An American Childhood by Annie Dillard—how many of you read this in school?

I adore this book, but I do feel some uncomfortable emotions about it because of the similarities to my life: growing up in Point Breeze, attending private school, going to dancing school… hallmarks of a privileged Pittsburgh upbringing, that not everyone has had—it feels a little prissy.

But I absolutely love the prologue—it’s a description of the topology of the Pittsburgh area intertwined with the coal-mining, steel-making history of the area.  Here’s a snippet:

I will see the city poured rolling down the mountains like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.  At sunset a red light like housefires shines from the narrow hillside windows; the houses’ bricks burn like glowing coals.

The writing is intelligent, complex, and yet still somehow accessible.  The emotions Dillard provokes are real: recognition, nostalgia, appreciation for the natural world, and a desire to live a rich and meaningful life, in which attention is paid.

My favorite part is the scene where the narrator discovers an amoeba in a drop of puddle water from Frick Park in her microscope.  I don’t want to ruin the scene for you if you haven’t read it yet (it’s on p. 147) but it ends with the line “My days and my nights were my own to plan and fill.”  This sentiment, realizing that your parents have lives of their own, and that the world is big and yours to discover, is something I’d like to remember as summer arrives—even as an adult.

From Dillard’s website, here’s  a brief list of her other work:

• Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974) (poems)
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) (nonfiction narrative)
• Holy the Firm (1977) (nonfiction narrative)
• Living by Fiction (1982) (non-fiction narrative)
• Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) (narrative essays)
• Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984) (nonfiction narrative)
• The Writing Life (1989) (non-fiction narrative)
• The Living (1992) (novel)
• Mornings Like This (1995) (poems)
• For the Time Being (1999) (non-fiction narrative)
• The Maytrees (2007) (fiction)

To hear Dillard read from her latest novel, The Maytrees, please click here.

I like this version of the jacket too: