Reading Geography

"beyond the rigidity of a GCSE exam syllabus, geography is perhaps more than anything else about reading"

The University of Cambridge's Geographical Society (CUGS) has a magazine, and there's a great article in the latest Compass by Chloe Rixon which explores her thoughts on the importance of reading as a geographer....

Worth browsing the issues (on ISSUU) for other articles.

As Chloe says in her piece, reflecting on her interview when she mentioned Michael Palin as somebody she'd read...

What I didn’t realise then, and I think I’m only really starting to realise now, is that, disbanding the academic corset of particular intellectual rigour or qualification, most (every?) writer is in their own respect a geographer. They’re writing about the earth: translating it, interpreting it, constructing it. By extension and implication, therefore, reading too is geographical. Palin may not be a ‘serious’ geographer (whatever that is), nor may be Austen or Plato, but, like Foucault and Said, he is fundamentally writing about the earth (be it through the lens of travel-writing) and hence, reading his work is a geographical exercise.

As Robert MacFarlane has said, "every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write"

So keep reading...