of prey species, set in the context of the history of the places he visits and told in parallel with the story of another north-to-south journey made by the naturalist William MacGillivray in 1819. The writing is really beautiful throughout, and the different strands of the book—the author's observations and experiences looking for and seeing the birds, the human history of the places and how it interweaves with their natural history and the history of raptors in particular, and the exploration of MacGillivray's life—are brought together very skilfully indeed. Highly recommended.
And now I'm reading Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Langford (so maybe not that unrelated, this obviously dealing in places with the Jacobites). It's interesting stuff, although for something that's presented as an 'introduction' it takes a great deal of background knowledge, sometimes more than I have, for granted: a lot of the time the author is presenting interpretations of events he assumes the reader already knows about rather than really introducing the period. In any case, I must read more about this period, also for general interesting history reasons, and this seems like a good place to start.
