Welcome to Litsy!

I completely understand why this was nominated for the women‘s prize for non-fiction. Masud weaves her stories of life searching the countryside in England with her memories from her traumatic childhood in Pakistan.

This was a challenging read about complex trauma. How the author demonstrates her trauma into her teachings and education into her past life is inspiring and interesting. Not everyone with trauma shares the same experiences so having a new perspective is greatly beneficial!

Diagnosed with complex PTSD, Masud uses the flat places she visits as a way to deal with that. The flat paces are places of conflict and colonialism. She visits Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and the Orkney islands and each trip represents a different challenge

I loved her description of the different places that she visited and at times I felt that I was visiting these places along with her

Recent acquisitions:

📖 English Heritage From the Air by Neil Burton, Photographs by Skyscan
📖 The Times London: A History in Photographs
📖 Historic Pubs of London by Ted Bruning

#UniteAgainstBookBans #LetUtahRead

While academic in some places, this little book was fun and fascinating if like me, you find different cultural conceptions of the world worth attempting to understand. While perhaps not fully understood, the author journeys through the landscape and tales of the Western Apache in Arizona to map local places, their historical Apache names and the historical as well as their social significance -a geography of stories and inherited wisdom.

Ultimately, this book didn‘t work for me. While it has some compelling content and some of the writing is beautiful, it‘s written in a stream of consciousness type way that felt chunked together to me. Also, the author tended toward the melodramatic at times, which I never like. And the cover is just awful. It looks like a PowerPoint template. If not for the Women‘s Prize, I likely would have bailed.

I don't want ever to be wholly relaxed, wholly at home, in a world of flowing fresh water built on the parched pain of others. The world itches, and so it should.

Enjoying lazy day with this.

The famous red-and-white-striped lighthouse had been demolished, only last year. It had stood on the edge of the Ness since 1792. But by 2013, the sea had doggedly eaten its way too far inland, and the lighthouse was decommissioned. Waves lapped at the base of the building. It was time to level it....

Why hadn't the lighthouse simply been left to rot with the other ruins on the Ness...?

Quintessential nature writing and my favourite nonfiction of 2024 so far. I‘m so glad I finally got around to reading Nan Shepherd‘s classic about the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. Her exquisite prose is so evocative that I was frequently transported off into reveries of my own encounters with the natural world.