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brookebookshelf's review
4.0
Charming, quirky, picturesque, and poetic. Local stories and histories sitting alongside tales from his obsession with swimming in every kind of “swimmable” location. Some made me want to dive in with him and others seemed terrifying or just icky. It was A LOT of swimming to read about, but his writing kept me (mostly) engaged. Like another reviewer here, I would have enjoyed seeing photos of some of the locations.
fat_girl_fiction's review
3.0
Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin
This review and rating is more a reflection of my likes rather than the book itself. Roger Deakin is a brilliant writer, there's no question in that. His writing is almost poetic full or rich similies and metaphors. The way he describes the rivers and the towns in which they reside makes the reader want to go there and visit. I unfortunately am not a fan of non-fiction, I struggle because of the lack of plot and 'the pull'. I wish I did enjoy travel writing, because if so this would be a definite five out of five. If I travel to any of the places mentioned in the book, I will be taking this book for me as a reference to the history and famous faces that go with the wild rivers, lidos and lakes.
This review and rating is more a reflection of my likes rather than the book itself. Roger Deakin is a brilliant writer, there's no question in that. His writing is almost poetic full or rich similies and metaphors. The way he describes the rivers and the towns in which they reside makes the reader want to go there and visit. I unfortunately am not a fan of non-fiction, I struggle because of the lack of plot and 'the pull'. I wish I did enjoy travel writing, because if so this would be a definite five out of five. If I travel to any of the places mentioned in the book, I will be taking this book for me as a reference to the history and famous faces that go with the wild rivers, lidos and lakes.
tanekaberi's review
4.0
Brilliant wander about England looking for a place to have a swim and also talking about the places as well.
tdbrwn's review
The premise of swimming around Britain is a convenient peg on which to hang this charming travelogue about all things water. Deakin strikes an elegiac tone when he's writing about the history of river swimming in various pre-industrial edens and the declining communities of public pool-swimmers (increasingly caught in the net of apparently unrestrained capitalism). However, what might have been overly sentimental is always offset by Deakin's well-placed levity. The book is an always interesting tribute to a particular moment in our changing relationship with water.
mkat303's review
I started Waterlog, but only got about one chapter in before it was due back at the library.
bewick's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
5.0
sadie_slater's review
3.0
In 1997 Roger Deakin, environmentalist, film-maker and keen swimmer, embarked on a journey through Britain, swimming in rivers, lakes, outdoor pools and the sea. The book he wrote about it, Waterlog, has become a classic of the nature-writing genre. I first heard of it when I read Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, which is in part a memorial to Macfarlane's friendship with Deakin, last year, and picked up a copy a few months ago.
Waterlog's subtitle, 'A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain', suggests a linear progress through the country, but in fact Deakin follows a meandering course, concentrating mainly on the West Country and East Anglia, close to his Suffolk home. He makes one visit to Wales, spends some time in the Yorkshire Dales and swims off the west coast of Scotland before returning south again with only a brief stop in Northumbria. Huge areas of the UK are left unexplored, including (sadly for me, at least) pretty much all of the lakes and waterways I'm most familiar with (bar a brief dip in the Windrush near Burford). Nevertheless, it's a fascinating book. As well as describing his swimming experiences, Deakin writes thoughtfully about the history, natural history and cultural importance of the bodies of water he swims through, and his beautiful descriptive prose left me longing to visit the places he describes (although not to swim, except in the few outdoor pools and lidos he swims in; I love swimming, but as a short-sighted person of a nervous disposition, and one who once nearly drowned in Walden Pond, I'm happy to be a pool-based swimmer and to experience nature by walking, or maybe occasional paddling, instead).
However, for me, Waterlog does suffer somewhat from being an example of what Kathleen Jamie, in her London Review of Books review of The Wild Places, dubbed 'the Lone Enraptured Male'. Yes, occasionally Deakin talks to locals: the last eel-fisher in Ely, an artist working in the Medway estuary, a farmer and cider-maker in the Somerset Levels, but with the exception of a woman referred to only as Judith whose family own an old mill in the Avon near Evesham and swim there all summer, all of these are male. Sometimes he quotes other writers who have visited the same waters, but just about all of them are male too, and most of the time the only voice we hear is his. And his voice is a voice which, quite unconsciously, sees the world as being about men and doesn't really consider women at all (the most egregious example of this comes towards the end, when he mentions a prep school which once required boys and girls to swim naked together up to the age of 12, and describes the acute embarrassment of the older boys struggling to hide their arousal while the by-then-pubescent girls changed, without ever seeming to pause to consider that it was probably pretty embarrassing for the girls as well) and which takes a distinctly male attitude towards the sensual experience of outdoor swimming, with the water he's swimming in subtly characterised as female in a way that made me cringe a bit (the most obvious and explicit example comes when he is swimming his way across Norfolk and enters the River Wissey "feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair", which was an actual full-body wince). I did still enjoy the book, but this stopped me loving it as I might have done.
Waterlog's subtitle, 'A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain', suggests a linear progress through the country, but in fact Deakin follows a meandering course, concentrating mainly on the West Country and East Anglia, close to his Suffolk home. He makes one visit to Wales, spends some time in the Yorkshire Dales and swims off the west coast of Scotland before returning south again with only a brief stop in Northumbria. Huge areas of the UK are left unexplored, including (sadly for me, at least) pretty much all of the lakes and waterways I'm most familiar with (bar a brief dip in the Windrush near Burford). Nevertheless, it's a fascinating book. As well as describing his swimming experiences, Deakin writes thoughtfully about the history, natural history and cultural importance of the bodies of water he swims through, and his beautiful descriptive prose left me longing to visit the places he describes (although not to swim, except in the few outdoor pools and lidos he swims in; I love swimming, but as a short-sighted person of a nervous disposition, and one who once nearly drowned in Walden Pond, I'm happy to be a pool-based swimmer and to experience nature by walking, or maybe occasional paddling, instead).
However, for me, Waterlog does suffer somewhat from being an example of what Kathleen Jamie, in her London Review of Books review of The Wild Places, dubbed 'the Lone Enraptured Male'. Yes, occasionally Deakin talks to locals: the last eel-fisher in Ely, an artist working in the Medway estuary, a farmer and cider-maker in the Somerset Levels, but with the exception of a woman referred to only as Judith whose family own an old mill in the Avon near Evesham and swim there all summer, all of these are male. Sometimes he quotes other writers who have visited the same waters, but just about all of them are male too, and most of the time the only voice we hear is his. And his voice is a voice which, quite unconsciously, sees the world as being about men and doesn't really consider women at all (the most egregious example of this comes towards the end, when he mentions a prep school which once required boys and girls to swim naked together up to the age of 12, and describes the acute embarrassment of the older boys struggling to hide their arousal while the by-then-pubescent girls changed, without ever seeming to pause to consider that it was probably pretty embarrassing for the girls as well) and which takes a distinctly male attitude towards the sensual experience of outdoor swimming, with the water he's swimming in subtly characterised as female in a way that made me cringe a bit (the most obvious and explicit example comes when he is swimming his way across Norfolk and enters the River Wissey "feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair", which was an actual full-body wince). I did still enjoy the book, but this stopped me loving it as I might have done.
nora__reads's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
A luscious love affair with nature in just over 300 pages. Fancy a quick dip in some freezing water now!