(no subject)

[skygiants]

Despite having literally just purchased a baker's dozen of books in Hay-on-Wye, I convinced genarti to prioritize Visiting a Bookstore as an agenda item in Orkney. We walked out with A Glisk of Sun: Selected Works of 'Countrywoman' Bessie Skea and spent the rest of the trip trading it back and forth between other books because it was so exactly what we both wanted to be reading as we wandered around the Highlands and islands.

Bessie Skea wrote for various Orkney publications and published several books, now all out of print; her grandchildren put together this collection in honor of her centenary. Most of the book is composed of prose sketches of a life spent in Orkney: a cycle of anecdotes representing each month progressing through the year, memories of her childhood and young adulthood in the twenties and thirties, beautiful descriptions of the Orkney landscape and the various people and creatures that live in it. The book also contains some poems and short stories related to Orkney and those are also enjoyable and often a bit supernatural (there's a selkie and several ghosts) but the day-to-day anecdotes are IMO more fun and more interesting than any of the more dramatic fiction.

She's got a vivid voice, evocative and pragmatic and funny by turns. The way she writes about her childhood reminds me a bit of L.M. Montgomery writing about Prince Edward Island, and I think I would have enjoyed it at any time, but in particularly it really was the perfect book to read while touring around Orkney, because Bessie Skea loves Orkney. She writes about it the way you only can when you know a place not just inside out, but well enough to be constantly rediscovering it. She's not a guide -- most of this work first appeared in The Orcadian and The Orkney Herald and so on, all very intentionally local and personal -- but all the same, if you're visiting a place that is new, it is really wonderful to be able to borrow the eyes of somebody else who loves it.

Comments

[sovay]

Most of the book is composed of prose sketches of a life spent in Orkney: a cycle of anecdotes representing each month progressing through the year, memories of her childhood and young adulthood in the twenties and thirties, beautiful descriptions of the Orkney landscape and the various people and creatures that live in it.

Thank you; I will look for this. (I am glad George Mackay Brown supported her, because they sound very similarly tuned and people can be territorial: it is good that he was not.)

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, that sounds lovely!

[snowynight]

It sounds lovely. Thanks for the rec!

[osprey_archer]

Oh, this sounds amazing! Truly the perfect book to read while visiting the Orkneys.

[headstone]

What a great find!

[skygiants]

I found this incredibly cute picture of them hanging out together and I keep coming back to it; they look so charming and charmed with each other!

[skygiants]

It really felt like discovering a treasure -- the bookstore had a whole stack of stuff that had been published on Orkney and I was tempted by several of them, but I think we picked the right one.

[skygiants]

You're welcome, I hope you enjoy it if you find it!

[rachelmanija]

I love this sort of thing.

What did you buy in Hay-on-Wye?

[skygiants]

One of the earliest entries is about her taking a day trip to tromp around the island of Hoy, splitting a seam in her trousers, huffing and puffing as she climbs up the hills and yet finding it all worth it, and we read it on the one (1) cafe in Hoy* on our day trip to Hoy having huffed and puffed our way up the hills like "yeah! it's just like that!"

*okay this is an exaggeration. There are now two cafes on Hoy.

[skygiants]

The lesson I am taking away is that I am 100% justified in always visiting the local bookstore no matter how unnecessary it may seem 😌

[sovay]

I found this incredibly cute picture of them hanging out together and I keep coming back to it; they look so charming and charmed with each other!

That's wonderful!

[skygiants]

Let's see ... I got a WWI memoir (Disenchantment), a turn-of-the-century theater memoir (Problems of the Actor), a Naomi Mitchison (Blood of the Martyrs), a 1911 fantasy novel about two modern ladies time traveling back to Versailles (An Adventure), a fifties sci fi short story collection (Tales from Gavagan's Bar), a Mary Stewart (My Brother Michael), and a collection of WWII Mass Observation Diaries (Our Hidden Lives); Beth got an incredibly trashy seventies sci fi (Fliers of Antares), a book on WWI aircraft (Aircraft in the German War), a boys' own adventure About Pilots (War Wings), and a midcentury opera memoir (A Star On The Door.)

(I thought we'd gotten thirteen collectively but this actually only adds up to 11 so I must have done my math wrong ....)

[genarti]

I'd bought a book on professional woman gardeners of the early 20th century (An Almost Impossible Thing) in London two days before and we acquired a book-shaped guide to Royal Society for the Protection of Birds sites in the process of that highly traditional British activity, being gently huckstered for charitable donations by an earnest retiree, so maybe that's what you're thinking of to make up the total?

[scintilla10]

Aw, wow, that sounds lovely! I've been enjoying reading all of your travel-and-books experiences. :D