Book Club - Thursday December 10

Our next Book Club meeting with be Thursday, December 10, at 7:30 on Zoom. We will be reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. This book was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It is available from both the Sonoma and Marin Country libraries as a book, an audio book, and an ebook.

“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . There is an ambition about Dillard's book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review



Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence.” Dillard's personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.