I spent the day at the Mall, shopping with my niece for a much needed "nice outfit" for her as well as other odds and ends. On top of everything else, we found the perfect jeans and are each wearing a pair now and enjoying the hell out of them. There's nothing like fitting into the same size as a 19 year old to really make yourself feel good.

But man my legs are still killing me from the workout the other day. Tomorrow is chest, my favorite. The bench keeps creeping along, but I'm getting there.

I picked up the 2005 edition of Best American Essays the other day at Costco because I just can not resist it. Every year I think I'll pass it by but there is always somebody included who I love and I end up with a copy. This year I am thrilled to find an outstanding essay from Andrea Barrett, one of my all time favorite writers. In her piece "The Sea of Information" from The Kenyon Review, she writes about researching and writing her latest book. I had heard that she was writing about tuberculosis and people "taking the cure" at the turn of the century, but the manner in which she came to this subject was a complete mystery. Barrett outlines the journey in her essay and also writes about her own never ending curiousity and how it has impacted her writing. Anyone who reads her short stories and novels (and really you should), knows that she has an impressive grasp on historical detail and also a wide range of interests. I loved Voyage of the Narwhal in particular, partly because it is about Polar Exploration, something I studied so much in college, but also because she broadened her story to include the women back home and not just the explorers themselves. It was so unexpected in a book on this subject and so welcome, by me at least, that she inspired me a bit as I wrote my book on Alaska flying. It's not the same type of book at all, but I do hope that some of her attention to detail rubbed off on me; I know I tried to make that happen.

In her essay Barrett lists some of the subjects she has written about: "China during the Cultural Revolution, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Achipelago, the monk and botanist Gregor Mendel and his experiments with peas, ninteenth-century Arctic exploration, surveying and mapmaking in the 1860s, and the development of paleontology in ninteenth-century America. I've studied early conceptions of the formation of dew and rain, the founding of the utopian colony of New Harmony and the manufacture of the glass eyes used by taxidermists to simulate life in stuffed game."

Okay, how can you not be fascinated by this woman? She reminds of Diane Ackerman and would certainly have a lot to discuss with her. (I need to suggest Barrett to Donna Seaman!) I guess what I love about Barrett is that she is unafraid to learn anything and then write about it - she wants to write about different ideas and people and places because she wants to know about different ideas and people and places. It's a great way to be a writer and a great way to be a human. She just impresses the hell out of me, and her essay alone was worth the price of the book.