Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

There are some interesting bits but on the whole I found it disjointed and rambling. My husband cousins lived a very similar life on islands near Flodder, maybe I had heard about a lot of it. I’d hope to have got the feeling of this remote Island life but sadly it left me glad that I had never experienced . Find an interesting bit the author then goes off in a completely different direction and aim lost. There are some good bits and some of the turns of phrase have a poetic feel about them but it needed more photography and it’s one book I wish I had ordered from the local library or borrowed from a friend.

At first the book seemed so lovely and poetical with some wonderful anecdotes. it was detailed and interesting. Then the author described how he went to kill puffins... Nowadays, with plenty of other food stuffs available, he wasn't starving!, killing a protected species is just horrible. Book now in bin!

I enjoyed reading this book which is full of all sorts of information about a remarkable set of islands. It got a bit heavy on archaeology at one point but I skipped that section, and then decided to go back and read it to get the full picture. It's great to read also about the owner's thoughts on how such a trio of islands should be treated and managed. Congratulations to Adam on putting pen to paper to produce such an authorative but readable account. But a measure of any good book is whether it opens up further enquires. This one does. Using the internet and Wikipedia, I led on the read about some of the other remoter Hebridean islands, and using Ancestry.co.uk (I'm into family history), I also researched and read up on the Nicholson family and earlier generations through the 19th century - equally interesting, a touch of scandal here and there, and a totally different aspect of life!!

Fascinating account of Adam Nicholson's inheriting the Shiant Isles and all that entailed. The passages about finding and getting along with a boat builder etc are unsurprisingly reminiscent of those in Annie Proulx's "The Shipping Report", but this is not a criticism.The Shiants and Nova Scotia have a lot in common and the theme of novice client meets master builder is the same. Vivid descriptions giving a strong sense of place, some accounts of the Clearances, a little archaeology and probably as much as you need to know about sheep, rats and gulls, or the perils of taking a small boat out on the Minch, or of dealing with the unwanted bureaucratic attentions of the RSPB.

This book is, as one reviewer accurately puts it, a "scattershot" account of one man and his deep, abiding love for the Shiants (pronounced "Shants"), the three barren islands he has inherited in the Outer Hebrides. The man is Adam Nicolson (Baron Adam Nicolson, mind you, though he never mentions the title here, in keeping with his ambivalence toward "ownership" of them, described quite thoroughly herein). This love and attachment to place and his experiences - sometimes quite harrowing - constitute the theme of the book in the first several chapters and the last. N.B. - The web page here, for some reason, puts the book's length erroneously at 256 pages. My copy and those of other reviewers with different editions who mention the length all seem to have the correct page number: 391. The middle of the book - especially compared with the poetic prose of the first chapters - is a bit weighted down for my tastes with geological, socio-economic and historical minutiae about these islands. It's all quite interesting at first. But, caveat lector, Nicholson does go on a bit. In fact, the middle of the book would serve quite well, I think, as the foundation for a doctoral dissertation. But let me get on with what I loved about the book. Nicolson is a highly reflective, poetic and yet dogged writer who writes with a lovely relish about the desolate, frequently perilous beauty of these islands. He describes - better than I can - his instincts in life and writing beautifully: "One of the reasons I loved the Shiants was that they were away from the world of definition.....I never think things through. I never have. I never envisage the end before I plunge into the beginning. I never clarify the whole. I bank on instinct, allowing my nose to sniff its way into the vacuum, trusting that somewhere or other, soon enough, out of the murk, something is bound to turn up." He goes on to quote some lines from poet Denise Levertov: "There's nothing The dog disdains on his way, Nevertheless he Keeps moving, changing Pace and approach but Not direction - every step an arrival." He also mentions Emily Dickinson and quotes Yeats and Shelley. These are the sections I truly loved. Other reviewers have tended to dwell on the last chapter and the question of whether Nicolson should "own" the islands. The question is very much a non-starter for me. He should. In his passage describing medieval solitaries, Nicolson writes: "All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisors, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding." It is the great wonder of the best parts of the book that the reflective Nicolson describes his own inner per...