What I'm reading - January 2008

Current read: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
Where / how acquired: Christmas present from brother-in-law
Vibe: Woody

Roger Deakin's Waterlog was one of my reading highlights of 2007. I worked in the Cambridge branch of Waterstones when the book was originally published in 1999 and Deakin came in to talk about it. The book is his diary of a year swimming everywhere and anywhere in the British Isles, mostly in the wild. I remember talking to him about swimming in the Cam, and although I didn't read the book at the time it was on a must-read list in the back of my mind since.

This new book, finished just before he died in 2006, was published last year and it was, I think, Will Self's review of it that reminded me about Waterlog. That book is just brilliant - a humble, personal but beautiful, delicate mixture of autobiography, travel writing and ecology - and all based in the UK, much of it in east Anglia which is where I'm from.

I'm about two thirds of the way through Wildwood now. It does feel as is Deakin's death meant the editorial process has been stymied a little – the part in Australia seems to meander on just a bit too long, for instance, but that may just be that it’s writing about the UK that I like about Deakin’s books. But much of the book is just a joy - I loved the part where he joins a moth-hunting society for the evening in a local wood; the section on cricket-bat willow (I'm hoping there's a bit later on about guitar wood, we'll see); his tales of being a youthful ecologist in 1950s Hampshire; and the current section, set in the incredible-sounding walnut forests of Central Asia, where wood is simply a way of life.