Author: Annie Dillard
Genre: Philosophy
Pages (words): 304 (88,994)
Readability: 9.2
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Annie Dillard ruminates on living a full year in a cabin near Tinker Creek, a small stream in Virginia. Much like Thoreau's Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek uses observations on nature to make much larger points. Dillard talks about everything from tracking muskrats to the art of listening, but throughout all of it she is really focused on how man can find God, if He really exists.
Thoughts: For me, this book started out as a five-star book, then fell to three, and then ended up meriting four stars. Dillard is really an incredible writer, and she certainly has a knack for pulling meaning out of things that I never could have. There were parts of the book that I enjoyed very, very much, and some parts that I thought were a little bit too "out there" for me. I wish that I had known beforehand how the book was structured; the first half is about the beautiful things that exist in nature that signify there is a God, while the second half is about the awful things that one must cut away in order to find God. Not knowing this (until Dillard explained it in the epilogue), I couldn't figure out why the second half of the book was so unlike the first. I probably would have enjoyed it more had I known that going in to it. Overall, this book was definitely a worthwhile read, and I'll be looking in to reading some more Dillard in the future.
Disclaimer: None.
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