Helen Gordon

Excellent and extremely readable book about the history/development of the science of geology, broken down into short chapters, including plenty of conversations with geologists to help explain the science.
Gordon also includes anecdotes, potted histories and personal travelogue to vary the pace and engage the reader. Some of these stories I have read before, but they are well told here.
The three penultimate chapters consider aspects of the Anthropocene, with that discussing the issue of nuclear waste being fascinating, enlightening, and it starts with a poem which encapsulates the issue:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This message is a warning about danger.

The final chapter is a beautiful conclusion blending Gordon’s personal reminiscence with geological travelogue:
There’s a pleasure in knowing the names of things. It’s not about a need to categorise the world, sectioning it into little boxes. And clearly you don’t have to know the names of rocks – or trees or plants or birds – in order to enjoy a landscape. But if you do have this information, something changes about the way you exist in that space. A named landscape thickens. It’s to do with history and context but also, I think, with the quality of attention. To assign something its name, you need to take the time to pick out identifying features. You look for longer. And the more you know, the more things stop being a backdrop – blurred, indistinguishable, hurried over – and become somehow more present in the view, more insistently themselves, the way a familiar face stands out in a crowd.… (meer)

This is a moving first novel that explores the difficult feelings that Alice still experiences seventeen years after the unexplained disappearance of her sister, Jenny. After a relatively successful career as a critic for an art magazine in London, she is made redundant when the magazine closes. At around the same time, her parents ask her to housesit for them while they take an extended world tour. She agrees, but returning home resurrects her thoughts of Jenny, thoughts that are magnified by the arrival from America of her cousin, Emily, who is a similar age to Jenny when she vanished. Alice becomes lethargic in her situation, but finally takes up the offer to write a book about one of her favourite artists, Karin Ericsson. On a visit to interview her, dramatic events occur and fate intervenes in a haunting manner.… (meer)