BOOK CLUB
KEEP MOVING (OUT NOW)
BY MAGGIE SMITH If you’ve been online through the pandemic, you’ve probably read the exquisite poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith – a true national treasure, but the one who’s an author from Ohio, rather than the octogenarian megastar actor. Written in 2016, Good Bones became a small shard of white-hot hope, shared voraciously by word-lovers looking for meaning in post-tragedy senselessness. This new work builds on that hopefulness in a series of heart-filling quotes and essays, fragments held together with pure gold, finding the opportunity for growth and expansion in the face of terror and sadness. As the book’s blurb itself says: “ Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength that’s found on the other side of loss… and is for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: what comes next?’’ A stunning and truly helpful gift for anyone who might be struggling, or in need of a little hope.
Right This collection of hopeful quotes and essays by Maggie Smith is the perfect gift for someone who might have found lockdown particularly difficult
“Snow makes a familiar place strange… it can seem to rewrite reality”
FIFTY WORDS FOR SNOW
Loss is a haunting theme for the book: the foreword reveals that, as the author began to compile this list of words, her partner Anna suffered a major stroke. Campbell worked on the book through a long and difficult winter at Anna’s bedside while she recovered from severe aphasia, with her words returning in fragmented and “often puzzling” form – leaving the author to wonder even more about the complexities presented by vanishing vocabularies, and the sheer power of a single word. The fifty sections of this project contain linguistic analysis, geographic records, folk stories, economic history, references to art, film, music – it’s so much more than simply a wonderful gift for a weather-lover, or anyone curious about the origins of language. An ideal wintery bedside companion that’s packed tight with information, Campbell should be applauded for the extraordinary amount of research that’s been distilled into each of the book’s sparkling, fascinating chapters.
(OUT 5 NOV) BY NANCY CAMPBELL
Compiled by Nancy Campbell, the title of this beautiful book plays on the (now- disproven) myth about the multiple Inuit words for snow, and sets out to dig deep into the drift of knowledge that can be extrapolated from different languages’ terms for the soft, cold, white rain that falls from the sky in the winter months. As anyone who’s spent an early morning in Cambridge after a snowfall will know, and as Campbell writes in her introduction, “Snow makes a familiar place strange... it can seem to rewrite reality, concealing, clothing, cleansing or suspending the landscape. It muffles. It shrouds.” Finished under lockdown, Campbell voyaged around the world through dictionaries and extensive research: not an unfamiliar activity for someone who had previously researched glacial ice, travelling north of the Arctic Circle to do so – this wonderful work is a fantastic exploration
Above Nancy Campbell digs deep into the meanings, etymologies and histories of 50 international words for snow
of language, but also a record of what we might be soon to miss, if climates continue to change and snowfalls become even less frequent.
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C A M B S E D I T I O N . C O . U K
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