📚 🚶Introducing our March book
And check me out on the cover (albeit at a jaunty angle) of this week's Spectator!
Dear walking book clubbers,
As Spring inches closer, it’s time to turn to Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield and transport ourselves back to 1960s Suffolk village life.
This beautiful book is a landmark work of oral history: Blythe cycled around the village with his tape recorder, interviewed around fifty people and wrote down what they said. He captures a wonderful range of individual voices, which is so transporting. Meet and listen to “The Survivors” of War, the bell-ringers, the vet, the wheelwright and many more. Some of the villagers are very old and share childhood memories and lore passed down from previous generations, so the result is a picture of village life stretching all the way back into the 1800s. It’s astonishing.
Fascinating nuggets abound, creating a vivid portrait of a time when, for instance, individual nails were made by hand, when there was no running water at home so children were made to drink up at school (and also when they missed school to pick stones from the fields), when a farm-hand could join the army and gain a stone as he’s no longer being ‘worked to death’…
At Akenfield’s heart is a deep tension between the villagers' respect for tradition and their desire for progress, raising enduring questions about the relationship between memory and modernity, nature and human nature, silence and speech.
I can only apologise for the book’s appallingly small print! I was anxious about choosing it for this reason, but laid my worries to rest when various older readers I know told me they could handle it. In addition, I think the broken-up style of the book makes it bearable. I would say that it is worth enduring the tiny print for the extraordinary content.
Please scroll down for all the information you need about our March events - including our special appearance at the Daunt Books Festival - and links to discover more about the book.
The Tyranny of World Book Day
First, I’d love to share THIS PIECE with you, which made the cover of this week’s Spectator magazine (albeit sidelined by Frankopan on Putin). Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to love about World Book Day, but I think dressing up for it is the antithesis to its aim of promoting reading for pleasure. Since when did panic-buying a polyester costume, or drawing a lightning scar on a forehead make you love reading? The transportive power of books is about enabling us to feel like a character, not look like them.
Read the piece to find out more - you can usually read a couple of articles before the paywall kicks in. And let me know your thoughts, I would love to hear!
Our March Akenfield Discussions
At the Daunt Books Festival: Friday 17th March, 10-11.30am, setting off from Daunt Books Marylebone, 83-84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW and walking around Regent’s Park. See the Festival’s stellar line up, featuring Katherine Rundell, Sophie Mackintosh, Jeremy Lee and others, and buy a festival pass HERE. Alternatively:
On the Heath: Sunday 26th March, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £5-15. Book in for our regular Sunday Hampstead Heath walk:
On Zoom: Monday 27th March, 8-8.40pm, £1-10. Our evening online chat:
Live Discussion Thread: Friday 31st March, 1.30-2pm. A lovely chance to share whatever else we’ve been enjoying over this past month, as well as this book.
Buy Akenfield from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.
Discover more about Akenfield
Here is the cream of a huge crop of fascinating interviews, reviews and essays … Please don’t think of this as homework! These links are here only in case you are interested and would like to extend your reading - I promise I won’t quiz you on them at any of our meetups…
A good start is Maggie Fergusson’s insightful piece, HERE, for Slightly Foxed magazine, which gives a great feel of the scope of the book.
For more detail, THIS in Slate magazine (also the introduction to the American NYRB edition) is a beautiful and thoughtful exploration of Akenfield and its ongoing relevance from a senior American editor. In addition Andrew Motion writes especially well about Blythe’s poetic use of language in THIS long piece for the New York Review of Books. (There’s a paywall, but if you register for free you can read an article.)
You can listen to Ronald Blythe talking to Robert Macfarlane and Olivia Laing (what an amazing combo!!) at their event at the Charleston Festival back in 2012, describing ‘A Sense of Place’.
I highly recommend the acclaimed 1975 Peter Hall film of Akenfield. I know that film adaptations are often disappointing, but this one isn’t! He used local people as untrained actors, and worked with Ronald Blythe to give the story a bit more plot, but you’ll recognise many of the passages - it’s beautiful. You can rent it via the BFI HERE.
Ronald Blythe was on Desert Island Discs with Sue Lawley, back in 2001. It is a joy of an episode, so full of wisdom. Listen HERE.
The author passed away earlier this year, aged 100, prompting a wealth of obituaries, including THIS ONE in the Church Times, for which he wrote a column for the best part of a quarter of a century. A selection of these columns about life as seen from his Suffolk home Bottengoms Farm has been beautifully published, interspersed with contributions from other luminaries (including Olivia Laing, Maggi Hambling, Robert Macfarlane, Vikram Seth and more) in this gorgeous new hardback, Next to Nature. I adore my copy! If you’re in the mood for buying books, there’s also the intriguing Return to Akenfield by Craig Taylor - info & extract HERE.
What’s next?
That’s the million-dollar question. Watch this space for our April-July picks coming soon. And thank you for your patience - I know you are keen to get reading and planning! It always takes me longer than anticipated to get the right combination of books…
In the meantime, look out for the March instalment of Our Walkers’ Walks landing in your inbox next Monday.
Happy reading,
Emily
Sounds really interesting. I wonder how different the stories would sound today if we went around our hometowns and did the same!