Books To Go

We expected to have plenty of time to read and to make blog posts, especially during our 2+ weeks on the famously drizzly Outer Hebrides. But in fact, while the rest of the UK is under water, we have had great weather on the Hebrides just as we have throughout our trip. With the days being so long, we are out and about for a long time every day and are too tired to read more than a few pages before nodding off. So we haven't done much reading or blog posting.  Still, I have had time to read just a few books about the places we've been visiting. Below, I've given a brief description of  each of the ones I liked. Note that the photos aren't actually clickable to get "a look inside," it just says that because I grabbed the book cover photo from Amazon. 

The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power, by John S.C. Abbott, 1859 (!)

If you have been reading or watching George R.R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" series you may have been thinking "gee, this isn't very realistic, with all of these royals and would-be royals constantly betraying each other and raising armies to slaughter each other, and having people tortured." If so, you should read this book. It focuses mostly on the doings of the grand people, not the lives of the peasantry, and one grows weary of hearing how yet another Hapsburg broke a treaty by invading Bohemia, or how some other grand poobah bribed the Italian states into invading Austria...and on and on for hundreds of years. And, yes, there's torture too. I won't retain any of the names and dates (and indeed have forgotten almost all of them already) but the book gave me a good grasp of the major forces that shaped Austria until the mid-1800s. 

Murder on the Danube, by William S Shepard

This is a pretty lousy mystery in a series; I suspect they are all pretty lousy.  But people don't buy them for the mystery writing really, they buy them because, intermixed with the bad mystery, there is a lot of historical information and travelogue type information...about Budapest and some nearby parts of Hungary, in this case (I read it while I was there). Sample: "Sylvie was delighted with [the town of] Karlovy Vary, 'as long as I don't have to drink any bad-tasting mineral water or bathe in mud,' she had insisted. Like Bath in England there were fashionable shops and arcades. Little by little, the hotels and restaurants were beginning to reclaim their former splendor." Definitely not worth reading unless you are going to Budapest, but if you are it might be worth a go.

The Black House, by Peter May. A much better mystery than Murder on the Danube, this one is set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (which is where I am as I write this). Although fictional, the book gives some flavor of what it is like living on the Outer Hebrides. 

Tales from Barra told by The Coddie, by The Coddie as told to John Campbell

"The Coddie " was the nickname of a man who lived on the small, picturesque island of Barra, and was one of the last of the great Scottish Gaelic storytellers (a pastime or avocation that largely died out after radio, TV, and other modern conveniences came in). This book relates a bunch of The Coddie's tales, many of them true stories from the past 200 years or so. Or at least they purport to be true stories: Campbell did some research on them and found that the dates or names are often impossible (for instance, a particular story could not have happened when it was said to have happened, because the Laird at that date didn't have the name of the Laird in the story). But many of the stories conform to details that can be checked.  In any case, true or false they are useful for learning how people lived on the Outer Hebrides 100 or 200 years ago, just as a Sherlock Holmes story tells you a lot about conditions in London in the late 1800s even though the story itself isn't true. Unfortunately many of The Coddie's stories aren't all that interesting, but each one is short and easy reading. It's a fairly good book, though not as good as I had hoped.

Sea Room, by Adam Nicolson. 

This book styles itself a memoir of the man who owns the Shiant Islands. After reading the first 30 pages, in which the author discusses geology, natural history, human history, and other things besides, I thought this was shaping up to be a truly great book, up there with Sand County Almanac, say, or Desert Solitaire. Then I read a bit farther, and the honeymoon was over: I found an error, a false "fact." And, later, another. The problem with these little falsehoods is not that I am learning some things that aren't true, it's that it makes me mistrust all of the other things in the book. I happen to know that a couple of specific things are wrong, but is that because those are the only bad ones, or are there lots of other false notes but I don't know enough to recognize them?

 So maybe it's not a great book; it is still a very very good one. Although the prose can be a bit purple at times (a common hazard in this type of book), in general it is beautifully written. Here's a sample:

Almost 300 Lewis men were drowned in the second half of the nineteenth century, all of them within a few miles of their home shores, some of them watched by their families and friends as the small boats struggled to get home through the surf. If the bodies came ashore, which they often didn't, they, like the boats, were smashed into pieces or rotted beyond recognition. It was the pattern all down the western seaboard of the British Isles: Poor soils drive men to boats in which they drown.

That is a great summary of this aspect of life on these islands, and it takes only three sentences...although many more sentences are devoted to telling a few specific stories.  


(One true story that isn't in this book but that I will mention here is the fate of the small settlement on the island of Pabbay, south of Barra: in May, 1897, all of the dozen or so men of Pabbay were out fishing in the same boat. A squall came up and the boat went down with no survivors: every man from Pabbay died that day. The settlement, which was declining anyway, never recovered, and the island has been uninhabited since 1903). 


Anyway, this is an excellent book, and if you only read one of the above then this is the one to go for.