I own every book McPhee published and have read each one at least twice. He is, without question, the finest writer of non-fiction I know. Annals, as you may know, was originally published as 4 separate volumes, each covering a particular US region. Assembling California is my absolute favorite McPhee work. I have a layman’s interest in geology and plate tectonics that I developed specifically because of this book.
I'm currently reading Assembling California (California resident, so I've seen all the things he discusses in the book, and wondered, like why is Half Dome so big and grey??). Like you I am rapidly developing a layman's interest in plate tectonics.
In every chapter there is a passage like this:
If you could pull up an acre of abyssal plain anywhere in the world -- lift into view a complete column of the ocean floor, from the accumulated sediments at the top to mantle rock at the base -- you would find the sheeted dikes about halfway down. In contrast to the rock columns you find all over the continents -- giddy with time gaps among lithologies of miscellaneous origin and age -- this totem assemblage from the oceans tells a generally consistent story. At its low end is peridotite, the rock of the mantle, tectonically altered in several ways on departure from the spreading center. Above the mantle rock lie the cooled remains of the great magma chamber that released flowing red rock into the spreading center. The chamber, in cooling, tends to form strata, as developing crystals settle within it like snow -- olivine, plagioclase, pyroxene snow -- but above these cumulate bands it becomes essentially a massive gabbro shading upward into plagiogranite as the magmatic juices chemically differentiate themselves in ways that relate to temperature. Just above the granites are the sheeted dikes of diabase, which keep filling the rift between the diverging plates. Above the sheeted dikes, where the fluid rock actually entered the sea, the suddenly chilled extrusions are piled high, like logs outside a sawmill. Because these extrusions have convex ends that bulge smoothly and resemble pillows, they are known in geology as pillow lavas. Above the pillows are the various sediments that have drifted downward through the deep sea -- umbers, ochres, cherts, chalk. Unlike the rest of the crust-and-mantle package, the sediments may hint at the surrounding world.
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This guy basically writes in a way that transforms the book I am holding in front of my face, physically into a rock. Like some kind of magic trick. He clearly had so much fun writing this, it's amazing and very fun... if rocks tickle you even a little bit this book is worth reading.
