However, I finally finished the grim Colombian thriller La Casa de la Belleza, leaving me free to read more of A Hundred Years of Solitude and then South African books, to continue my journey around the world.
This week, Barack Obama's presidency memoir A Promised Land came out. Albeit a little daunted by the length, I might finally begin reading a book of his for the first time.
In terms of topical political reading, the biography of Nero by Suetonius also seems relevant again.
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For lighter reading in the train on the way to voice coaching lessons, I have been reading Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem, which uncle M. kindly let me order through him at the bookshop where he works.
Written by an ex-Londoner who grew up in the countryside, who now in her early forties traipses along the foreshore of the Thames (often during low tides) in search of historical bric-a-brac, it is a charming read. It is amazing how many unexpected treasures washed out of the banks and beaches: Roman tiles and pots, Tudor clothing accessories, Georgian coins, Victorian medicine bottles, grain-sized red 'Thames garnets,' and so on.
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| Cover of Mudlarking, via the publisher: Bloomsbury UK |
Her mudlarking has an ethic. It would have been irrelevant to the original Victorian mudlarks who fished coal and whatever else they could find from the dangerously dirty river to make a living. But one requires a permit in the 21st century. And Maiklem herself eschews the Schliemann-esque force of metal-detecting and digging, and instead trusts to luck to see things that are lying on or lodged in the surface. Important finds are shown to the Museum of London, for example, and the government rules on treasure are observed.
Besides, washing and sorting the finds is a demanding workload, with which for example a 17th-century pirate might hardly have bothered when he retrieved his own treasures from a boarded ship. I felt secondhand anxiety at the thought of the finds that Lara Maiklem must order and store, or give away. How many medieval roof tiles can one display in one's dining room before they begin to be too much of a good thing?
Mudlarking — in the USA it is called Mudlark — honours and celebrates the history of Britain. At times it even eschews modernity altogether.
It has become a Sunday Times bestseller, but I mentally associate it with the Daily Telegraph. Of course I have no idea of the author's private politics. But the book has the aesthetic order often found alongside old-fashioned, right-wing ideology although I suspect it also appeals to a strain of British reserve across the political spectrum.
(It is a fine book to read during these times, too, for a superficial reason: it is liberating to read about people who spend hours outdoors!
It is also an excellent companion read to Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways — I broke off that book during the first Berlin lockdown in March, but plan to take it up again once taking the U-Bahn to work regularly is safe. The scene of the mouth of the Thames in a fog in Maiklem's book is reminiscent, for example, of the more ominous scene of vast tidal flats in MacFarlane's.)
Whether they own the book or not, anyone can glimpse Maiklem's finds as she presents them engagingly on her Twitter account.
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Additional information taken from "Lara Maiklem" [Wikipedia]
