Book: All The Light We Cannot See

A pleasure of long distant travel is the time to dedicate to reading. A good novel while sitting in the middle seats of long flight makes the experience a bit more tolerable. I very much enjoyed the novel All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. 

There was a period when I was always in the midst of reading a novel. That reading pattern has fallen off because unless a novel really grabs my mind I will give it up. This book easily broke through that stoppage. After the initial start on the plane, I found myself picking it up to read to the finish at every small opportunity.

The title is in reference to the electromagnetic spectrum. The story takes place in the run up and though WWII.

There was a line in the book that was used twice that in a way reminded me of my own science experience: "A scientist's work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time".

Snow and Spire: Just Right for the Season

A bit of an opinion and a strong one at that: There is no better "coffee table" book featuring the Washington State Landscape than Snow and Spire. Washington State has been blessed with some remarkable photographers that have been inspired by our landscapes and have successfully passed that inspiration on to others.  

The images in Snow and Spire surpass words. There is one image in the book of a place I had once been. I recognized the location immediately. I had gone there alone. On that trip I did not see another human being for a week. At the time I could not believe there was such a landscape. In my memory the sites I saw fall into the border between reality and dreams. It was a foolish dangerous trip. Get the book - it is a much better way:
https://wolverinepublishing.com/snow-and-spire.

I came across this video of John's ventures. Besides the wonder of the images, John has been making some significant contributions to understanding the glaciers in the North Cascades.
 

Snow and Spire - The Aerial Photography of John Scurlock from Chris Newley on Vimeo.

 

Egan Chasing Shadows

 

I have accumulated some books on the Washington State Landscape that deserve a write up hence wallula-gap and geology-of-san-juan-islands.

 

Timothy Egan took on Edward Curtis. Curtis moved to Washington State and started a photography business in Seattle. His fame is the photographs he took of First Nations peoples. Curtis' genius was recognizing that we would soon loose multiple cultures unless he captured those cultures before they were gone. He was not the only one to recognize this need, but he may have done more than anyone else capturing the shadows of the cultures that once inhabited our landscapes before they were gone.

 

Egan is one of our own and his perspective is appreciated. And the book manages to capture the capturer of shadows and another time so easily forgotten of the early days of the second nation in the Pacific Northwest and what is now Washington State. I particularly liked learning more about Asahel Curtis, Edward Curtis' brother as I have used his photographs in my own work. A. Curtis captured different images - numerous of geologic and historic importance and some that captured the shaping of our current landscapes.

 

I know that I have been frustrated at the loss of understanding of what once was the Pacific Northwest, but Curtis captured at least a part of that in his images and Egan gives this important work an added perspective. 

Geology of the San Juan Islands

 

http://washingtonlandscape.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-to-get-geolgy-of-san-juan-islands.html

Ned Brown has provided geologists and anyone else interested in the geology of northwest Washington State an up to date book on the geology of the San Juan Islands (and non San Juan Islands Fidalgo Island). And if your interested in deciphering accretion tectonics anywhere, this book should be in your library. Ned has put together a clear compilation of the San Juan Island bedrock geology as it is currently understood. He also provides a good overview of how geologists extract stories out of rocks from microscopic study of minerals to zapping zircons with lasers. The book is full of excellent graphics and ends with some guidance to good outcrop sites.

I do a fair bit of geology work in the San Juans. For many years I have been heavily relying on 1975 maps of the San Juan Islands produced by Joe Vance and John Whetten published in Geology and Water Resources of the San Juan Islands (Russel, editor, 1975). My copy of that work is very dog eared.

I anticipate that my copy of Ned's book will become dog eared as well. The book already answered a question I had about an outcrop at the Lopez Island ferry landing and another outcrop at the north end of Blakely.