Sightlines (Vintage original) Book

"I can't imagine not being able to pick up a book whenever I want to", writes Melvyn Bragg. It's a nice twist that this traditional book is devised to ensure that Bragg, and anyone else, will continue to be able to do so, albeit in a different medium. Sightlines is designed to raise funds "to bring the Royal National Institute for the Blind's Talking Books into the digital age", and use digitisation to preserve this important collection for posterity. Editors PD James and Harriet Harvey Wood have brought together some 50 writers, contributing without fee, to offer their thoughts on sight and blindness, in the majority of cases in previously unpublished pieces--short stories, poetry and essays. And the cavalcade is pretty dazzling: Doris Lessing, Craig Raine, Joanna Trollope, Fay Weldon, John Fowles, Louis de Bernières, Antonia Fraser, AS Byatt, Rose Tremain, David Lodge and so forth. While it seems invidious to single out particular authors, Douglas Dunn's meditation on sight and love is particularly thoughtful; while DJ Enright's apparently autobiographical notes on cataract and Glaucoma--set against a Milton sonnet--are touching. Susan Wicks ends the collection by starkly setting out what she "shall" and "shall not" do "when [she's] blind". But even her negatively "shall not" list transmutes positively into a different notion of "shall": "I shall write sun and shadow by the sweat on me, hills by my heartbeats, the angle at my ankles, write this other landscape by smell..." It is a fitting conclusion to a collection that seeks to write another landscape--by sound. --Alan StewartRead More