Earlier this week I read Helen Humphreys' lovely book
The Frozen Thames. Having loved a couple of her other books, I was excited about this one. I was even more excited to read it after I held it: it is a small book that nestled perfectly into my hands. Its layout to brings together text and historical illustrations. In the ongoing discussion of why eBooks will never fully replace print books, this book is Exhibit A.
The Frozen Thames' premise is that "In its long history, the river Thames has frozen solid forty times. These are the stories of that frozen river." Humphreys has written a short vignette for each of those forty times. Humphreys draws me in with her subject matter (i.e.,
Julia Margaret Cameron,
Virginia Woolf and gardens but she captivates me with her spare, elegant, evocative prose that moves toward a moment you feel like you can almost hold in your hands. For example, "The girl looks at the robin on her bedpost, and he cocks his head and looks back at her. Somewhere downstairs the other robin is singing. All over London, the girl thinks, all over London this very same thing is happening. Each house is a dark lantern, and each one holds the lit flicker of bird within its ribs" (175).
This book is not only a meditation on the river Thames but, as Humphreys writes, "This book is intended as a long meditation on the nature of ice. Each story is a story of transformation, as ice itself is the result of a transformative process" (182). The fact that there is only one vignette from the 20th century is significant: "we are in danger of losing ice from our world. If ice disappeared, we would not only lose the thing itself and its stabilizing place in the balance of nature, but we would also lose the idea of ice from our consciousness, and all the ways in which we are able to imagine it" (182).
Earlier this week I read Helen Humphreys' lovely book The Frozen Thames. Having loved a couple of her other books, I was excited about this one. I was even more excited to read it after I held it: it is a small book that nestled perfectly into my hands. Its layout to brings together text and historical illustrations. In the ongoing discussion of why eBooks will never fully replace print books, this book is Exhibit A.
The Frozen Thames' premise is that "In its long history, the river Thames has frozen solid forty times. These are the stories of that frozen river." Humphreys has written a short vignette for each of those forty times. Humphreys draws me in with her subject matter (i.e., Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf and gardens but she captivates me with her spare, elegant, evocative prose that moves toward a moment you feel like you can almost hold in your hands. For example, "The girl looks at the robin on her bedpost, and he cocks his head and looks back at her. Somewhere downstairs the other robin is singing. All over London, the girl thinks, all over London this very same thing is happening. Each house is a dark lantern, and each one holds the lit flicker of bird within its ribs" (175). 
This book is not only a meditation on the river Thames but, as Humphreys writes, "This book is intended as a long meditation on the nature of ice. Each story is a story of transformation, as ice itself is the result of a transformative process" (182). The fact that there is only one vignette from the 20th century is significant: "we are in danger of losing ice from our world. If ice disappeared, we would not only lose the thing itself and its stabilizing place in the balance of nature, but we would also lose the idea of ice from our consciousness, and all the ways in which we are able to imagine it" (182).
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