On the back cover of Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice, there’s a blurb from a current popular author:
Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know … only Herzog could have written this weird, slender classic. — Popular Author
Imagine the cheek you’d need to have to write something like that of Werner Herzog. “These here Dead Sea Scrolls are unputdownable.” — Gary Lineker.
The books of this popular author are very nice. But fucking hell, it’s a question of scale.
And he’ll never stop. A 2017 Canongate reissue of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain has an introduction by this guy that’s almost as long as Shepherd’s actual work.
He should have just let Nan ‘splain.
Oh yeah! dances