2022/150: 21st Century Yokel — Tom Cox

[tamaranth]

2022/150: 21st Century Yokel — Tom Cox

Had they known me, they would have realised that ‘I wouldn’t try to go that way if I were you – it’s difficult’ is one of the three main motivational hiking phrases a person can say in my vicinity, along with ‘There’s a great pub at the apex of this route’ and ‘This hill is well known due to the coven which is said to have practised in the copse at its plateau during the middle of the seventeenth century.’ [loc. 151]

What I like most about Tom Cox's writing -- here, online, in Villager -- is the immensity of his enthusiasm for and curiosity about things. So many things: cats (obviously), music, otters, wood, woodlands, winter, scarecrows, pigs preparing for apocalypse, bat detectors, the sea, the sea ...

21st Century Yokel is a bit of a patchwork of anecdotes, rambling in more than one sense: there isn't a plot, except inasmuch as it's about going for long walks and getting your head together. There are hints of bad stuff in the past (divorce, quitting mainstream job) but it's mostly about the rabbitholes that his interests open up, and the ways in which the landscape affects him, and about his family (especially his dad, whose monologues are rendered in ALL CAPITALS, which can become slightly wearing). 21st Century Yokel made me, too, want to go for long walks and experience the eerieness of twilight on a deserted lane, or face down the sea to settle my mind.

This was self-published via Unbound, and it was good to see more than one friend's name in the list of sponsors.

Comments

[anef]

Sounds excellent - I have this on Kindle, nmaybe I will schedule for my next N/F book (after Edith Hall on the Ancient Greeks)

Random von Internetz drops a comment...

[hairyears]

Your book reviews are fascinating, I will be buying this one on the strength of your review, and that's a good reason to put you on the 'follow' list..

I've granted you access because I think everyone's entitled to know at least something of anyone who follows us out of the blue: I'll rescind that in a couple of weeks if you're not all that interested.

Re: Random von Internetz drops a comment...

[tamaranth]

Thank you! It is really good to know that someone is reading and enjoying my reviews. I like to think of them as a nicely-punctuated version of my usual sitting-around-emoting-about-books.

Following you back -- I believe we interacted Way Back When in that other place: did you perchance send a random LJ person a PalmPilot?

Psions and Wonders...

[hairyears]

Not me, I've never owned one, but I seem to remember a conversation in which a Palm Pilot (or possibly a Psion) was re-homed.


But... Not-so-random, it was the LJ continuation of a conversation in a party in Gwydir Street with a Greenend contingent, beautiful beautiful geeks one and all: and Palm Pilots were be-geeked from person to person on at least two occasions in the extended Greenend Geekosphere.

One of them (I think) is now in the Cambridge Museum of Computing.