Landmarks

Effectively the book is a collection of long form reviews of other great nature writing, done by another great nature writer. It reminded me a lot of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, which was largely a book-length review of TH White’s The Goshawk. But Macfarlane is a great writer! Each chapter covers a nature writer, doing some biography and capsule recommendations that all made me want to pick up the books in question.

Then paired with each, there’s glossary of rare landscape words, grouped in some theme (moors, rivers, mountains, forests, etc). There are some delights in there, but I found it hard to read them with any attention. No matter how much it’s fun to be like ‘in Gaelic they call icicles “X”’, my attention just blurs when I get to a definition list. It was hard to shake the feeling of those clickbait articles like ’27 untranslatable words'. Presumably there are some fascinating gems tucked in there, I just didn’t dig for them.

Noted on August 9, 2022