I promised myself that I wouldn’t buy any books whilst in the extremely restricted living space of the caravan. I promised myself. But it seems that I have an addiction that is very difficult to shake.
Books have always been a big part of my life.
One of my earliest happy memories of Christmas is opening a gift-wrapped book. The smell of the paper and printing ink. The tactile pleasure of handling it, feeling the slight roughness of a linen book cover. The crisp turning of its new pages. The pleasure of curling up quietly on a sofa and losing myself deeply in its world. These are things I’ve always loved.
I couldn’t resist buying a few books to read over this festive break. It seemed sort of traditional.
Besides. Alan Garner has just published a new book at the age of 87. It would seem rude not to support such a momentous undertaking. I first read his novel The Owl Service at the age of eight, and I found it deeply disturbing, and very powerful. So much so that the memory of the book stayed with me, and when forty years later I came across a copy of it in a secondhand book store, I had to buy it to read again as an adult. It was still a strongly evocative, disturbing book.
His new book, Treacle Walker, is apparently based on the legends around Alderney Edge in Cheshire, where the author still lives.
I shall wrap it in festive paper and gift it to myself for Christmas. I shall find some quiet moments to absorb it.
It’s over fifty years now since I first read his work and I feel that Mr Garner and I are overdue a revisit.
Ravencroft Skye 