Category Archives: Books
Left of the blue wall
One thing I have learned from reading authors like Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez over the last year is the power of language to shape our world view. Both authors believe that the words we use directly affect the way we see the world, and that the current evolution of our language, away from specialized…
To be taught, if fortunate
Science fiction and fantasy author Becky Chambers gave a short talk at JPL last week. We were all expecting a fun conversation, probably accompanied by a powerpoint presentation, about what it’s like to be a science fiction writer. Instead she gave us so much more. Chambers’s talk was essentially a love letter letter to space…
At long last, here he was
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is perhaps the perfect pandemic book. I read it in the early months and finally bought a copy for my own shelves recently. The book follows the life of Count Alexander Rostov through 30 years under house arrest in the ornate Metropol Hotel in Moscow. Despite the tight…
A monkish existence
In addition to others featured here, Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite authors. For most of his life he was known as a respected neurologist and passionate storyteller who took a wholistic view of his patients, not seeing them as diseases that need to be titrated away, but instead as complex individuals. Although Sacks…
Wisdom Sits in Places
In school I recall being taught that the land is “sacred” to indigenous cultures in a similar way that a church or mosque may be considered sacred by adherents of that religion. Although there may be some truth to that statement I’ve always found the comparison to be severely lacking in nuance. Wisdom Sits in…
A tidepool has been called a world under a rock
John Steinbeck became a favorite of mine after I read East of Eden, so it’s about time I finally got around to reading The Log of the Sea of Cortez. The non-fiction tale of exploration and adventure chronicles a 6 week journey that Steinbeck made with his good friend and marine biologist, Ed Ricketts around…
Horizon
The more I read of Barry Lopez the more I come to appreciate his worldview and how it overlaps with the way I would like to be able to relate to landscape and place. He had a long career traveling, writing, and generally investigating the interactions between culture, society, landscape and nature. Lopez (paraphrasing a…
Time Machine
I am not a geologist by any stretch of the imagination, yet I do help operate a mobile geology lab on Mars and occasionally get asked about why we should explore Mars in the first place. I usually mumble something about geology and why rocks are important and how water was probably there once and…
Time enough
Time is a fickle thing. In the western tradition we tend to describe it as something we continuously move through with a constant speed and direction, but I’ve come across some other interesting descriptions lately that I think are worth considering. In PrairyErth: A Deep Map author William Least Heat-Moon notes that in western philosophy…