Of our interviews recommending rocks and minerals books, two are on volcanoes. David Pyle, volcanologist at Oxford University, talks about what causes them to erupt, and how—and to what extent—they differ due to the various rocks and minerals of which they are composed. He chooses a number of travel books on volcanoes as well as a book of verse. Author and journalist Simon Winchester’s choices are more fictional takes on volcanoes, including Jules Verne’s  Journey to the Centre of the Earth and the Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer Lytton.

Dr Caroline Smith, one of the Natural History Museum’s experts in meteoritics, chooses her best books on meteorites, discussing the rocks and minerals which comprise meteorites. She explains what meteorites can teach us, and why there are fewer hitting the earth than there used to be.  Some meteorites predate the earth by over 150 years, and in her job, she “can be holding the oldest object known to man in the morning and a piece of Mars in the afternoon.”