Landmarks (Landscapes)

This is a magical book. It is both a collection of landscape words from the British Isles and a meditation on writing, mountains and landscapes. It is not a quick read but something that satiates after a few pages, requiring digestion, or rereading. The place words are from a vanishing time when we knew our land like we now know how to get about town. The words shimmer with beauty even though I suspect I am making a poor job of the Gaelic pronunciations. I thought I was a pretty good writer but reading this is humbling in a happy way, taking pleasure in his writing and glad that there are people who can write like this. If you love nature, if you love words, if you think there is more than one way to climb a mountain (p. 63), this is a book that will give you pleasure.

This is a very interesting approach to nature and to language. Anything that R. Macfarlane writes is going to make me think, and probably point me in the direction of several other books to add to my list. After only 2 or 3 chapters of this book, I already have 2 other books to find and read. I wasn't sure what to expect. Much of this is about other writers and their approach to nature and outdoors. Each chapter has a lengthy glossary, probably 70% of which contains words new to me. The book is definitely British-centric, but don't let that put you off. Rather, let it start you on an exploration of how regional writers in the US relate to and reflect their chosen environments.

Find enchantment The lists and glossaries are captivating - as a study in cognitive linguistics, this book rocks. As a series of biographies of land-wise people, it is fair. As a treatment of the philosophy of place-love, I get it. I got tired of the troubled souls and the people-hatred by the middle of the book. (Aren’t humans part of nature? Aren’t their constructed habitats natural?) But the glossaries kept me reading to the end. Some notes: On optical illusions: our habitual vision is not the only correct perception (68) A tree is a river of sap (105) On moving and seeing (237) On being north-minded (220) Wonder is an essential survival skill (238) Emerson: language is a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone (342) The smell of rain on stone = petrichor (348) This book rehabilitates the word “parochial.” In a good way.

MacFarlane knows how to write about nature, and our relationship to nature, without getting all "woo-woo" or straying off into politics. His prose is absolutely a delight to read. Great fun.

One of my favorite authors, Robert MacFarlane, writes, “As we further deplete our ability to name, describe, and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted.” This impoverishment of the imagination is, he said, an attack on the very idea of caring for and defending what we love. We need these wild imaginings, connections, and places, more than ever. I thank him for the depth and breadth of his thinking and his writing.

This is a book from a man in love with Earth. Wonderfully written. I absolutely loved it! I bought it for Kindle, but now I'll buy it on paper so I can easily write my own memories, experiences, go back and forth, draw, paste images of birds and plants and rocks and landscapes Macfarlane talks about. He certainly offers us an amazing lens focused on our partners - other Nature’s beings - inciting us to respect them and meet them in person. A book every professional working with landscape and education should read.

The vocabulary list the author has compiled is exceptional. He has delved into our loss of specific expression and identification words and pulled them out of obscurity: words that that are largely no longer in use in this age of erasable text messages and instagrams. It's a gem for writers and lovers of nature.

It is an epic poem of field and stream. Many articles- cum- chapters on nature in the suburban british land. Hugely aware of sky and terrain. Very energetic prose and as charged with poetry as any transcendentalist. Fits no category. Beuatiful language a keeper in english language and among naturists I liked it a lot.

Lo ho preso dopo aver cominciato a seguire per caso l’autore su twitter. Una scoperta: lettura molto particolare, per via dell’argomento, ma molto molto piacevole.

Landmarks is a pleasure to read, and lovely to dip into for random new words. I'm a blatant logophile, and living as I do on one of the Scottish islands I'm aware of both the specialist vocabulary that lingers on in such places, and of all the words that must have been lost down the years. I wander hills that are plotted on maps, and I think about how every tor, and every rushy hollow must have once been named. Without the words, such places become hazy - the big hill, the broad valley - and we lose the magic of place. To name the world is to enter fully into it - words genuinely have power. I'm delighted that amongst the treasures Robert Macfarlane visits is Nan Shepherd, whose elegiac portrayals of the Cairngorms are an especial favourite of mine. She, too, knew the value of the right word in the right place. "O burnie with the glass-white shiver/singing over stone". It wouldn't be right without the precise word for that stream in that place. If I have one complaint about Landmarks, it's that it's too unwieldy (and too lovely) to shove into my pack and take out among the hills, where the right word might be needed for a note, or a quick poem. If only the book were formatted differently - say, along the lines of The Jolly Postman - with pockets filled with little books; each of the glossaries as a tiny, pocketable book, preferably in a weatherproof material! Still, it sits permanently by my bedside, so that before I lie down I can open its pages and enter briefly into the mystery of place - see in my mind's eye a hazy hover of haar on the horizon, or pick up a chucky stone to tuck into the interstices of a tumbled bothy wall - an image to carry me down into sleep.

Estupendo libro

Si te gusta la el paisaje y toda su lírica condensada en una palabra, este es el libro. Vengo siguiendo a R. Macfarlane como lector habitual de The Guardian y en concreto sus mini ensayos sobre naturaleza. Es una lástima que ninguno de sus libros, ni los de tantos escritores ingleses que describen con sutili precisión y cariño sobre la naturaleza estén traducidos al español.

This is a wonderful book, particularly for nature - and word - lovers. I liked it so much I bought a copy for a friend as well!