It’s book review central here as I carve out more reading time and get to grips with my 20 books of summer and review books. How lucky I am to have such a wide variety to read!

First off, I need to report on one extra book I read in July – Stephen Rutt’s “The Seafarers”, which I’ve reviewed for Shiny New Books. This was a wonderful book about the (oddly hard to define) seabirds of Britain, taking in locations from the Shetlands in the North to the Scillies in the South, with beautiful, artistically written descriptions of land, sea and bird life. Although this has been talked about as being about the help nature can give to mental health, this isn’t a huge part of the story – while I know some readers like a lot of memoir in their nature writing, I like a book to be about the nature and the person’s reaction to that.

I also liked the respect the author paid to previous nature writers who have gone before him, bringing back memories of those older volumes sitting in bird hides and the hotels you stay in on birding trips. Altogether a lovely book and highly recommended. You can read my full review here and I know the lovely editors at Shiny will appreciate you popping over and having a read (you can follow their Facebook and Twitter accounts, too).

Now for #20 books of summer, another slimmer volume in the All Virago (and Persephone) All August part of the project.Ā  Kaggsy from the Ramblings sent me this one in November via Heaven-Ali, just like “The Eye of Love” (except I’m afraid I’ll probably be putting “Maurice Guest” to one side as it looks a bit turgid and Germaine Greer thinks it’s not as good as this one. Do I do everything Greer says? No: for a start, I am still fully underclothed at all times, however much I read “The Female Eunuch” as a teenager. Anyway, this was an interesting read, especially for its Australian setting.

Henry Handel Richardson – “The Getting of Wisdom”

30 November 2018 – from Kaggsy

The getting of wisdom is of course nothing to do with the rote-learning at the boarding school where this book is set: it’s all about how to get on with people, something our heroine never quite grasps. Like “The Eye of Love” this is another book about convention: however, here, convention stifles and squashes Laura Rambotham’s spirit and natural ebulliance, making her by turns over shy but over confident, mendacious, smarmy and over religious as she works her way unsuccessfully through a couple of years of boarding school. Her mother classifies her as disobedient and self-willed and she heart-breakingly never works out how to get on with people, missing the point generally all the way along, although a hint of her future near the end suggests that she might get what she wants eventually, unlike her friends.

We feel for Laura’s poor mother, keen on needlework but mocked for her garish designs, and having to support herself and her family, eschewing stays but trying to keep everyone on the straight and narrow. There’s a great feeling for a veneer of imposed and strict ‘culture’ over the chaos of life in Australia, and the backdrop means Laura gets to rest from school by the thundering ocean, not something that features much in British school stories except as a source of danger for rescues!

There are some good, sharp comments about how to write, and how writing allows to lie as if something was true, much easier than keeping things straight in life. There’s not a huge amount of plot but as Greer says in the introduction, it’s about someone who is “ordinary, and therefore deeply important”.

This was Book 9 in my 20 Books of Summer project.

Still reading “Spam Tomorrow” (not Jam, which I claimed yesterday!) by Verily Anderson; still enjoying it very much. How are your 20 books going??