Favorites – Notes

LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.

EP #7* – Everything in Its Place, Oliver Sacks

April – June, 2023

Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

Favorites
Waterbabies, 1997
Remembering South Kensington, 1993
Travels with Lowell, 1988
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Botanists on Park, 2009
Orangutan

EP #5*: Favorites from the Golden Age of the Am. Essay** 1945-1970

2023

Favorites:
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer
Writing about Jews, Philip Roth
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention, Gore Vidal
One Night’s Dying, Loren Eisley

EP #6*: Favorites from the Contemporary American Essay

April-May 2023

Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, 2005
Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, 2013
Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
John McPhee, Draft #4, 2017
Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003

* Part 6 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

** The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Philip Lopate

w/CS: The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen

January – April 2023

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen, 2018. These are my chapter by chapter notes. Besides having very good reviews and being by a well-regarded author, this book got a (rare) very high rating from Reid Priedhorsky…

Read this with CS.

EP #3*: Favorites from Best American Essays of the 20thC

Thursday, 25 August 2022

My favorites from the Best American Essays of the 20th Century:
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982

And essays which weren’t quite favorites, but which I found instructive:
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970

EP #2*: Favorites from Best Am. Essays of 2020

Friday, 27 August 2022

Favorites:
A Street of Splendid Strangers, Leslie Jamison
Driving as a Metaphor, Rachel Cusk
How to Bartend, Rabih Alameddine

w/CS: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Thomas Halliday- Introduction

Tuesday 15 March 2022

LATER: This is the best science book I have ever read; I have a 20+ page document of notes on both the content and the lyrical writing. I regret that I had not systematically started keeping notes in this blog at the point we were reading this.

This morning CS and I meet to begin our discussion of the book Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record; he appears to be quite young, but has already won a raft of awards for his scientific work as well as one or two awards for his writing. A riffle through the book leaves me with high expectations. I note with approval that it has about fifty pages of notes, all pointing to various scholarly articles and books. The front matter includes an abbreviated chart of geolgical eras (mostly the Phanerozoic eon, presumably indicating the time-span covered in the book); I do like it that the book works backward in time rather than oldest first.

EP #2: Best Am. Essays of 2020 – First look…

Wednesday 9 March 2022

It’s a cold day, in the teens, with a some faint wisps of cirrus clouds in a whitish blue sky. As the temperatures have fallen over the past few days, puddles have solidified, breeding long spear-like ice crystals. There are ice crystals in the sky as well — they make up the Cirrus clouds and distinguish them from most other types of clouds which are made of water droplets. Cirrus clouds occur during fair weather, which this is; they sometimes herald warm fronts, but not this time.

I have just come from my weekly meeting with CT, where we discussed essays. We have finished the Oxford Book of Essays, and embarked on a new book: The Best American Essays, 2020. After the Oxford book, whose most recent essay was authored in 1984, we wanted to get a sense of the state of the art. For this session, we read the Foreward, Introduction, and first three essays of BAE2020.

EP #1*: Ten Favorites from The Oxford Book of Essays**

February 27, 2022

Favorites:
The Haunted Mind, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835
The Acorn-Gatherer, Richard Jefferies, 1884
Cordova, Arthur Symons, 1898
A Clergyman, Sir Max Beerbohm, 1918
The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf, 1925
Insouciance, 1928, D H Lawrence
The Toy Farm, J. B. Priestly, 1927
The Snout, Loren Eisley, 1957
The Crisp at the Crossroads, Reyner Banham, 1970
La Paz, Jan Morris, 1963

Essays: G. K. Chesterton: family & sociability

Thursday 6 July 2021

I also read CK Chesterton’s essay on the family as an institution. I’d dipped into it before, but read it all the way through and now have my own copy of the book to mark up. He has some funny and acute observations:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In large community we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 10-11