I must admit, when Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was first announced, my heart sank. Do we really need yet another film version of such an iconic story? Like many I’m getting a bit tired of the recycled tat we get in cinemas these days and would rather see a truly original story. Surely AI hasn’t grasped us yet to the point where we can’t come up with new ideas?
I recently spent a weekend on the Norfolk Coast enjoying the beach, the sunshine and copious amounts of ice cream. As usual I spent much of my days (when I was not eating ice cream) on long walks. Norfolk has some great long distance walking paths, with the Norfolk Coast Path a firm favourite of mine, and I find myself returning to the prettiest sections again and again. This time I also explored some terrain more inland and racked up over fifty kilometres over the weekend.
To accompany me I brought a very appropriate book that had caught my eye in the library. Windswept: Why Women Walk by Annabel Abbs is part memoir (about Abbs own mixed feelings about walking) and part biography of several famous women who walked. The rota includes Simone de Beauviour, Gwen John, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and I was curious to find out more about their lives and the role walking played in it.
It’s one of those books everyone knows and many are too scared to actually attempt: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Even with an American Studies PhD under my belt I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve never gotten round to reading it. It’s a very long and very difficult book about whales, after all. Not exactly an easy sell.
But with the nights drawing in and more time on my hands I decided to give it a go.
One of the joys of reading is that there is always more to be discovered. Earlier this week my mum messaged me to ask if I had ever heard of Alfred Wainwright, and if not, that I would probably like his work. She’d heard him mentioned in a TV show she was watching and sent me a link to his Wikipedia entry without further context.
I had never heard of Wainwright, which seems odd given my recurrent interest in nature writing. Wainwright, as I soon discovered, is well known for having written a long list of guides to the Lake District. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t previously know of him. I’ve never been to the Lake District (although, now having read The Eastern Fells, I do want to go there) and as I discovered when I started reading one of his first books, it is not nature writing in the traditional sense.
become a cliché to the point that they seem to have lost much of their ability to scare, I still can’t resist a good vampire story. For every boring, unimaginative Twilight rip-off, there’s a lesser-known gem lurking in the darkness somewhere, waiting to be devoured. Or, perhaps, to devour unsuspecting readers first. One such story is Necroscope by Brian Lumley.
Self-publishing is often frowned upon, seen as a vanity exercise that removes the gatekeeper function of traditional publishers and releases floods of drivel onto an already saturated media landscape. My own opinion is a bit more nuanced. I think publishing and self-publishing can easily exist together. Indie and DIY approaches have long been common in other creative sectors, such as music and film. And with everyone broadcasting themselves on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, I can’t see why self-publishing my thoughts in book form would be a weird or embarrassing thing to do.
I don’t know if it’s typical for Norwich, but the people here tend to leave items they no longer need… Read more Lost and Found: On Reading Books from the Street
With an ongoing lockdown, and libraries shut until further notice, my book supply had all but dried up as of last week. For someone who always carries something to read and only sleeps soundly with a healthy to-read-stack waiting for her in the morning, this was a problem. I suffered withdrawal symptoms, albeit non-physical ones, and longed more for the escapism good books provide than ever before.
With the world still in peril and the library still shut, I’ve recently found myself reconsidering my own book shelves. I only own a handful of books, mostly because my voracious reading habit would otherwise become rather space-consuming and expensive, and I rarely reread books anyway. But since I don’t like to read from screens, which means ebooks are out, and no imminent end to the current lockdown seems likely, it looks like I’ll need to reconsider my principles.
Many institutions and individual enthusiasts have started to share culture online, or had already started to do so long before we had even heard of Covid-19. If you’ve had enough Netflix to last you a lifetime and the thought of a jigsaw puzzle makes you cringe, here are a few places you can access from home to open your mind.
cococatani 