Was tricked by the fact it’s a normal looking book of normal book proportions with all the normal blurbs and stuff, into thinking I could read it like a normal book, end to end. So I did that, but it was arduous. It’s much more like a guidebook: I think the ideal, perhaps intended way to read this would be to pick it up the night before your daytrip to a cathedral city, check if said city’s cathedral is in here, and if so, read only that chapter for the fun facts. As it is, reading end to end feels boring and repetitive, and there were whole chapters I couldn’t get my eyes to focus for.
I think the two options which would make this work as a book experience would be 1) presenting a more intensely researched, narrative history of each cathedral, or 2) scrapping the cathedral-by-cathedral approach and organising this by theme: rituals, craft, conflict, etc. But my sense is that neither of those are even vaguely the kind of work Somerville does: he writes personal tours for old people (realising this was kind of a relief in accounting for the mildly conservative energy of some of this, the fact it’s a book about cathedrals not withstanding). I’m young, and selfish, I guess, so that doesn’t really do it for me. Pillars of Earth it is, then, to scratch my cathedral itch?
Also, I thought this was maddeningly rude to Inverness Cathedral lol? Don’t make it a specific chapter if you’re not going to honestly engage with the place.