Dearest book lovers, we are in great peril.
For the book-buyers amongst us we are entering turbulent times as the backlog of new books suddenly bursts onto the shelves. Six hundred books published this week, and as I walked into Waterstones for my weekly browse I think every single one must have been on display. I'm currently working on the principle that we have had nigh on six months of going nowhere, spending nothing. No petrol money, no coffee and cake, no excursions, and therefore my book account tally should be nicely in credit.
But can anything withstand the onslaught.
I'm only buying non-fiction for now...hardback fiction will be from the library, but even then there were at least six books that jumped right off the shelf at me. I came home with three because I had actually bought 'a few' last week and the table is filling fast.
Vesper Flights ~ Helen Macdonald
I was a late arrival with Helen Macdonald's first book H is for Hawk. Several false starts until I eventually understood what so many others had...that it is a superlative book...
'Bonding with a hawk seems, in many ways, similar to bonding with a newborn baby (and not in a lot of other ways...don't feed a baby day old chicks and rabbit legs etc and maybe don't expect it to sit on a perch) There are anxieties to be assuaged on both sides; food to be offered; a cycle of sleep to be established; paths of recognition and acceptance to be mapped; responses to cues and moods to be learned, even facial expressions and body language to be interpreted and recognised. To say nothing of the regular weighing, and the caring and the nurturing and the concern....'
That was a fraction of my thoughts about the book and I enjoyed revisiting that post on the scribbles as a reminder of how many different tangents of thought H is For Hawk sent me along.
And this is from You Know Where, on Vesper Flights...
From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world.Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches.
Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers.
Featherhood ~ Charlie Gilmour
Now I'm all for forgiveness, and Charlie Gilmour has served his time courtesy of HMP for that ill-placed swing off the cenotaph back in 2011. I doubt I'll ever forget the day I popped in for a cup of tea with my dad and he was watching it on the news. He was utterly crestfallen and deflated, and I'd have given my right arm to sit young Charlie down with my primary source to find out why. There were occasions through my dad's ninety years(not many, and fewer in later life) when he wondered whether anyone really appreciated the sacrifice of his generation. For years it seemed not, but as the big anniversaries came along suddenly with it came a new national consciousness, and I'm forever grateful that he experienced that respect before he died.
So I am intrigued to see how Charlie has dealt with this, and the other traumas in his life...and of course there is a local Port Eliot connection of which I know a little...
This is a story about birds and fathers.
About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair...
About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.
It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own.
It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest.
And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.
Rummage ~ A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycle and Refused to Let Go
Emily Cockayne
And this was an entirely impulse purchase which involved me putting another book back on the shelf until my next visit. I picked it up thinking absolutely 'not me', only to find, with its potted histories and fascinating stories, that it is exactly me...
Rummage tells the overlooked story of our throwaway past. Emily Cockayne extracts glittering gems from the rubbish pile of centuries past and introduces us to the visionaries, crooks and everyday do-gooders who have shaped the material world we live in today - like the fancy ladies of the First World War who turned dog hair into yarn, or the Victorian gentlemen selling pianofortes made from papier-mâché, or the hapless public servants coaxing people into giving up their railings for the greater good.
In this original and fascinating new history, Cockayne illuminates our relationship to our rubbish: from the simple question of how we reuse and recycle things (and which is better), to all the weird and wonderful ways it's been done in the past. She exposes the hidden work (often done by women) that has gone into shaping the world for each future generation, and she shows what lessons can be drawn from the past to address urgent questions of our waste today.
There's so much 'Did you know...' herein that Bookhound is going to mesmerised by my revelations for months ahead, and this can only be a good thing because this little stockpiling of books for the winter feels akin to getting the logs in this year.
Brain food for the long winter ahead...
Time to action the library reservations , and I'm wondering if there are any more of the Six Hundred that you are looking forward to...
Recent Comments