I’m still muddling my way through Zinsser’s masterpiece, On Writing Well, and it continues to be the wonderful book it has been since the beginning.
To it I owe, just by virtue of its examples, the discovery of incredible authors like Joan Didion and Joseph Mitchell.
And now another – Jonathan Raba – who not only writes stunningly but writes about some of what I love: travel in and ponderings of the American West (is it time to read Michener’s Centennial again?). I checked out Raba’s Bad Land: An American Romance (about the settlement of the Dakotas and Montana) and went right to work, and it didn’t take more than a page or two to come across such descriptive gems as this:
“It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.”
Or this:
“Here, where a crew of surly heifers blocked the road beside the creek, was Garber country. A barred lazy A and upright T were burned into the hide of each animal—the family brand of the Garbers (‘Gene-Fernande-Warren-Bernie’) whose grand ranch entrance I had passed eight or nine miles back. I honked, and was met by a unanimous stare of sorrowing resentment, as if I was trying to barge my way through an important cow funeral.”
As usual, I rush to tell you all about something like this I’ve discovered. If you’ve ever found it useful – if you’ve ever said to yourself, “well that’s something new that I might check out for myself,” let me know. And if you know something that compares favorably with Didion, Mitchell, and now Raban, I sure would like to know that too. I’ve never paid much mind to it before, but I’m finding more and more those authors that take me to a completely new level and it’s kind of fun.