Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 3
goes beyond mere book
recommendations and
taps into what makes
great nature books so
moving and profound.
Here are forgotten works
of children’s fiction tinged
with dusty melancholy,
dream guidebooks to holiday
enlightenment, bleak accounts
of hard-scrabble self-sufficiency
that inspired 70s sitcoms, richly
detailed visits to the homes
of grand eccentrics, ghostly
tales of men possessed by
brute nature, images of chill
beauty from treasured books
of poetry, and profoundly rare
oddities about deeply peculiar
humans and animals that you’ll
just want to track down for
yourself.
So from an original
tossed-off idea, we now have
this marvellous collection.
Left with me, the idea would
doubtless be little more
than another email in need
of deletion in order to free
up more memory for an
ever-growing itunes folder.
Given my job, I suppose I’m
conditioned to do this kind
of thing; making exciting
discoveries and wanting to
pass them on. It’s about the
redistribution of knowledge,
if you want to be fancy and,
ever since they set up the
website back in 2007, I’ve seen
Caught by the River as kindred
spirits, from that equally
exciting world of books and
nature. Filtered through
the egalitarian philosophy,
boundless enthusiasm and
rock’n’roll camaraderie of
Caught by the River this single
idea has been transformed into
something special. The Caught
By the River Nature Book
Reader will now be an ever
growing feature of the Caught
by the River website,
constantly building into an
archive of great writing, on
great writing. It may even
become a book, or two; from
an idea that I doubted would
really come to anything, that
makes me very happy.
3
