What book are you reading now?

Rereading 'The Making of the British Landscape: From the Ice Age to the Present'

Nicholas Crane (2016) Weidenfield & Jackson

It has some similarities with Robert McFarlane's books. Crane is a geographer, but with obvious interests in flora and fauna. (This very morning there is a report in the Independent that UK and Belgian archeologists have dredged up further evidence of Stone Age settlement in the so-called Doggerland area now covered by the North Sea.) One of Crane's obvious objectives with this book is to chronicle and recognise numerous examples of global-warming and cooling events over the last twelve centuries and beyond. Interesting topic of great current significance, but not quite as infectious a read as most of the McFarlane stuff.

The above also kind of reminds me of the Ian Anderson Doggerland LP from a few years back, in which Ian pontificated greatly about the current (supposedly) parlous state of UK society and culture. (The title says it all, really!). I don't play that album very often. I have gotten just a bit jaded by Ian always being such a clever-clogs know-it-all. (But as some of his roadcrew have been known to opine, he always was pretty aloof. Many Scots would probably agree, having noted some of his salmon farming blunders.) He now sounds just a little bit too conceited for my liking. Shades of Johnson, Gove and Rees-Smogg!

And one almost every critical publication review says I should NOT be reading right now;

www.theguardian.com/.../the-victorians-twelve-titans-forged-britain-jacob-rees-mogg-review

Rereading 'The Making of the British Landscape: From the Ice Age to the Present'

Nicholas Crane (2016) Weidenfield & Jackson

It has some similarities with Robert McFarlane's books. Crane is a geographer, but with obvious interests in flora and fauna. (This very morning there is a report in the Independent that UK and Belgian archeologists have dredged up further evidence of Stone Age settlement in the so-called Doggerland area now covered by the North Sea.) One of Crane's obvious objectives with this book is to chronicle and recognise numerous examples of global-warming and cooling events over the last twelve centuries and beyond. Interesting topic of great current significance, but not quite as infectious a read as most of the McFarlane stuff.

The above also kind of reminds me of the Ian Anderson Doggerland LP from a few years back, in which Ian pontificated greatly about the current (supposedly) parlous state of UK society and culture. (The title says it all, really!). I don't play that album very often. I have gotten just a bit jaded by Ian always being such a clever-clogs know-it-all. (But as some of his roadcrew have been known to opine, he always was pretty aloof. Many Scots would probably agree, having noted some of his salmon farming blunders.) He now sounds just a little bit too conceited for my liking. Shades of Johnson, Gove and Rees-Smogg!

And one almost every critical publication review says I should NOT be reading right now;

www.theguardian.com/.../the-victorians-twelve-titans-forged-britain-jacob-rees-mogg-review

'The making of the British Landscape' actually seems quite interesting. I could probably get quite into that in the right mood.