Hammock books and heavenly days

Shocker, I know, but I read a lot of books on holiday, so I thought I'd tell you about them. (Don't worry, I've got the back-to-work blues now like everyone else.)

Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I read and recommend nature books. Thanks for reading!

Did I spend the entire 11 days of my holiday lying here reading? No. But could I have? Pfff. Easy.

What I’ve been reading

Judging by how busy the bus to the city was this morning, we’re all finally creaking into gear and getting back to work. So in a feeble attempt to teleport myself back - at least in words - to my hammock in Fiji, I’m sharing what I read on my holidays.

There was a lot of gold in the teetering stack of pixels I loaded onto my Kindle for this trip, so I hope it’s useful.

Julia Blackburn’s Threads

First cab off the rank, and entertaining enough to enthrall me through the less-than-blissful flight, was Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske.

I read this because I loved Blackburn’s book Time Song: Searching for Doggerland, and went looking for her other work. It paid off. Threads is so delightfully strange - it’s the true story of an early 20th-century Norfolk fisherman who became mysteriously ill at only 36, and lapsed in and out of comas and extreme lassitude for the rest of his life. During his awake yet exhausted periods, he took up painting, although entirely untrained, and when that became too tiring, switched to embroidery. He created extraordinary works whose brilliance still goes relatively unrecognised.

This is a great start, but there’s more. Most people who love books as much as I do love books that let you in on the process of writing, and Blackburn brings us along on her quest to discover more about this mysterious, mostly-forgotten artist. So it’s both an intriguing tale, and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how she researched and wrote it. This was such a haunting book, almost as much for Blackburn’s story as for Craske’s.

Olivia Laing’s Everybody

I’ve loved Olivia Laing since reading To the River not long after it came out in 2011. With this book, Everybody, she’s gone off in what seems to me an unexpected direction, but isn’t that the function of authors? To hack out new pathways through the jungles of thought, and then turn, and generously bring you (silly old you, sitting in your safe, familiar clearing) along with them?

Laing always does that for me. I didn’t give a toss about Kathy Acker till I read Crudo, and I wasn’t all that interested in the history - and future - of the politics of the body until I read Everybody.

I can never quite tease apart how she weaves her disparate strands of inquiry so ingeniously together, but I can absolutely enjoy the verve and artistry with which she does it.

John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa. Yes, it’s annoying that it’s nearly the same colour as my background. Sorry.

I recently posted on Instagram about how unknown John McPhee is outside the US. Am I right about that? Or do you know and love his work? (To know it is to love it, I’d wager. His The Patch has pieces about sports in it, for goodness’ sake, and I even read those.)

Anyway, if you don’t know him, he’s a longtime New Yorker writer and Princeton journalism professor, and everything he writes - and there’s a lot of it - is an absolute masterclass in narrative nonfiction. (That’s actually how I discovered him - his Draft No 4: On the Writing Process popped up on a list of how-to-write books, and for me it stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of that crowded genre.)

He is also an absolutely superb nature writer - PLEASE read Coming into the Country if you haven’t already; it’s a stone-cold classic - and my holiday hammock book of his, Tabula Rasa, has plenty more shimmering examples of the form. The conceit of the book is a corker, too: despite having been shockingly prolific during his long writing career, McPhee reveals he has plenty of untold stories. He doesn’t have the time or the inclination to write a whole book for each one, so here, in brief vignettes, are some of the things he didn’t write about.

It is at once a brilliant and funny and slightly melancholy book; melancholy not in itself but because it reminds me that he is 92, and at some point fairly soon we will have no more new words from John McPhee.

He is not remotely self-pitying about this, by the way, and this book is his delightfully practical response to that fact - cram ’em in while you still can. Yet in it, he does allow himself one small defiance against the dying of the light. It’s not rage - nothing so crassly futile. It’s an eyebrow raised in amusement, perhaps. And you’ll find it in the subtitle of this book, written - I must belabour this point - in his tenth decade of life. Friends, he called it Volume I.

Ayyyy, wishing I was back here.

I actually read eight more books on my holidays that I’d like to write about, but contemplating the contrast between the hammock-book-beer bliss pictured above and my current reality has exhausted me, and I must go to bed. Till next time!

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