Stop What You’re Doing And Read This! - Plot & Excerpts
Jeanette Winterson A Bed. A Book.A Mountain. I AM LYING in bed reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. This is a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms – a mountain range in north-east Scotland. The book was written in the 1940s, and lay unpublished until the 1970s. Now it has been reissued by Canongate. Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else. There is no substitute for reading. To go back to the book. Nan Shepherd never married and never lived anywhere but her native Scotland in a village at the foot of the Cairngorms. She was well educated and well travelled but she always came home. She loved the Cairngorms. She wrote, ‘The mind cannot carry away all it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’ I am not a mountain climber or even a hill walker. I know nothing about the Cairngorms. The book was sent to me and because books and doors both need to be opened, I opened it.
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