John McPhee

Not only am I posting about reading a book of excerpts from other books (what do you all think about this? is it acceptable?), but I haven't even read the whole thing. I've read all the excerpts from Coming into the Country (about Alaska) in The Second John McPhee Reader. It does make me want to read Coming into the Country. It's on my list now. Although I confess I checked Basin and Range out of the library back in Oregon and never made it very far, I am convinced still more now that McPhee is a fabulous writer.

In the spirit of excerpts, since even the excerptable stories that make it into the reader can't fit here, I offer my own favorite little quotes from the part about Anchorage:

Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque.

Books were selling in Anchorage, once when I was there, for forty-seven cents a pound.

And McPhee's storytelling is far more delightful than his little one-liners. I don't even want to study how he does what he does, for example, in his story (from Table of Contents) about meeting a game warden with the same name as him. It's magic. It has zany postmodern moments, shifts of time and viewpoint without transition, nested stories (eminently excerptable, I suppose). His best gift is just pure storytelling, survival stories good enough to make you cry with joy.