Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning; in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway.
That's a tiny well-crystallized sample lump of prose by Annie Dillard, author of the celebrated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which Eudora Welty said is "a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing)." It's from her memoir An American Childhood . She tosses off such gorgeously crafted observations seemingly with little effort. Her writing is a tangible pleasure.
The other book I'm reading might be of interest to some TOP readers. It's by Greg Milner and is titled Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music 
Here's a small sample:
...The World War II generation were audiophiles who longed for hi-fi; their boomer offspring were not and did not. In the new pop world, what mattered was sound that hit you like a train, as opposed to sound that mimicked a train about to hit you.
Really a fun book and one I'm enjoying immensely. I wouldn't have believed that a book on this subject could be a page-turner. Highly recommended if you like recordings.
As an aside, I noticed in looking her up that Annie Dillard has a book called The Writing Life 
Mike
(Thanks to S., who loves A.D.)
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Featured Comments from:
John Camp: "I have to tell you, I have spent time at writers' conferences ridiculing The Writing Life. Honest to God, if I'd read that book before I became a writer, I'd be selling real estate today. She makes writing sound like one of the more onerous and tedious tasks in the world, one step backward for every two steps forward, entire days spent juggling a dozen words to create a simple sentence. Life is much too short for that. To paraphrase Mark Twain on Henry James, I believe Ms. Dillard often chews more than she bit off.
"I wouldn't recommend you persist in this ambition, but should you decide to read The Writing Life, I would suggest you simultaneously read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft . The King book is one of the best ever written on writing, IMHO, both in dealing with the craft and the life. The contrast will be stark."
[Reader John Camp is a very successful writer of thriller novels, under the nom de plume John Sandford
Mike replies: I read and liked the King book. It would probably be a great experience to read those two books back to back or simultaneously, if indeed, as you say, the contrast is stark. Some of my bookshelves are arranged in pairs of books that complement each other; I like reading that way.
It's curious too how this relates to David McRaney's thoughts on survivorship bias. According to his formulation, King and Dillard are the last people we should listen to when it comes to how to write. King's how-to might go, "first, write a book in your spare time while working at a laundry. Next, open an envelope you receive in the mail and have a $400,000 check fall out of it." Not everyone can follow that advice.
Perhaps the best writing advice I ever got was from you, John, when I asked you for the secret of writing a novel. You said "finish it," adding that your observation has been that when people finish their books, good things tend to happen. You also mentioned that most people who want to be writers and most people who are working on novels never do finish one (unfortunately, that's true of me).
William Schneider: "I required our photography grad students to read a story by Annie Dillard in September. While it may seem odd to give a literary reading to visual artists, they quickly realize that she sees the world better than most photographers do."
pbass wil responds to John Camp: "S. King has a great command of prose writing, and he's a wonderful story maker. But if his content dug as deep as A. Dillard's, he too would find the act of writing onerous. It's one thing to construct compelling sentences and paragraphs. It's another to mine the psyche as deeply as Dillard does and then convert that inchoate stuff into language. She's the Jung of lit! Different genre, different goals—different effort."
