Reddit reviews Rocks and Minerals in Thin Section: A Colour Atlas

Hi there and congratulations on your acceptance to such an excellent choice of degree!

Your A-levels will serve you very well here, though once you start to get your teeth into the geology degree properly you may be surprised at the amount of chemistry involved! Anyway, a virtually identical question was posted here a few days ago, so I’ll regurgitate my answer from that thread:

Seeing as you mentioned A-Level you must be in the UK, so check out The Geology of Britain by Peter Toghill. Its at A-level standard, so shouldn’t cause you much trouble at the moment and will be very readable once you’ve made a little headway in the first year. It also has lovely large colour photographs and illustrations throughout, which is particularly useful when just starting to read about these things. Which uni are you off to? Probably many of the locations in the Toghill book you will end up going on field trips to.

A dictionary of geology terms is essential for first year (and all years really), the Oxford one is great. For getting to grips with the basics of thin sections, I also found this little handbook absolutely invaluable.

If you are more inclined towards the paleontology side of things, then I quite like this book too. Again, I would say it’s written at an A-level depth, and is actually much more than just the title suggests. After the initial pages with global paleomaps it covers many key periods in Earth history and the history of life.

Fossils at a Glance by Milsom & Rigby is a nice introduction to many key fossils and I like the way it has info laid out on a two page spread for each organism/topic, makes for a great reference.

Somebody else in the previous thread also recommended Earth Story: The Shaping of Our World by Simon Lamb, as a regular book to just read casually which introduces all the key concepts of geology.

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