Book Fever

I've been on a bit of a reading streak recently, mostly nonfiction. First, I explored Mary Roach's oeuvre, which is entertaining and informative and a little bit bizarre. All of which makes for an excellent read.

Then I decided to become re-enamored of Susan Orlean. I'd been a fan of her travel writing (My Kind of Place) and recently picked up The Orchid Thief at my local Goodwill.

It's no secret that the woman *can write*. The Orchid Thief is positively riddled with brilliant passages just dropped in like throwaways:

The Fakahatchee has a particular strange and exceptional beauty. The grass prairies in sunlight look like yards of raw silk. The tall, straight palm trunks and the tall, straight cypress trunks shoot up out of the flat land like geysers. It is beautiful the way a Persian carpet is beautiful — thick, intricate, lush, almost monotonous in its richness.

You could teach an entire class on writing by dissecting that paragraph: the lulling images of flat prairies, smooth silk, and the repeated mantra of "tall, straight" followed by the violent action of geysers shooting up; the spare but illuminating descriptions — almost photographic in their detail and yet edited down to their absolute essence. Now imagine an entire 282 pages of this dense, lush poetry which Orlean manages to make compellingly readable via flashes of wit and dark humor and of course the sheer pleasure of reading sentences like:

I had vowed that I would acquire not even a single orchid on any of my trips down here, but I thought I might die if I couldn't have this one. The background of the petals was the beigey yellow of a legal pad, and over the yellow background was a spray of hot-pink pinpoint dots, and the flower was attached to the plant by a stem that was twisted like a stick of licorice.

Absolutely irresistible.