What are your favorite essays?

Cafe Society
21

Dammit. Thudlow beat me to it. I love Chesterton.

I don’t know if it counts as an essay, but Annie Dillard’s An Expedition to the Pole is also great.

22

My favorite humorous essay is Fran Lebowitz’s Tips For Teens.

My favorite essayist is John McPhee. I highly recommend The John McPhee Reader, even though it’s 30 years old now. His Looking For A Ship is one of my very favorite books. Uncommon Carriers (his latest, 2006) is also very good. But I can’t think of a single specific essay I love; I just really like them all.

23

I’m also a big McPhee fan, having discovered him as an undergrad back in the early 80s. There is a second John McPhee reader, which contains some of his later essays; IIRC it was published 10 or so years ago. I’ve managed to read all of his works over the last 25 or so years; his works have impressive breadth & depth.

24

Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident Volume 2, Appendix F- Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle by R. P. Feynman

Last line:

The Bad Astronomy Blog - much good stuff there.

25

Sir Franics Bacon - Of Death

26

Gore Vidal’s “The National Security State” and “Cue the Green God, Ted” are two of my favorites. In the past decade the death of his longtime partner, health problems, and a seeming general self-pity over being a literary Norma Desmond have seen his essays get increasingly provocative to the point of loopiness (9-11 conspiracy theories/Timothy McVeigh was framed/American involvement in WW2 was totally unnecessary, etc.) but these were written in the 80s when he was more biting and less bitter.

In the Beginning was the Command Line by novelist/programmer Neal Stephenson is one of the best I’ve ever read on technology.

27

Years ago (early '90s?) Harpers magazine ran an essay on “the desire for an end”. It was about living with suicidal tendencies, written by a man in his 50’s. It was about living with the desire for suicide and how one can get tired of beautiful sunsets and sunrises. As someone who sometimes has the desire for an end, it was a good essay. I tried to find it in Harper’s archives but without subscriber access I would have to search by year, then by month, then by issue. More work than I want to do tonight.

The other is Jimmy Carter’s Law Day speech. He was running for President and was invited to speak at the University of Georgia. He gave a speech that was critical of the legal system. That takes a lot of guts for a Presidential candidate. One of my favorite qoutes:

“You can go to the prisons of Georgia, and I don’t know, it may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know that they are the only ones who serve prison sentences”

Here’s the speech.

28

Out of the corner of my eye all I saw was “Bacon of Death” and did a doubletake.

29

Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress

30

Yes, that one is fabulous.

31

Carl Sagan wrote several that greatly inspired me. The one that influenced my viewpoint the most was probably Is it possible to be both pro-choice and pro-life?; I was already pro-choice, but at the same time had some ethical problems with it, and Sagan gives an excellent “when it should be considered a human” arguments.

32

Since Russell’s essay has been mentioned, we might as well include a link to Chesterton’s Why I am a Christian. (Unfortunately the formatting on that page is lousy. If someone has a link to a better edition please post it.)

33

William Faulkner’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature (1950).

34

I was just reading this again earlier today: Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Ballplayer Ever.

35

Thanks! I’d never seen that before - it was fantastic.

36

He’s largely retired now, but almost anything by Lewis Lapham is brilliant (Lapham was chief editor at Harper’s for quite a while). It’s hard to pick out one essay in particular, but I’ll go ahead and take his parody rewrite of A Christmas Carol from…I’ll say 1996, I’m not in the mood to hunt it down right now.
Also - when he sucked, which was often - he sucked bad, but until about 1975, Hunter Thompson kicked out some amazing material. The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved is bundled into any copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Thanks to everyone for mentioning all this GREAT reading! I’ve bookmarked this thread so I can come back and go over it all. You people are the best. :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

37

Here are some more vintage Chesterton essays:

The Common Man
The Twelve Men
The Medical Mistake and Wanted: An Unpractical Man
The last link is too an entire book, but the first two chapters also function just fine as stand-alone essays. Here’s a sample.

38

Diddling by Edgar Allan Poe.