Friday reads: Rain

 

    Melissa Harrison's At Hawthorn Time, a beautifully wrought, unsettling novel of contemporary rural England, impressed me greatly when I read it a couple of years ago. Although that was fiction, the author's skill as a nature writer was more than apparent in it, so I didn't hesitate to buy her most recent book Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, "an evocative meditation on the English landscape in wet weather".

    I'm currently reading the second of the four walks, in Shropshire in April. On Easter Sunday, in a country lane, the cow parsley is starting to come out, and it reminds Melissa of Edward Thomas's poem 'It Rains', "with its lovely sense of the lushness of spring rain on new green growth, and its clear sense of rain's oblique relationship to memory and the past:

    

It rains, and nothing stirs within the fence
Anywhere through the orchard’s untrodden, dense
Forest of parsley. The great diamonds
Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,
Or the fallen petals further down to shake.

And I am nearly as happy as possible
To search the wilderness in vain though well,
To think of two walking, kissing there,
Drenched, yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:

Sad, too, to think that never, never again,
Unless alone, so happy shall I walk
In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk
Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower
Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,
The past hovering as it revisits the light."

    This and another Thomas poem, "Rain", are discussed here.

    What are you reading this weekend?

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Comments

[Spade & Dagger]

I have to admit that I'm reading a popular action thriller called Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz (a kind of Bourne Identity type book). I started reading a long awaited library reserve by Noah Hawley A Conspiracy of Tall Men. However its' claustrophobic story line made me long for something more expansive & I switched to an action thriller picked up in the mobile library really to help boost their borrowing numbers on the premise of use the service or lose the service!! Still, I'm enjoying it so far.

[Kim]

Thank you for this post. I have just downloaded samples of them both to my kindle. I am having terrible trouble concentrating on anything at the moment, so have been doing lots of re reading old favorites. Maybe these are just what I need (especially Rain) to get me back on track. x

[cathy]

I'm reading 2 books, unusual for me. First is a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, the 3rd in a series by Blanche Wiesen Cook. Lots of talk of 'America First', populism, xenophobia, racism, anti-immigrant...you'd think it was written about 2016/2017, not 1939.

The other is a novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney. An octogenarian visits her old NYC haunts on New Year's Eve 1985. I should have had such a life. It's based on Margaret Fishback.

[Cornflower]

Sounds good on all counts.

[Cornflower]

Rain is good in that respect as the essays are not too long.

[Cornflower]

Interesting reads, both, by the sound of them.

[Dark Puss]

I am halfway through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari which was kindly lent to me by a colleague at work (I lent her The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage in return). So far it is proving very readable and thought provoking though I will reserve further judgement or comment until I reach the end.

[Cornflower]

The Lovelace and Babbage book sounds interesting; I'm not familiar with Sapiens but I shall go and look it up.

[Dark Puss]

You can read my review of the Lovelace and Babbage book at SNB. Sapiens appears to be quite popular at the moment given by how many copies I have noted on my tube journeys recently.

[Toffeeapple]

I love reading about nature so I will investigate the rain book.

Currently reading Barbara Pym's Jane and Prudence with three more Pym's to follow. I started to read her just recently and have enjoyed everything so far.