I heart Annie Dillard...but not everyone does...

I always feel a little vulnerable sharing what authors I like reading. Ok, sharing about what I'm reading is ok, it's actually suggesting that someone else read a book I've read and loved that makes me feel a little vulnerable. What if they don't like it? What if they think I'm weird for liking it? What if there's something in it that makes them stumble or puts a really retched image in their mind. Like the time I gave my friend G my copy of The Jane Austen Book Club.

So recently not only did I share an author that I love, but I also went so far as to buy a book for a friend leaving the country for six months. After all, she was going to be in a foreign land and needed good reading material. That is why I should have made a wiser choice. I should not have gone out on a limb. I should have never told her that I like Annie Dillard.

I think Annie Dillard is awesome. She writes paragraphs like:

The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn't recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

Is this not a beautiful paragraph? I will admit though, you do have to trudge through hundreds of other paragraphs to find such a gem.

I will say that my friends disinterest in the Annie Dillard book that we gave her reminded me that I have grown a lot. Formerly I would have been a little devastated that someone didn't like my book recommendation. The only emotion I felt this time was regret that we didn't give her a gift that she would have enjoyed overseas.

I will say that I can see how someone would not love Annie Dillard's writing. It is a bit lengthy. It's a bit rambling. And it's a bit obscure. I've tried to read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she is quite famous for, but did not enjoy it at all. I picked up another book by her called For the Time Being and I thought it was weird. But still my love for her writing persists.

I recently finished An American Childhood, which is her story of growing up in Pittsburgh during the fifties. I felt a little like I did when I finished my favorite book she has written, The Living. I felt inspired. I felt like I understood my own sub-conscious and conscious thoughts more fully. And I felt like I wanted to read it again. And that is the mark of a good book!

And so, I will leave this post with another long ramble by Dillard on reading as a child:

It was clear that adults, including our parents, approved of children who read books, but it was not at all clear why this was so. Our reading was subversive, and we knew it. Did the think we read to improve our vocabularies? Did they want us to read and not pay the least bit of heed to what we read, as they wanted us to go to Sunday School and ignore what we heard?

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized. This life could be found and joined, like the Resistance. I kept this exhilarating faith alive in myself, concealed under my uniform shirt like an oblate's ribbon; I would not be parted from it.

We who had grown up in the Warsaw ghetto, who had seen all our families gassed in the death chambers, who had shipped before the mast, and hunted sperm whale in arctic seas; we who had marched from Moscow to Poland and lost our legs to the cold; we who knew by heart every snag and sandbar on the Mississippi River south of Cairo, and knew by heart Morse code, forty parables and psalms, and lots of Shakespeare; we who had battled Hitler and Hirohito in the North Atlantic, in North Africa, in New Guinea and Burma and Guam, in the air over London, in the Greek and Italian hills; we who had learned to man minesweepers before we learned to walk in high heels --were we going to marry Holden Caulfield's roommate, and buy a house in Point Breeze, and send our children to dancing school?

Ahhh....I heart Annie Dillard....