A remarkable one-night read

 I’m going to have to revise my list of one-night reads, the books that can be read in one night. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain deserves a place of honor.

A reviewer for The Guardian called it “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.” That judgment is straightforward but strikes me as unfortunate.

First, some other outstanding writers have been interested in Britain’s landscape. To take a few examples from contemporaries, Robert Macfarlane, Ronald Blythe, Roger Deakin and Alice Oswald have written some wonderful things. I wouldn’t know how to compare them to Shepherd’s book.

A more serious problem with “the finest book ever written” judgment is that I know biologists — naturalists who are also scientists — who wouldn’t like The Living Mountain. 

The book has some wonderful descriptions of landscape, plants and wildlife, but it’s not a biology book, not a scientific book. It doesn’t have a catalog of the flora and fauna of the Cairngorms. It contains no great ecological insights. It’s about how getting familiar with a place changes a person. It’s a book about human nature and the place of a person within the cosmos.

I love The Living Mountain because it made me think about some questions that I’d only sideswiped or had somehow managed to avoid. Here are two examples:

• “I’ve been the instrument of my own discovery,” Shepherd says, and she wonders what she’s done about cleaning and sharpening her own instruments. She makes a case for paying attention and noticing things. But she also makes a case of experience a place in repose, when you’re not focused, not trying to capture ever detail. She makes a case for sleeping on the mountain, relaxing in it, finding out what the place is like when you’re not vigilantly trying to wring every lesson out of the experience.

• She also makes the case, unapologetically, for seeing things that the scientist doesn’t see, or at least doesn’t talk about. Watching an eagle hunt, she points out that you can see a scientific reason for the bird’s power and speed. But what do you say about its gracefulness?

The Living Mountain poses some deep questions but is mercifully brief. I think we can call it a one-night read. It’s 108 pages in the new edition — Macfarlane estimates 30,000 words. It took me more than one night, but I’m a slow reader.

• Source and notes: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025.

If you’re curious about one-night reads, see “The notion of one-night reads at 20,” Oct. 28, 2021. A five-part list of my favorites ran from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2, 2021.