• Essays • – Page 3

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

Essays: On first reading G K Chesterton

29 June 2021

Well, it is not my first reading. Long ago, and once or twice since, I’ve read a short story of his in an anthology of fantasy and science fiction. But I had set out to read stories, not Chesterton, and while the story was curious enough to make me remember the author’s name, it did not cause me to seek him out.