I love Dillard's originality and boldness to be wildly unconventional ( )

I've always loved Annie Dillard's work -- she is a powerful and echoing writer, and we follow her string of consciousness along whatever path she chooses to tread. This is a very nice collection of her work. It's a little odd, because somehow I thought there would be new work here, or that it would be mostly new work, and it isn't. It's really lovely excerpts of older work and a few essays on youth that I hadn't seen before. It's basically a best-of reader in handy format. Reading it on the bus got me into one of the most pleasant unsolicited conversations I've had lately, so there's that, too. It's a book, and a siren song to writers.

Advanced readers copy provided by Edelweiss. ( )

I was so enjoying this book. The writing is gorgeous, and I found myself copying long passages down to re read and savour. Then a couple of things started to concern me- the authors dispassionate description of a suffering deer, her self congratulatory tone regarding her mental toughness as a meat eater. Then I got to a paragraph where, in an attempt to scare away some steer blocking her access to a river, she yells scary things at them. Her final submission is “SWEDISH MEATBALLS”, at which point they run away. Shortly after that point, I had to stop reading the book. No matter how hard I tried, I read mean spiritedness against animals in her tone, at the same time that she wrote mind bogglingly beautiful passages around her appreciation of nature in all its glory. ( )

Anne Dillard is very different to most people. When they look at the world around them they only see a fraction of what is actually there, she relentlessly absorbs every detail of the place and experience. But her true skill lies in taking what she has seen and writing about it with tight, and sharp prose. In this new collection, Dillard writes about subjects as wide-ranging and diverse as solar eclipses, the family jokes, the bundle of energy that is the weasel, as well as essays on skin, tsunamis and about the Victorian expeditions to the North Pole.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

Her sense of fascination and wonder at the things she sees permeates the book with all the subjects she talks about, making this a wonderful thing to read. My favourite essay was the one titled ‘For The Time Being’, about that material that most do not consider, sand. In her unique way, we find out how many grains of sand are created every moment, how it flows with water down to the sea before transforming back to rock over countless millennia. We learn that the sharpest items are not always metal and that they took hundreds of small blows to form these exquisite stone implements. This is the second book of Dillard’s that I have read now and I am finding that I am liking her writing more and more. Her penetrating gaze at the world around is brilliantly complemented by her precise prose. Whilst I realise that some of these have been published before, this is a fine introduction to her work who hasn’t read anything of her work before. ( )

Annie gets all five stars from me, but the curators of this collection only get three, so I'm going with the average. I think there could have been a greater selection of material Dillard diehards haven't already practically memorized. But maybe this volume will serve as an enticing introduction to newcomers. ( )