Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised when a book doesn't give me what I thought I was getting into, so I pressed on.

I know this is Goodreads not Tripadvisor but value for money was one reason I was wobbling between 3 and 4 stars. Es gibt immer mehr Licht, die die Nacht zwar nicht zum Tag macht, aber trotzdem wird es zum Beispiel immer schwieriger, nachts die Sterne zu sehen. So erzählt er nicht nur die Geschichte seiner Wanderung, sondern auch die anderer Menschen, die er bewundert. He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow . Another highlight was the final two chapters, which reveal that Charles Dickens’s frequent night walks were an essential aspect of his writing method (in an apparently similar way to Haruki Murakami’s use of long-distance running to sustain his writing).And if he thinks people might think he's a criminal, I'd imagine that would be even more likely if he wasn't white. Rather than a history shown through the lens of literature, he makes this a literary critique that simply uses history as a loose excuse to show off his own knowledge. Es ist ein kleines, aber sehr feines Buch, bei dem es um viel mehr geht als nur das Unterwegssein in der Nacht. The author himself mentions not wanting to become too accustomed to the night lest it loses its power (the "explorer's wonder"). Which is about as relevant to nightwalking as including a definition of pulling a moonie, being over the moon etc etc.

This is a nature memoir I picked up on sale this year about nightwalking and what it's like depending on the season, including what plants and animals are out and about at this time. I mean, it adds poems, links, lists and a totally unnecessary glossary just to pad the text out to 100 pages! Although for citizens living away from the main thoroughfares the nights remained “nasty, brutish, and all too long”, as Beaumont neatly observes, for others street lighting completely transformed London. A warning note - don't be put off by Will Self's foreword which, as he so often does, equates cleverness and insight with unreadability.Some sleepless nights I take the dog out, into the 3am city stillness and hope to see an old spirit avoiding eye contact under his hat coming the other way. I have seen a moon-bow, an arch of white light in the heavens; I have watched hares box in a star-charmed, wave-earthed plough field; I have learned our human insignificance by gazing up at the cosmic sprawl of the Milky Way. A pretty sequence of vignettes describing nighttime walks taken in the author's local countryside and the wildlife encountered thereupon. In conclusion, Nightwalking is an excellent addition to the burgeoning field of psychogeography as well as the established domains of literary criticism and historical narrative. And my beliefs are very different to the author’s - so I’d have to disagree on some points but that hasn’t taken away the fact I’ve enjoyed this book!