blogs I read

The shrinking glacier of Hardangerjokul, from Brian John's blog

I've done one of those extremely infrequent updates to my blog-roll today.


What spurred it was, in the course of trying to find the actual location of Bowl's Barrow Heytesbury (something I failed to achieve, by the way), I happened across Brian John's sensationally good site on bluestones, Stonehenge, glaciation and Pembrokeshire geology; if you are interested in this stuff, you'll understand how it all hangs together.


https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/


Blogs like Brian's are rare and precious. It had to go on the blog-roll straight away.


Sample post, very excited about a possible match for the Altar Stone at Stonehenge, in what seems like a perfect source for glacial erratics. With a bonus in the shape of Dylan Thomas.


https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/dylan-thomas-and-altar-stone.html












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While updating my list I also added a couple of other sites that I read regularly by email subscription.


Richard Warren's blog about (usually) twentieth-century art, sculpture and literature. Richard lives in Wolverhampton, writes beautifully, and constantly discovers new and wonderful things about eras of British art of which I'm shamefully ignorant.


One of the signs of a great blog is that it makes you interested in topics you never knew you were interested in...


https://richardawarren.wordpress.com/author/richardawarren/

Engraving by Paul Sandby, from Richard Warren's blog

(Richard commented: "Eighteenth century painters are a bit off piste for this blog, but indulge me."...)


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A reflection that could be instanced too by Non Morris' amazing "Dahlia Papers".


https://thedahliapapers.com/


I don't know anything about garden design. I don't even know if I like garden design or approve of garden design, if you know what I mean. I know almost nothing of roses or espaliers or Versailles planters. --- but


"The ultimate source of the Versailles Planter today is the Parisian company  ‘Jardins du Roi Soleil’ who make the original design under licence in different sizes and twelve classic colours using a muscly cast iron frame, solid oak from the Auvergne and heavy duty steel bolts."


When Non Morris visits Sissinghurst or Vaux-le-Vicomte, you just have to go along.

Distylium racemosum at Sissinghurst, from Non Morris' blog

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What GoodReads is to Quora, Guy Savage's blog is to Wikipedia. Kind of.  What I'm trying to say is that Guy's blog consists unashamedly of I-have-just-read-it book reviews, a complete mixture of highbrow and lowbrow, but unlike GoodReads it's actually worth reading. He always quotes a decent-length extract and he always discusses story and characters in some detail. Discusses, not churns out.   He's reading his way through all of Anita Brookner's novels at the moment, and that's fascinating.  And we can expect a good deal more of Pushkin in the near future.


We live in a world where it's impossible to read more than an infinitesimal crumb of what we would really like to read, no,  of what we hunger to read. I wonder if I'll ever read any more Brookner than the one novel of hers that I've read. I wonder if I'll ever pick up Pushkin again. Most likely not. But thanks to Guy's blog, at least I can pay them a visit.


https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/author/sludgespa/