If you followed Ray Bradbury's advice, how did you source your essays? He said to read 1 short story + 1 poem + 1 essay every night for 1000 days. I don't like popsci, pseudoscience, and political propaganda. But if you look for essays, those are the stuff you get.
>>25467471>how did you source your essays?You stick to the classic English essayists like Bacon, Addison, Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, etc. There's no shortage of good essays.
>>25467471He bagged Bo Derek
>>25467571>it's real>>25467471skim intro textbooks
>>25467471If you have talent you dont need alladat stuff
>>25467471https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Waysfree and interesting for /lit/ crowd
>>25467471If you're going the Ray Bradbury route, make sure you have a LOT of stuff available. You need hard and/or long stuff for when you have time and energy, and short easy stuff for when you don't. You need at least half-a-dozen authors on the go. Then you can pick one that suits your mood, and when you run out of a book you have plenty to keep you going whilst you look for another book.There are many thousands of good essays out there. Just try to strike a balance between people known for writing (you take a chance on their knowing other stuff) and people known for other stuff (you take a chance on their being able to write).There's plenty of classics (Browne, Bacon, Montaigne, Johnson, Hazlitt). Then there's decent modern people (Huxley, Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence). James Thurber wrote dozens of great “semi-essays”. They're basically fact-based but a bit embroidered / whimsical. (He probably did more of this than the pure short fiction actually.)Mencken is often fun although occasionally a bit contrarian.Joan Didion of course.Plenty of people known for fiction have turned out some decent essay collections. e.g. William Golding's "The Hot Gates".David Foster Wallace is OK, and not usually too liberal.Cultural Amnesia (Clive James) & A Homage To Qwert Yuiop (Anthony Burgess) are good fat tomes you can just dip into whenever. Both guys are well-read. CJ is a bit liberal sometimes. AB is usually morally sound.There are plenty of books which are really episodic and so count as a collection of essays even if they're not marketed quite like that. Travel books are often like this. Try e.g. Gerald Durrell’s "Encounters With Animals". (He's worth two of his brother in my opinion.)Then there are unexpected little gems like M. F. K. Fisher's "The Art Of Eating". Superb writing, so you might like it even if you care nothing about food.
>>25469224>Then there are unexpected little gems like M. F. K. Fisher's "The Art Of Eating". Superb writing, so you might like it even if you care nothing about food.Fisher is pure fucking kino, more people need to read her work. Incredible prose stylist>>25467471Get a copy of The Oxford Book of Essays ed. John Gross and start there
>>25467471So I watched the original source.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-r7ABrMYU First 15 minutes or so.And he wants you to read from various fields. The ones he mentioned: zoology, anthropology, biology, politicsHe specifically recommended Loren Eiseley‘s essays. Eiseley was a friend of Bradbury.
