In his 33 years as a New Yorker staff writer, John McPhee has been nothing if not prolific and orderly, producing dozens of books on a host of offbeat topics that include canoe builders, tennis players, oranges, aerodynamic design and Scotland. Cuttings from those books were gathered together into "The John McPhee Reader," published in 1977. Now comes "The Second John McPhee Reader," with 14 selections from his most recent two decades of work. Reading either of these anthologies is a little like taking a tour through a small-town museum, the kind established in 1910 by the eccentric heir to the local pig-iron fortune and filled with a melange of stuffed animals, pottery shards, arrowheads, and the founder's rock collection too.

Which is just the problem some critics have had with McPhee's writing. As fellow New Yorker writer David Remnick -- who selected the pieces here, along with Patricia Strachan -- says in his introduction, many have found McPhee's subjects maddeningly obscure, the result of his seemingly conscious decision to keep himself "too distant from politics, preferring to make something of very little." This reader has never bought into that view. I've identified with the Alaskan gold miners McPhee profiled in his most commercially successful book, "Coming Into the Country," and learned to appreciate the shiny stylistic nuggets he regularly sends downstream.

This particular stroll through the McPhee Museum brings glimpses of the Last Frontier, New York vegetable sellers, the Swiss Army, bush pilots, rural doctors, merchant marine sailors, Russian art collectors, and portions of the author's extensive writings on North American geology. McPhee's geology writings have irked his critics and tried the patience of even his fans. Convinced that "there seemed. . . to be more than a little of the humanities in this subject," he turned out four very long studies over the course of 12 years. When Tina Brown's supporters contrast the "old" and "new" New Yorker with the cry, "No more 50,000 word pieces about shale!" they're refering to McPhee and his rock collection. But it turns out that the geology series does indeed benefit from the process of selection, a sort of literary erosion that's exposed the finest, most lucid parts to public view. There will no doubt be a third reader appearing sometime in 2016. Don't wait till then to take the tour.

-- Edward Neuert