Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The Boston Globe calls Annie Dillard's The Writing Life a "small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer's task. ..." Well, what the book is in fact is a short collection of the author's observations on writing and a bunch of other things: the seventh and final chapter of the book, for example, 19 of the book's 111 pages, has to do with a stunt pilot/geologist from Washington State with whom Dillard once went flying.

Dillard's book reads like a series of journal entries, which may indeed have been its origin. Some of the entries are amusing, for example Dillard's description of her weeks-long, late-night chess game with an unknown opponent who, she briefly thinks, just might be the diaper-clad but otherwise naked baby she finds hovering around the board one evening. But some of the entries are mere poetic, well, nonsense: "The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illumines the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm." The Writing Life cannot, I should think, be of any practical benefit to writers. And it is neither a "guidebook" nor a particularly inspiring piece of prose, however much the blurbists may rave. But it is intermittently interesting, and, after all, it is a very quick read.