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One of the things I love about reading a good work of nonfiction is that it’s like you’ve dispatched your own explorer into the world, tasked to return with the most interesting things they can find.
Sometimes authors explore ideas, sometimes it might be the past (as in a work of history), or perhaps an interesting person (biography) or scandalous event (true crime). Whatever the subject or approach, the pleasure in reading comes with a kind of joining of consciousnesses, where suddenly you’re experiencing the world through another person’s mind. This joining can feel almost mystical and given that none of us has the time to explore everything that might be of interest, it’s wonderful that at any given moment there’s countless others out there, unearthing hidden treasures for the rest of us.
One of my absolute personal favorite explorers is John McPhee, and his most recent book, “Tabula Rasa,” allows the reader a unique insight into the writer.
At 92 years old and a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963, McPhee’s explorations have literally been all over the map. Sometimes he is bringing interesting people to us, such as in his first book, “A Sense of Where You Are,” about a young Bill Bradley when he was a college basketball star and Rhodes scholar, not yet an NBA Hall of Famer and U.S. Senator.
McPhee is also a wonderful chronicler of the natural world as in his book “Oranges,” which is about ... well … oranges, or his Pulitzer-winning “Annals of the Former World,” which explores our landscape through the lens of geography. “Uncommon Carriers” turns the seemingly boring — how freight moves from one place to another — into something unbelievably fascinating, revealing a huge aspect of our lives that would have otherwise remained hidden away.
“Tabula Rasa” is a book of fragments, bits and pieces of stories that McPhee never managed to write, some of them planned projects that didn’t gel, with others moments of happenstance of subjects worthy of additional exploration. Some entries are short vignettes, such as a conversation he once had with Peter Benchley (author of “Jaws”) about whether or not McPhee would quit writing if he’d “made so much money he’d never write again.” McPhee couldn’t imagine such a scenario for himself, so he could not consider the proposition, but in the piece he observes that Benchley continued to write long after he’d made his fortune on the shark book.
Other pieces are somewhat longer, reminiscences of events in his own career, such as the origin story for his book on oranges, wondering what was up with the changing hue of the fresh squeezed juice at the Penn Station counter where he had his daily glass.
What all of the fragments reveal is a life dedicated to witnessing and considering the world around him. This is the work of every writer, every good writer, anyway, but McPhee is uncommonly perceptive about his own orientations and process. His 2017 book “Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process” breaks down how a whole piece would come together from the fragments of his research and observations.
“Tabula Rasa” allows for a deeper look into the raw material and reveals that for all the apparent genius in McPhee’s final products, there is a much more mundane yet ultimately fascinating reality to the process.
Perhaps strangely, “Tabula Rasa” both demystifies what it means to write about the world and deepens one’s pleasure as to the many mysteries inherent to writing.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “White Noise” by Don DeLillo
2. “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein
3. “Lapvona” by Ottessa Moshfegh
4. “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman
5. “The Girls” by Emma Cline
— Mina P., Barcelona, Spain
Mina needs something with some good psychological intensity. For me, that conjures Dana Spiotta and her most recent novel, “Wayward.”
1. “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray
2. “Victory City” by Salman Rushdie
3. “Foe” by J.M. Coetzee
4. “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes
5. “The Sea” by John Banville
— Ben T., San Francisco
What is it like to read a murder mystery where the point of the book is not to reveal the whodunit? “Being Dead” by Jim Crace answers that question and I think it’s a good fit for Ben.
1. “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” by Kate Beaton
2. “Swing Time” by Zadie Smith
3. “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt
4. “The Little Friend” by Donna Tartt
5. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
— Leah B., Chicago
Under the radar, Rufi Thorpe has produced some funny and wise novels, one of which is “Dear Fang, With Love,” my recommendation for Leah.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com