Reading notes: 'Oranges'

17 May, 2026

Oranges is a book wherein John McPhee, having done tons of research, writes a bunch of stuff about oranges. Some notes:

1. There's a certain register that McPhee shares with David Halberstam, David Quammen, and others: it's friendly but authoritative, and it welcomes the reader but expects a careful one. The weight and rhythm of each sentence shows obvious care, often from an editor at The New Yorker or the New York Times. This was a well-known and -loved subgenre of nonfiction, and when you picked up a high-quality magazine you expected to find an essay or two written in this style.
2. This subgenre is dying or dead, and not just because fewer writers are competent in it and fewer outlets are willing to publish (and, especially, pay for) it. Genre is defined in large part by the reader's expectations,¹ and readers do not expect to read a hundred pages about oranges without an explicit argumentative or ethical purpose. If you published a text like this (or even this text verbatim) today, it would be received differently. The author's understanding of those expectations would change either their output or the only reasonable interpretations of that output.
3. This book is very good, and I enjoyed reading my physical paperback copy in mornings and evenings.
4. Much of the material is timeless, but some of it is time-specific in amusing ways. To the extent the book has a single arc (and it doesn't), it's about the shift from fresh juice to concentrate. I suspect that most of my readers have never taken a cardboard cylinder of concentrate from the freezer to make their juice. So, here's some context: back in the '80s and '90s, we were drinking a lot of orange juice, much of it mixed ourselves from concentrate.
5. Speaking of anachronism: one person McPhee profiles spent his lunches looking through the phone book for amusing names.
6. This book was on my shelf because an Arizona poker acquaintance owed me money in 2007. He gave me a pile of books, partly as collateral and partly as one reader lending books to another. When I left Arizona, he had neither repaid me nor asked for the books back. The books aren't quite mine in a way that would entitle me to give them away (or so I've felt for these 19 years). I've long been willing to return them, but am not in touch with the original owner. So I've been moving around and occasionally contemplating these books, which have their long history and ambiguous status on my shelf. As I settle into middle age, more and more of life is like this.
7. And this leads to another, grimmer respect in which this book shows cultural changes across decades. The person who lent me this book is bright, capable, and sensitive, living a life enriched by books. If I met person in roughly analogous circumstances in 2026 (that is, if he were a twenty-something man toeing the line between broke and not-broke in a certain Phoenix-area subculture), the odds would be very long against his owning and reading volumes of Amy Clampitt's poetry. It is sadly probable that he would not be reading any books at all.

#culture #reading #reading notes #things that make me feel old