Our natural world is portrayed in all its wonder and horror, and we are invited to consider what it all means, and where we fit in. Nothing is sugar coated or kept behind the curtain.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a beautifully and intelligently written meditation and memoir about life, death, nature, the world and physical universe how to experience and understand them and how we relate to the world in which we live. The higher altitude method would not do for me, I wanted to savor every word. All the way through, I found myself reading every word. When reading in this way, sentences are read at a glance as opposed to word for word. Some books, perhaps most books, I have learned to read at a faster pace, reading for concepts, ideas, plot sequences, etc. 'This book has been on my to-read shelf for years, and I finally got around to it, prompted by a quote from the author posted on a college friend's Twitter feed. Throughout her wanderings, Annie Dillard’s keen observations, poetic sensibilities, introspective reflections, and reverence for her surroundings show us the world outside as we have never seen it before. She tries to con a coot, unties a snakeskin, witnesses a flood, and plays “King of the Meadow” with a field of grasshoppers. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and thinks about wave mechanics in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. In this classic of literary nonfiction, Annie Dillard takes us through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, bringing anecdotes, curiosities, and insights about all she observes and experiences.

A pilgrim at tinker creek