My Reading Month: July

Summer walks

The relaxation of some lockdown rules in Scotland did not do much for my reading tally in July.

I'm most definitely not a party animal, and the likelihood of me visiting a pub these days is zero - but I was able to meet up with various friends (one at a time that is) for some wonderful walks and talks, and it's surprising how soon a morning can disappear.  We also spent lovely days with our son and daughter-in-law in the Highlands, and with our daughters in Edinburgh; I obviously don't regret any of these, they were all immensely cheering, but my reading did suffer - and did make me realise just how much some bloggers achieve while still holding down full time jobs.

The books I did read were a mixed bunch. Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt has been widely acclaimed, and with good reason - it's very entertaining but also pulls no punches in showing us what actually happens in our understaffed, underfunded health service. Kay trained in a big London hospital where he seems to have spent most of his time literally running from one near-disaster to another. It's a credit to the doctors, nurses and support staff that very few of these threatened disasters actually come to fruition, but the level of responsibility and lack of support given to junior staff is especially terrifying. Why does the NHS still seem to allow some consultants to do very little at all just because they themselves were once the put-upon registrars? Isn't it time someone took a long hard look at the safety, not to mention the fairness, of subjecting young doctors to such enormous pressure? My full review is here.

Whispers in the Village forms part of Rebecca Shaw's Turnham Malpas series. In this one too-good-to-be-true rector Peter Harris and his equally perfect family depart these shores to do Good Works in the Third World.  The locum who replaces Peter is - pass the sal volatile please! - a woman, and even worse, one with her own ideas. In my review here I've tried to examine why, despite the issues I have with them, I still go back to these books again and again.

Sara Sheridan's London Calling is the second in her Mirabelle Bevan series. It's 1952 and Mirabelle, a former wartime Secret Service employee, is now running a debt-collecting agency in Brighton, along with her lively assistant Vesta Churchill.  When Vesta's childhood friend, sax-player Lindon Claremont, is accused of abducting missing London debutante Rose Bellamy Gore, he flees the city and turns up on the office doorstep. Vesta persuades Mirabelle that they must take on the case, find the missing girl (or at least find out what has happened to her) and clear Lindon's name. Soon both women are up in London, scouring the smart squares of Belgravia and the seedy basements of Soho jazz clubs, to uncover the truth, rescue Rose and prove Lindon's innocence. I enjoyed this story but found Mirabelle a bit difficult to take at times - she reminded me a little of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs, another too-perfect character with no sense of humour. Vesta was much more fun and livened things up immensely.

My favourite book of July was - perhaps unsurprisingly - The Nature of Summer, the fourth in Jim Crumley's quartet of books about the seasons. Jim is one of the best nature writers in this country; there is no hyperbole in his careful, quiet prose, just close and patient observation of animals and plants, and thoughts about such diverse - but intimately related - subjects as pollution, seabird decline, air travel, birdsong, climate change, St Kilda, skylarks and spawning salmon. His theme for this book is a quote from John Muir;

'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.' 

Although he talks of past trips to Alaska, Norway and Iceland, Jim's heart is in Scotland, and from his home in Stirlingshire he travels from Burnmouth to the Bass Rock, from the Cairngorms to Caithness, to the wilds of Argyll, and of course out to the islands, to Shetland, Skye, Papa Westray, Fair Isle and (in the past) to North Uist and onwards to the archipelago that is St Kilda. In this book more than in any other in the series, there is a profound sense of unease about the fate of the natural world, but there are still many moments of transcendent beauty - kingfishers flying along a river, a fox crossing a patch of sunlight beneath Creag na h-Iolaire, dolphins diving off the Berwickshire coast. If you want to read about one man's lifetime study of (mainly Scottish) nature I can't recommend Jim Crumley's books highly enough.

And that was it for July. I'm going to have to do better in August or  my #20BooksofSummer will turn into #8unreadbooksforautumn....