No doubt Steve will give Reid a run for his money on the list of books he's currently reading. As usual, I'm reading just the one. This week it's Annie Dillard's wonderful memoir An American Childhood.
Herein Dillard charts the start of an arc, the life of a lucky girl from Pittsburgh in the '50s. It is a world exquisitely well-remembered, down to the dust on the library shelves and the floating motes above the reading room. It is a story of the magic of books, in part. Dillard learns to wake up to the rest of her life by examples she finds sleeping between the covers of old volumes: how to draw; how to bunt; the names of exotic rocks; about pond life, bird life, trees. Every page is quotable, but here's a paragraph that should appeal to the eclectic readers of an eclectic blog:
"Everything in the world, every baby, city, tetanus shot, tennis ball, and pebble, was an outcrop of some vast and hitherto concealed vein of knowledge, apparently, that had compelled people's emotions and engaged their minds in the minutest detail without anyone's having done with it. There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth--fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness. There was no one here but us fanatics: bird-watchers, infedels, Islamic scholars, opera composers, people who studied Bali, vials of air, bats. It seemed to take all these people working full time to extract the interest from everything and articulate it for the rest of us."
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