So: I propose that we take Nan Shepherd's slender masterpiece The Living Mountain as the first book in the #CoReadingVirus global Twitter Reading Group. It's a beautiful, moving, wise meditation on landscape, love, nature & the nature of being.
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Shepherd wrote her book in the 1940s at a time of world crisis; it was published in 1977, near the end of her long life. It tells the story of her "traffic of love" with the Cairngorm Mountains of north-east Scotland, and of how she learned to walk "into" this landscape... 
...Nan--clever, gentle Nan--re-imagined the tradition of mountain literature, & indeed of nature writing more broadly; she was drawn to passes rather than peaks, pilgrimage rather than conquest & she used the Cairngorms to "think with", exploring broad philosophical questions...
...but also drawing on her decades of acquaintance with the hills to evoke & celebrate the particularities of weather, creature, geology, people, water, ice & rock. The Living Mountain is about the Cairngorms in so far as Mrs Dalloway is about London or Moby-Dick about whales...
...which is to say it's fabulously specific in its attention to the details of place and time, but also radiates powerfully outwards from its chosen subject to vast questions of life, love & value; questions that feel more pressing right now than perhaps ever before...
...I've known the Cairngorms literally since before I was born (photo below is of me "climbing" one of my first mountains, courtesy of my father, in those hills), & I've loved & proselytised for Shepherd's wondrous book for years. So it would be a joy to read it with you all...
...in the coming hard weeks & months, both as a book that might take us out of our current confinements & anxieties, & a book that might help us better think through what matters most in this strange, desperate time & in its aftermath, when we re-build a world out of rubble...
...and decide what to keep & what to make anew for the good.
So if you'd like to join the Reading Group, please try to get hold of a copy of The Living Mountain. It's available as an e-book, as an audiobook & of course as a 'real' book. If you're buying a hard copy...
So if you'd like to join the Reading Group, please try to get hold of a copy of The Living Mountain. It's available as an e-book, as an audiobook & of course as a 'real' book. If you're buying a hard copy...
...please consider supporting an independent bookstore rather than a mega-online retailer. For avoidance of doubt, though I've written essays accompanying editions of The Living Mountain, I gain no royalty for these & have zero pecuniary interest in increased sales of the book...
...I simply have a heartfelt passion for the book, Nan's work more broadly, & the mountain landscape in which The Living Mountain is set. I'd like to use the Reading Group to build conversation, community, curiosity & kindness at this time of need. So if you'd like to join in...
...find your way to a copy of TLM in the coming days if you can & I'll post more details here on the evening of Sun 22nd about how & when the group might work, with a view to starting discussions from Saturday 28th March. Use the hashtags #CoReadingVirus & #TheLivingMountain...
...to find your way to discussions/threads as they grow in the future. Please tell others if you think they'd like to join, & do RT this thread, of which the last words go to Nan, from her memorial stone in Makars' Court in Edinburgh: "It's a grand thing to get leave to live."
