Current & Recent Reading: Books on bird's names, rewilding Scotland, and snow plus woods, bothies, Edward Abbey, Charles Dickens, and Sherlock Holmes

I'm usually reading several books at once. Recently I started the three above - one sent for review, one I contributed to on Kickstarter, and one a birthday present. All three look excellent.

They're not the only books I'm reading though. I've been slowly working my way through Richard Fortey's The Wood For The Trees. It's divided into seasons and whilst Strathspey is a long way from Fortey's southern England wood I've been reading sections at the appropriate time of year. I'm also reading Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend - I like to have at least one work of fiction in my pile of current reading and this is an old favourite.

Two nights ago in a tent in Glen Feshie I was reading another old favourite - Edward Abbey. This was a mix of fiction and non-fiction (though with Abbey it's sometimes hard to tell which is which) as a collection called The Best of Edward Abbey was the only work by him I could find for my Kindle.

I don't often take print books camping anymore. I like having a selection of options. With the Kindle I can carry a whole library. On my recent GR5 walk I read several very different books starting with Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. I was shocked again at the abrupt and disturbing ending - a real cliffhanger! I wanted to remind myself of the original after seeing an excellent theatrical version at the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

Other GR5 books were John Burns' entertaining Bothy Tales; Mathias Rostrom's The Life & Death of Sherlock Holmes, a fascinating and exhaustive account of Holmes in popular culture from Conan Doyle to Sherlock and Elementary; and then, of course, many of the original stories in The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Even though they were familiar I found the Sherlock Holmes stories really good for unwinding in the evening, especially when the weather made staying in my shelter sensible.