✎Community question: What are your favourite essays?
(I will probably try to read them all)
Hello,
I’m writing something about my love of writing essays for tomorrow’s post, but it got me thinking about my own favourites. The ones that spring immediately to mind are Jenny Diski’s A Feeling for Ice, John Berger’s Some Notes About the Art of Falling, and Annie Dillard’s Bethlehem.
Then is sprial outwards to essayists instead of specific essays; I will read anything by Jon Ronson, Christina Sharpe, Arundhati Roy, Emma Dabiri, Stephen Jay Gould, Kathryn Schulz, Helen Macdonald, Zadie Smith, Jay Griffiths, Andrew O’Hagan, Samantha Irby, David Sedaris, Deborah Levy, Ross Gay, Sarah Krasnostein, Marina Hyde, Sam Knight, Pico Iyer… I could go on. And on. And on.
Which got me wondering - what essays or essayists do you love? I worry that by asking this question I will be setting myself an enormous list, but - oh! - what a list it will be!
(I keep going back to that list above and adding new names, so I’m going to hit publish before this takes over my entire day…)
Yours in anticpation,
Katherine
A couple others mentioned it, but Barbara Kingsolver's essays (start with Small Wonder) will always have my heart. Rebecca Solnit. Terry Tempest Williams. Wendell Berry. Annie Dillard. Margaret Renkyl. Basically anyone writing about the natural world thoughtfully.
Ann Patchett - "How you ride says everything about how you see the world. In the winnebago, we see the world from inside our house. We watch it as it rolls sedately past our living room window. But on the back of Rhonda's bike, leaning from side to side, I am the jutting purple mountains. I am the asphalt and the birds in the sky. I remember everything about the twenty minutes spent in the blow back cloud of Rhonda's hair. People are more that willing to die on motorcycles because for that moment in the Badlands of South Dakota they are truly and deeply alive." - from the story of a happy marriage. unspeakably good.