Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking, best book ever read
Review: Incredible. I had to read this book in a Freshman Year class and since then have reread it about 3 to 4 times and have recommended it to friends as well. Dillard's prose parallels the way we think and her insights tells it like it is. Nature is beautiful, but horrible at the same time. It is a very spiritual and meditative work about questions and wonders that puzzle us all. Her work challenges us to imagine. It literally is the best book I have read so far at age 26.

Phillip

Rating:
Summary: By Which All Other Writing is Judged
Review: This is a magic book, an excruciatingly lovely book. It changed my life and continues to change me, every day. I think I have it memorized!

God bless you, Annie, for the stunning beauties you evoke. It is the book I want buried with me.

Jennifer Trudeau

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This book is the first ever to affect me this much. It changes the way I see, think, process information, and more. Dillard is an American literature author whose work, amazingly, has not yet been canonized, but owes qualities far exceeding books and novels which most of America is familiar with. Her intimate voice and eloquent and insightful writing connects the reader as though reading were instead a series of connected thoughts in the reader's mind. This book is one of the very few books that absolutely must be read in the course of anyone's lifetime. It is impossible to be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: Despite the numerous biology courses I had in school, I never looked at insects with anything more than indifference until I read PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK. It opened my eyes to the fascinating lives of various creatures that I had heretofore ignored. Dillard also introduced me to some wonderful authors (such as Edwin Way Teale) and books (especially THE INSECT WORLD OF J. HENRI FABRE, which proved to be far and away the best book I read one year). I heartily recommend purchasing this book.

Rating:
Summary: Breath-taking and terrifying writing
Review: This has got to be the best book I've ever read. Annie Dillard's style is poetic but blunt, and her use of one word sentences is amazing. She draws the reader on eloquently, and then hits them with her incredible sense of nature's terror and apathy, or grace and beauty. At least a dozen times I found myself kissing the page I was reading, overjoyed to have found something so perfect. I only gave it a 9 because I haven't read all of Dillard's other work and I want to leave room.

Rating:
Summary: the daddy
Review: One of my favorite books ever, even with the ongoing story of the maltreated moth. I will read this book many times.

Rating:
Summary: Good writing triumphs over all.
Review: I am reading Tinker Creek at the moment, and I find the writing superior in every way. Annie Dillard makes each moment of her experience come alive for the reader, and she fills them with ideas that make the reading a treat. Last summer, I had reason to call her on the telephone for an article I was writing. We talked for an hour about writing, about nature writing, about writers. I didn't get much of use for my article because Dillard wanted to know what I thought about these things. What writers do I like, she asked, and she was pleased when I named Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone. Stone is a friend of hers, she said, and those who know were reading McCarthy long ago, before most people every heard of him. It wasn't until later, after our conversation, that I realized what had happened in our conversation. That's what happens when you read Tinker Creek: minutes, hours, days afterwards, the reader experiences a cascade of understandings that hadn't occurred at the first flyby. That's pretty good writing, and that's not faint praise.

Rating:
Summary: An Unyielding Ambivalent Look at God
Review: An Unyielding Ambivalent Look at God Dillard, through this book (PTC), slickly cajoles us to
join her revel, in the open, unabashedly, in one of our
more disavowed addictions, god-watching. That indulgence
most of us yielded to but never admitted falling into, not unlike
that of heroin. Like a true addict, Annie could not bridle herself
from seeing God in everything. God, she asserts, is "apt to
create anything. He'll stop at nothing." And, too, like a stoned
addict, she walks dazed not knowing why "if God is in one sense,
the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God
is also in another sense the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial
as the atmosphere." Here smokes out what I could only insolently call as
Dillard's uncommitted ethics. No one, she seems convinced, could relate to
God but through ambivalence. God, to her senses, is real beyond any argument.
" I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves... my God what a world.
There is no accounting for one second of it." But God, to her mind, is at best
inscrutable, most incomprehensible that ambivalence is the only way to
understand him. Thus, amidst the beauty she is wallowing in,
she, at the same time, is compelled to lament, "God look at what
you have done to this creature, look at the sorrow, the cruelty,
the long damned waste." Fjording through the psychedelic thick of Dillard's
language, one finds her refreshingly unwavering, resolved to remain still
and inhale as much God from nature around her. But, unlike the true ethicist,
she equivocates, hedging the more substantive tension; either to just remain
gawking or rather to stand up, no matter how groggy one easily gets during such
times, and have one's say as to how things ought to be. Must have come only from her
unflinching yet spaced-out look at her ambivalent God.
Jude E. Ganzon ([e-mail]), Manila,

Rating:
Summary: beautiful and moving
Review: This book is one of the best I have ever read! It is thought provoking and wonderfully written. It's beautiful imagery takes you on a leave of your own world. It touches a place hidden in most people and lets you feel as if you were actually at Tinker Creek

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite
Review: I am now working as a professional writer, and I use Annie Dillard as my guide in stylistic elegance and intellectual depth. Each sentence is a finely-polished gem, creating a naturalist's mosaic of startling beauty and wit