Snow by Marcus Sedgwick

Snow by Marcus Sedgwick

English non-fiction

Source – Personal copy

I love to listen to a little bit of Radio or some talking in bed I tend to drop off in under ten minutes of being in bed I’m fast on anyway last week or the week before this was on over a week. I listened the first night and liked his style. Then I listened the next night and thought that the writer’s name sounded familiar. I woke next day and looked up the book and found it was one of the Nature books I buy every time I visit where my mum’s ashes are spread. I usually visit the local Waterstones and buy some Nature writing mum loved nature and I chose this as one of my favourite books of all time is Emily Miano’s book Around Snow. Marcus was mainly a writer of Children’s fiction he had won a lot of prizes for his fiction but he also wrote several non-fiction works. He wrote this a couple of years after moving to the Alps in France. Also this was published by Little Roller as part of a series alongside the other series of classic Nature writing I have loved the couple of books I have read so far.

All my life I have loved the snow; ever since boyhood, when it seemed that every year was blessed, if you see it that way, with a heavy snowfall. There were hard winters when I was a child, growing up in the Far East. The far east that is, of Kent, close enough to the continent to be swept by their snow clouds, and it was an utter delight for my brother and me when our parents declared that the roads from our village to school, only a few miles away, were impassable once again.It didn’t take much snow to do it; the sunken rural roads that ran out of the orchards and across open wind-swept cabbage fields were easily prone to collect drifting snow, sealing us happily into our tiny village.

I was reminded of a drift in 1981 that covered most of the ground floor of the house we lived in windows,

It felt right a week after the first snow to cover this collection of essays around Snow. Marcus talks about the childhood love of snow we all have..His new Home in the Alps which he pointed out was at the same height as the summit of Snowden and how he found out what real snow was when he got there. How the plough when the snow fell a certain way would block his drive. Then digressios into how flakes form different types of snow how many words some Languages have for snow and the certain myths about this as well. Seeing certain weather phenomena he had seen caused by snow. He touches on Schubert Winterrreise how he wrote it how it was so sad and dark in parts and was written near his death(I must listen in depth to this again at some point anyone suggest a good recording of it ) He was known to be a huge fan of Thomas Mann and this crops up in the book as well. It is a slim work that links into how snow affects us all at times and also how it can inspire us at times.

Today, a Schubertiade is a gathering of musicians performing works by, or inspired by, the Austrian composer. These affairs began as little salons at his patrons houses, for his friends and benefactors, often to trial new pieces. Winterreise falls into two halves of twelve songs each. The story goes that Schubert called his friends togethet, one evening in 1827, to hear him perform the first half. When he finished, there was stony silence, disbelieving faces. What was this utterly bleak and strange music that their hero had composed?

That was the first half the later part is meant be darker I must listen to this piece of music

They were dumbstruck by the weirdness and terror of the piece, and yet the first half, the half they’d witnessed, is nothing to the second, something so completely desolate it makes the first twelve songs appear like the dream of a summer’s picnic.

 

I’m pleased I got to this I had want to try read another nature book before the ned of the year and this is a great book for winter and can easily be read in an evening and if you like writers that go from point a to b but takes us on a trip as they do that this is a book for you. His view like my own we had more snow when we were young he proves this when he gets the Met Office records for his childhood home in Kent and finds yes in the 60s there were three times as many snow days as in the last ten years. He mixes art, literature and tales of snow into a book that is fun to read and packed full of little facts and insights. Other parts of the book, reminded me of a colleague I used to work with a former merchant sailor, he had gone to Siberia on an early trip and been shocked by the snow and how cold it was there is talk of people finding arctic conditions hard. Have you read any of the books in this Series.?

Winston’s score – A – perfect to be inside warm on a winter evening reading about snow!