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Easily one of the best nonfiction books I read this year was Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. It’s part memoir, part philosophical meditation and part historical narrative of one of the most fascinating and troubling characters in 20th Century science, David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford. The book amazes its readers, but what amazed me most might be a literary trick Miller pulls off halfway through the book.
It’s super-instructive because it teaches you how to help readers of your own stories feel whatever you want them, too, which is often what the protagonist is himself feeling.
Let me show you what I mean.
David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford, spent a lot of his free time — and frankly work time — naming species of fish. He went all over the world. Found the fish. Brought them back to his lab in San Francisco. Put little bits of paper next to the fish that hadn’t been identified yet. Wrote up peer-reviewed journal articles about the new fish. Got those peer-reviewed articles published.
At one point he had, like, 10,000 slips of paper next to, like, 10,000 species of fish in his lab, almost all of them identified by Starr Jordan but not yet known to the world.This was in 1906.
