The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life [Hardcover]

I was attracted by the cover as i waited for my wife in the shop at martin mere. i started to read it as she took her time choosing packs of cards. by the time i got to his amazing descriptions of gannets diving i knew i had to buy this book. Reading it has been an immense pleasure. The prose is fabulous - this is some of the best writing i have read in a long time - and the sense of the world he conveys is miraculous. The book drove me out. each time i finished a chapter i was gripped by a desire to get out into the countryside and watch the skies. but even more than that the book touched on what it means to be human and those insights into his own life added to the whole. I cannot recommend this book enough - it would be a great present to anyone who liked good writing. it certainly is a life worth sharing

On a browse through Amazon I chanced upon this book. It seemed something that would interest me as birdwatching is my number 1 hobby and it had (at the time) three 5* ratings - must be good then?

My overwhelming feeling is 'thank goodness I finished this book and managed not to give up on it'. I found it really boring. On the back Susannah Clapp says 'Those who love birds will love this book and envy Tim Dee for both the many adventures his year contained and the grace with which he describes them'.

Well apart from going to Zambia I don't really recall he did much adventuring, and certainly pages and pages about Redstarts isn't exactly an out of this world experience for the reader, well not for me.

Tim Dee is obviously a bright perhaps intellectual guy, far more than me and I am happy to put my hand up and say that perhaps that's why I didn't connect with it, I am too thick. But I am fairly well read and I think masterpieces are those that engage the reader in an enticing way not a flowery over written imagery one - and this is what really got on my nerves. Seldom does a paragraph pass without some simile of overwrought emotion or over description e.g.

'I walked through the fen waiting for it to get darker. The day was reluctant to finish. Two common terns made last flights above the reedy mere white as ice cubes against the green. In a hedge along a dyke, bullfinches piped their embarrassed music, their soft calls of bloodied regret escaping over their blood red breasts.' (Well for a start their breast are pink not red)

He goes off to see a Starling roost (millions of birds) nothing wrong with that. When he gets back he writes down 35 things that remind him of Starlings (4 pages) from Bertolt Brecht to Laurence Styerne to Coleridge to Yeats and John Clare (whom he is obsessed with). It is not really what reminds me of Starlings more like let me show off how much I know.

I imagined going birdwatching with him and decided that you just couldn't walk 2 yards without some literary quote. Look it's a Skylark, (ah yes Shelley said...) it's a Carrion Crow (ah yes Shakespeare) shall we go in this hut (ah yes it reminds me of a Canaletto) - arrrggghhhh!

In an excellent example of 'less is more' he waxes lyrically about the plumage of a Nightjar (nothing wrong in that, lovely birds) and then compares them to moths - okay....and then mentions that moths have interesting names and illustrates this with not, say, two or three, but 47 names - please!!

One bit that did make me laugh, was when he described meeting Peter Scott. He had won a competition and the great man was presenting the prizes. Tim says 'I disliked his paintings they seemed catastrophically lurid - it was always dawn or dusk with wild purple skies doing far too much...' - sounds like his own prose to me, doing far too much, or perhaps trying to do far too much.

I feel guilty only giving this 3*s after the other reviews although in truth I 'ummed' and 'ahhed' whether to give it two.If you are looking for a book that will take you out birdwatching then read, Alex Horne, Bill Oddie, Mark Cocker or (and I recommend this highly) Charlie Elder's 'While flocks last'. If however you want some over written prose with tons and tons of imagery about birds and more famous authors' quotes than you can shake a stick at then this is for you.

And finally, something that always irritates me, there's some nasty typos in it, but nice cover I must say.

Tim Dee has undoubtedly written a beautiful book with some awe inspiring paragraphs that lift your soul and have you rushing to get outside to experience just a little of the world that Tim writes about. However, and I have to say it's a big however, at times I found the book repetitive and just plain boring, too often there seemed to be pages of endless descriptions that left me far from inspired and more than a little frustrated.

The book is divided into sections defined by the twelve months of the year. In each section the author writes about his bird watching travels or his recollections from his life full which is obviously been full of birds. Each of these sections gave me some insight into Tim Dee's own personal life or gave some unknown fact about birds or the world they inhabit. But again, often these points were not just one of those quick facts that you end up telling everyone about, but rather a long draw out monologue of endless wordiness. I constantly felt like the book was somewhere between a birdwatcher story and a long piece of romantic poetry.

All this left me rather confused about my feeling towards this book by the time I finished reading it. On one hand, the author writes some glorious pieces of descriptive poetry that had me racing home to dictate sections to my wife, on the other hand I had long periods where I just wanted to leave the book alone and start something a little less laborious. While I love Tim Dee's descriptions of how birds have "bought a little bit of the sky down with them" or how he felt when he was out among the bird ringing them, I found it far more infuriating reading many pages worth how Redstarts are his favourite bird or about the mystery of the Nightjars call for the third time in one book. All in all I'd say read this book if you love `nature writing' and have a bit of time to invest, but not if you just want a book you can just pick up and have a quick read of.