Tag: reading

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Authors Books

More John McPhee

Yesterday I shared a list of John McPhee paperbacks that are in our home library. Using Google Gemini I had it prepare a list of the books from a photo I had taken of the stack of books.

Today as I was on my morning walk listening to an Economist podcast about de Tocqueville in America, it dawned on me that I should come back to Gemini and ask it for a ranked list of McPhee books that I should consider adding to our home library. Here is the prompt I used:

Now give me a list of his books that I don’t own. Rank the list based on recommendations. Include the same info as before.

Here is that list – useful the next time I’m at a used bookstore!

Recommended John McPhee Books (Not in Your Stack)

This curated list ranks the best books by John McPhee that are missing from your current home library. It prioritizes his most historically significant, critically acclaimed, and widely loved masterpieces.

1. Annals of the Former World

Year Published: 1998

Summary: This monumental, 700-page epic is the culmination of twenty years of research and travel alongside geological experts. It traces the deep geological history of the North American continent along the Interstate 80 corridor. The book is actually a compilation of five smaller works (Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California, and Crossing the Craton), tracking plate tectonics, mountain building, glaciers, and deep time.

How Reviewed: Widely considered McPhee’s magnum opus, it won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Critics universally praised it for taking what is traditionally considered a “dry” science and turning it into a gripping, human, and philosophically profound narrative about the Earth’s violent history.

An Interesting Story: McPhee originally estimated the geology project would take him about one to two years. It ended up consuming two decades of his life. Because geologists make notoriously distracted drivers—constantly swerving across highway lanes to examine exposed rock formations on roadcuts—McPhee had to do most of the driving during their cross-country road trips just to keep them safe.

2. Coming into the Country

Year Published: 1977

Summary: An extraordinary three-part portrait of Alaska during a chaotic, pivotal era in the 1970s. The first part covers a dangerous, pristine wilderness canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range. The second details the political gridlock of trying to establish a new state capital. The third and longest section is an intimate look at the rugged, eccentric, and fiercely independent settlers of the remote gold-rush town of Eagle near the Yukon border.

How Reviewed: A massive bestseller and critical triumph. It is universally regarded as one of the greatest books ever written about Alaska, capturing both the staggering scale of the wilderness and the complex, headstrong psychology of the people who flee to it.

An Interesting Story: While documenting the remote lives of wilderness settlers, McPhee met a man living in a cabin who had survived a brutal sub-zero winter with almost no food. At one point, the man’s entire remaining winter rations consisted of a single, frozen head of cabbage. McPhee’s meticulous fact-checkers at The New Yorker tracked down the source to verify the exact status and size of the cabbage before they would let him publish the story.

3. The Pine Barrens

Year Published: 1968

Summary: An exploration of a sprawling, million-acre wilderness of pitch pines, cedar swamps, and sandy aquifers hidden in the middle of heavily urbanized New Jersey. McPhee describes the unique ecology of the area and profiles the isolated, self-reliant residents—traditionally called “Pineys”—who lived off the land by gathering cranberries, digging bog iron, and hunting.

How Reviewed: A classic of regional literature and early environmental journalism. It was praised for exposing a secret, beautiful world right in the backyard of the busy East Coast, and it is widely credited with helping to spark the political movement that ultimately federally protected the region.

An Interesting Story: At the time McPhee wrote the book, there were major state plans to pave over the Pine Barrens to build a massive, multi-runway international jetport and a brand new city of 250,000 people. McPhee’s beautifully written, highly sympathetic portrait of the area’s quiet wilderness and historic communities turned public opinion so heavily against the developers that the entire project was permanently scrapped.

4. Levels of the Game

Year Published: 1969

Summary: A masterclass in narrative structure. The book is framed entirely around a single semi-final tennis match played at the 1968 US Open at Forest Hills between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. As the play-by-play of the match unfolds stroke-by-stroke, McPhee weaves in the biographies of the two young men, demonstrating how their family backgrounds, races, and political worldviews directly dictate the way they play tennis.

How Reviewed: Frequently cited by sportswriters as one of the greatest sports books ever written. Critics were mesmerized by how McPhee transformed a simple, brief tennis match into a brilliant, microscopic psychological study of two contrasting Americas in the late 1960s.

An Interesting Story: The book’s structure is incredibly tight—there are no chapters or headers; it reads as one continuous, unbroken volley of text from the first serve to the final match point. Because the manuscript was so structurally dependent on the exact sequence of tennis play, McPhee had to build a massive physical storyboard using index cards on his dining room table to track the score of the match alongside his biographical flashbacks.

5. Encounters with the Archdruid

Year Published: 1971

Summary: A brilliant structural experiment in narrative journalism. The book profiles David Brower, the passionately uncompromising executive director of the Sierra Club (whom his adversaries mockingly called “the Archdruid”). McPhee takes Brower on three separate wilderness expeditions, pairing him on each trip with one of his primary ideological enemies: a mineral engineer in the North Cascades, a resort developer on a pristine Georgia barrier island, and a dam-building commissioner in the depths of the Grand Canyon.

How Reviewed: Highly praised for its absolute neutrality. Instead of taking a side, McPhee steps back and allows both sides of the environmental debate to articulate their values in real-time as they hike, raft, and camp together.

An Interesting Story: During the Grand Canyon rafting trip, David Brower and his fierce ideological opponent, Floyd Dominy (the commissioner responsible for constructing major western dams), were forced to share a tiny rubber raft through dangerous, churning whitewater rapids. Dominy, a tough-talking Westerner, was terrified of the water. Brower, despite hating Dominy’s dams, quietly guided the raft safely through the rapids, forging a brief, surreal moment of mutual respect between the two bitter enemies.

6. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

Year Published: 2017

Summary: A masterclass handbook on the art and craft of nonfiction writing. Pulling from his decades of writing for The New Yorker and his legendary writing seminars at Princeton University, McPhee reveals his highly structured, sometimes eccentric methodology for conducting interviews, organizing mountains of research, drawing structural diagrams, and editing drafts.

How Reviewed: Celebrated as an instant classic for writers, students, and journalists. Reviewers loved the book’s warm, humble, and practical advice, combined with hilarious behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the editing world.

An Interesting Story: McPhee reveals that during his early career, he suffered from such severe writer’s block that he would literally tie himself to his office chair with a bathrobe sash to force himself to stay at his desk and type. He also details his “search-and-replace” editing method: on his fourth draft, he reads his work with a dictionary, finding any word that feels slightly lazy or uninspired, circling it, and listing dozens of synonyms beneath it until he finds the perfect match.

Categories
Writing

Still Learning

I never thought about rhythm in my writing. Not once.

A lifetime of writing. More essays than I can count. One book. And the sonic quality of my sentences — the way they moved, or failed to move, through a reader’s mind — simply wasn’t something I considered. I was too busy trying to say something true. I thought that was enough.

What changed was reading differently. Not for pleasure anymore, or not only for pleasure. David Perell conducts long interviews with writers about how they actually work — not what they believe about writing, but what they do, physically, at the desk, in the dark, before anyone sees it. He asks the same structural questions of very different writers and the patterns emerge slowly, the way patterns always emerge: first you see it once and think nothing of it, then you see it again, then you can’t stop seeing it. Rhythm came up constantly. Always in different language. Pacing. Breath. Music. Momentum. Always pointing at the same thing.

Then I found this from Susan Orlean:

My new preoccupation was on the sonic quality of my writing — the rhythm and tone of the sentences. I began reading all my work out loud, listening for places that lagged and dragged, that didn’t sparkle. I knew it was unlikely that anyone else was reading my stories out loud, but I was convinced that you do “hear” writing in your head as you read, and this pushes you (or stalls you) through the piece. I wanted the music — that is, this subconscious tonal effect — to match the subject.

I stopped. Read it again.

Because she was describing something real — something I had been doing wrong for twenty-five years without knowing it was wrong. You don’t know what you can’t hear. That’s the whole problem. The silence where the knowledge should be is itself silent.

I don’t read my work out loud. There’s something strange about it, something that breaks the spell — you stop being a writer and become an actor, hearing your own sentences hanging in the air, too exposed. But I do read and read again, more carefully now, looking for the wobble. Orlean’s point holds regardless of method: you hear writing in your head as you read it, and that hearing either carries you forward or it doesn’t. The ear that matters is the one inside.

George Saunders has a practice he describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: he reads from the beginning of a piece over and over, and the moment something feels off — a word, a rhythm, a single syllable landing wrong — he stops and fixes it before moving forward. Never skips the trouble spot. Never tells himself he’ll come back. His opening pages accumulate dozens of passes before he ever reaches the end. What he’s really doing, underneath the technique, is training himself to feel the exact microsecond when a reader’s attention would start to drift. To catch the loss before it happens.

That’s not craft instruction. That’s building a new sensitivity where there wasn’t one before.

John McPhee works from the other direction entirely. His famous boxes — index cards, sorted into piles, piles arranged into sequences, nothing drafted until the structure is known — are about architecture before a single word is written. He’s deciding which rooms exist, and in what order, before he furnishes any of them. Where Saunders builds outward from one true sentence, McPhee builds downward from a blueprint.

But they’re asking the same question. McPhee: is this section in the right place? Saunders: is this word in the right place? Both listening for the moment the piece loses its hold on the reader. Both doing triage on something most writers never even examine.

What I’m still learning — slowly, and late — is that rhythm isn’t decoration. It isn’t the thing you tend to after the real work is done. It’s structural. A sentence moving at the wrong speed for what it’s carrying fails the thought itself, not just the ear.

There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. If rhythm is the thing that’s hardest to hear in your own work — if the ear takes years to develop — then maybe the most useful writing tool isn’t a grammar checker. Those are solved. What isn’t solved is the rhythm problem. An editor who listens for the wobble, explains what’s failing and why, and works through the fix with you rather than just patching it. Not a red pen. A teacher.

I’ve been experimenting with exactly that. An AI editor I call Clark. His job isn’t correctness. It’s the sonic quality of prose — the rhythm — the same thing Orlean was describing, the same sensitivity Saunders spent years training. Clark finds what’s working as hard as what isn’t. And when something fails, he explains what the reader’s inner ear is hitting and why. Helpful.

I didn’t know much about rhythm in writing when I was fifty. Didn’t know it at sixty.

I’m not entirely sure I know it now. But I know it more than I did, which might be the only kind of knowing that’s real.

A lifetime of writing. Still learning how to listen.

Categories
Reading Writing

The Starting Five I Keep

On November 25, 1963, every journalist in America was at Arlington Cemetery covering the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Jimmy Breslin went to find the grave digger.

His name was Clifton Pollard. He was paid $3.01 an hour. He had been called in on his day off because the foreman thought he was the best they had, and the foreman was right about that. Breslin spent the morning with him while the ceremony unfolded a few hundred yards away — the dignitaries, the riderless horse, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a widow. Pollard ate a ham sandwich and kept working.

The piece Breslin filed that afternoon is still taught in journalism schools sixty years later. Not because it covered the funeral better than anyone else. Because it didn’t cover the funeral at all. It found the true subject by ignoring the announced one.

That instinct — turn away from the obvious, walk toward the unglamorous specific, trust that the universal is hiding there — is the one idea I’ve returned to more than any other. It shows up in two very different writers who occupy, in my mind, the same position on the roster.

Breslin got there through deadline fury and a saloon-bred instinct for where the real story was breathing. He didn’t theorize about it. He just did it, on a deadline, in a city that rewarded the loud and the fast. John McPhee got to the same place by an entirely different route: patience, structure, and a willingness to spend six months learning how canoes are made or what happens to a piece of shad on its way up the Delaware River. Breslin worked like a man catching a cab. McPhee worked like a man building a cathedral.

But the underlying claim is identical. If you stay with a specific, unglamorous subject long enough — if you resist the pull toward the obvious center — it will eventually yield something that couldn’t have been reached directly. Pollard and his shovel. The orange grower and his grove. The nuclear physicist who also happens to be a canoe builder. The method is the same. Look where no one else is looking. Wait longer than feels reasonable. Write what you find.

This is one player, really. Just wearing two different jerseys.

The second seat belongs to Wright Thompson — not a single book but a stance. The premise that the most revealing place in any story isn’t the event itself but the moment before and after it, when the subject is alone with something they haven’t yet put into words. Every piece in this tradition is quietly asking: what is this person carrying that they can’t say out loud? It’s a question that turns out to apply well beyond sportswriting. It applies to most things worth writing about.

The third is whatever the Apple design era taught about constraint and clarity. Not nostalgia — something more durable. The idea that removing something can be an act of confidence. That the most useful things often appear to be doing less than they are. This one surfaces constantly in writing, in argument, in the editing pass where you decide what the piece actually needs versus what it accumulated along the way. Features are easy to add. Knowing what to cut requires a different kind of certainty.

The fourth is the philosophy embedded in spaced repetition — not the algorithm but the claim underneath it. That knowledge you don’t revisit isn’t really yours. That understanding decays on a predictable schedule whether you acknowledge it or not. The honest response isn’t anxiety about this; it’s the habit of return. Going back to the same passage, the same idea, the same question on a different day, and finding it has changed — or finding that you have.

The fifth seat shifts. That’s probably the right design. Four constants and one that evolves is roughly the correct ratio for a starting lineup that has to play in different eras. Right now that seat belongs to the question of what AI does to a practiced human sensibility — whether it erodes it by substitution or clarifies it by contrast. Earlier it was held by a certain kind of systems thinking. Before that, something else. The player who earns that spot is always the one asking the question the current moment most needs answered.

The coach who wins five championships doesn’t do it with the same roster. But he does it with the same philosophy. The starting five aren’t the players who happened to be good once. They’re the ones who keep earning their minutes regardless of what the season throws at you.

Breslin knew where to find Clifton Pollard because he’d been looking in that direction his whole career. The skill wasn’t the story. The skill was knowing that the story was never where everyone else was standing.

That’s the one I keep coming back to.

Categories
Haiku Living Reading

The Presence We Keep Deferring

I have so many unread articles saved to Instapaper that I’ve stopped checking the count. Each one felt, in the moment of saving it, like something I needed. A long piece on urban planning, a profile of someone interesting, a reported essay I fully intended to sit with.

The app is beautifully designed for exactly this — the frictionless capture, the clean reading interface waiting patiently on the other side.

What it can’t do is manufacture the attention I didn’t have when I saved it and still don’t have now. The articles aren’t the problem. The premise is: that presence is something you can bank.

There’s a haiku I keep returning to, from Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines. It’s by a poet named Fumiko Harada:

Morning chill
I savor this moment —
one meeting one lifetime

Eleven words. No verb in the third line, which makes it feel less like a thought and more like a verdict.

The Japanese concept underneath it is ichi-go ichi-e — loosely, “one time, one meeting.” It’s a Zen idea with origins in the tea ceremony, the understanding that each gathering is singular and therefore irreversible. You cannot archive it. You cannot search for it later. When it ends, it doesn’t go anywhere you can retrieve.

This is what the Instapaper queue is, at scale: an archive of moments I decided to experience later. The article about urban planning was written by someone who spent months reporting it, on a day when some editor thought it was ready, and landed in my feed on a morning when something about the headline caught me. That constellation doesn’t reassemble. Later is a different article.

The tools I use every day are getting astonishing. There are systems that can summarize, translate, recall, explain, anticipate. I use them. I find them genuinely useful.

But there’s a habit of mind they reward — a kind of perpetual deferral of full attention — that I haven’t fully reckoned with. The promise, always, is that you can engage more completely later, once the summary is ready, once the transcript exists, once the notes have been taken. Presence becomes a productivity tax you pay while waiting for a deliverable.

Harada’s haiku doesn’t moralize. The speaker isn’t lecturing herself into awareness. She’s just cold, and awake, and choosing to notice. I savor this moment. The word “savor” does a lot of work. It implies effort. You savor things that could be missed.

The pivot in the third line is what stays with me. One meeting one lifetime. Not “this meeting will last a lifetime” — that would be sentiment. It’s more like a mathematical statement: the cardinality of this encounter is one. There is exactly one of them. This morning, this particular chill, whatever conversation or solitude is happening inside it — that set has one element. By tomorrow it has zero. No amount of documentation changes that arithmetic.

I’m working on believing that.

Categories
Books

The Observer Observed

I first encountered Susan Orlean not in person, but in the ashes. Specifically, the ashes of the Los Angeles Central Library. Reading The Library Book was a masterclass in how to weave a forensic investigation with a love letter to a public institution. It was reportage, but it possessed a beating heart. She has spent decades at The New Yorker perfecting the art of the “curious observer”—the person standing just to the side of the frame, noticing the detail everyone else missed.

That is why picking up Joyride felt different.

In a memoir, the observer must finally step in front of the lens. The transition from The Library Book—which is about the preservation of collective memory—to Joyride—which is about the fluidity of personal memory—is a fascinating shift. When a journalist writes a memoir, there is often a tension. They are used to looking outward, hunting for the story in orchids or arsonists. Turning that gaze inward requires a different kind of bravery.

“A commute has a destination; a joyride has only a duration.”

The title itself suggests a specific philosophy of living. It implies that the movement itself is the point. As I read, I found myself thinking about the difference between navigating a life and simply driving through it. Orlean captures that distinct feeling of the wind in your hair, the blur of the scenery, and the realization that the “plot” of our lives is often just the things that happen while we are busy steering.

We read writers like Orlean not just for what they saw, but for how they saw it. In Joyride, she reminds us that the most interesting routes are rarely the most direct ones. A great read!

Categories
Creativity Inspiration Living Quotations

The Conveyer Belt of Life

Lovely highlight this morning from Rick Rubin: “You might imagine that the outside world is a conveyor belt with a stream of small packages on it, always going by. The first step is to notice the conveyor belt is there. And then, any time you want, you can pick up one of those packages, unwrap it, and see what’s inside.” (Rick Rubin, The Creative Act)

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Living Reading

Human vs Machine: The Art of Rereading

Ann Patchett’s observation about the transformative nature of rereading strikes at the heart of what makes literature an endlessly renewable resource.

Like walking through a familiar neighborhood at different times of day or in different seasons, returning to a book seems to reveal new shadows, fresh angles, and unexpected details that were there all along, waiting for us to discover them.

The words on the page haven’t changed, but we bring new perspectives shaped by our own encounters as we live each day. Each major life transition – education, career shifts, parenthood, loss – adds another lens through which we view the world. These experiences accumulate and enrich our capacity to recognize nuance and complexity in what we read. Our changing interpretations become a kind of dialogue between our past and present selves.

This distinctly human rereading experience stands in stark contrast to AI models that process the same text identically each time, unchanged by the passage of time or accumulation of experience. While AI can analyze text with impressive sophistication, it cannot bring the lived experience that makes each human rereading unique and meaningful.

Our ability to find new meaning in old pages is a testament to our capacity for growth, emotional development, and the continuous evolution of our consciousness. Humans FTW!