{"id":8883,"date":"2019-09-06T18:21:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T17:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=8883"},"modified":"2019-09-06T18:21:31","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T17:21:31","slug":"waterland-by-graham-swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/waterland-by-graham-swift\/","title":{"rendered":"Waterland by Graham Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Earlier this year, I was cycling through <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rspb.org.uk\/reserves-and-events\/reserves-a-z\/fen-drayton-lakes\/\">Fen Drayton<\/a>, the Cambridgeshire nature reserve, with a friend, and he mentioned reading <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/2HPLdEV\"><em>Waterland<\/em><\/a> some years earlier. I&#8217;d always known of the book but had never read it. But now I was beginning to become interested in this strange landscape, that is as man-made as any other landscape. So while I was there, I picked up a copy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Waterland<\/em> is a fabulous book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The book tells the story of a semi-fictionalised fenland village and town, through a series of flashbacks that slowly reveal long hidden stories of what truly happened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within the fiction is a lot of fact, and it&#8217;s a great foundation for learning about how the fens were drained and turned into some of the most valuable arable land in the country &#8211; the ground being so fertile. The historical asides can be lengthy, but they&#8217;re never anything less than fascinating. I was swept away into a world that I knew so little about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was mesmerised by the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year, I was cycling through Fen Drayton, the Cambridgeshire nature reserve, with a friend, and he mentioned reading Waterland some years earlier. I&#8217;d always known of the book but had never read it. But now I was beginning to become interested in this strange landscape, that is as man-made as any other landscape. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[108],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8883"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8883"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8903,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8883\/revisions\/8903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}