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Dec 17, 2009

Donald rated it:

I got myself in a snit over the review in the NY Times Book Review and sent the editor the following:

To the Editor:

Certainly Annie Dillard’s new novel, The Maytrees, deserved a more perceptive — indeed, a more proficient — reader than Ms. Reed (July 29). One wonders if she has ever considered the punning irony of her name, as she managed to stumble upon the key sentences of the novel under review, failed to recognize their import, and then admitted in print to being unab More...

3 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jul 07, 2011

Kendall rated it:

It's hard to know what to make of this book; you can let yourself to be taken in by its beautiful prose and wallow in its lyricism; or to delight in the precise, glowing descriptions of landscapes and seascapes and emotional states-of-mind. But if you're into creating writing, perhaps not as a course but you have internalized its rules from reading too much genre, you may be angry that Dillard breaks all the rules: she mostly tells rather than shows (never mind that the telling is luminous). More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2008

Skylar rated it:

"Why surprise?" "Is all fair?" "Is love blind?" "Why sadder but wiser?" "What else could wisdom be?" These are some of Annie Dillard's profound questions in Maytrees. Here are some of mine: What is pomposity? Why care? Are big words better than more appropriate small words? Whither quotation marks? Will you ever stop asking short, choppy questions and tell a readable story?

While I recognized a few short flashes of genius in the writi More...

1 comment like (9 people liked it)

Jan 23, 2008

Sean rated it:

I live in awe of Annie Dillard's writing. While devouring much of her nonfiction, I consistently found my curiosity piqued at the one solitary novel (The Living) listed in the bibliography included in the front matter of each book I read. Last year I decided to satisfy that curiosity when I discovered a copy of The Living in a Vermont used bookstore. I was excited! How would Annie's writing style translate in fiction? I eagerly dove in and unfortunately was quickly disappointed. It's not th More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2009

Zinta rated it:

It was long ago that I bought the book, on a long, lone roadtrip southwest, in a favorite bookstore alongside the Rockies. I held it, carried it, kept it on my coffeetable, my nightstand, prolonging the sweet anticipation, knowing the coming reward. I have been (no hyperbole) in awe of Annie Dillard from the first encounter, decades ago, with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (winning Dillard the Pulitzer Prize). Finally, oh finally, picking up what I expect may be her final novel (I heard her interview o More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Apr 13, 2008

Sarah rated it:

Annie Dillard is simply the best living creative non-fiction writer. She has the rare ability to put common experiences and abstract emotions into words, and the structure and beauty of her sentences are pretty well unrivaled. If you don’t believe me, pick up An American Childhood or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – both books about everyday experiences that Dillard makes wondrous. Over the years, I think I’ve read every nonfiction book she’s written.

Still, can she write fiction? The Maytr More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2008

El rated it:

In post-war Cape Cod Toby Maytree meets Lou Bigelow and falls in love. They create a life and family, surrounded by friends and adoration for one another. They are a well-educated, well-read, talented couple who do not live to make money but who want to know the full meaning of "love" in all aspects.

It almost sounds hokey.

But Toby ultimately finds what he is looking for outside of Lou and what they have created is torn apart. Their lives and their feelings fo More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2007

Ellen rated it:

This book has gotten a lot of good reviews, but I was a little disappointed. I have not read any other books by Annie Dillard - her writing is poetic - maybe too poetic. Sometimes it was just confusing, a bit too "stream-of-consciousness". I became a bit detached - observing myself reading the book, instead of enjoying the book.

That said, it is a pretty good story, a quick read, and I liked it enough to recommend it as a beach read or something to take on a plane or trai More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2008

Charis rated it:

Good and strange. I felt a bit cheated by Annie. The book is strangely 'ungrounded' - snippets and particles of tangible story throughout, but somehow lacking any GLUE, anything to make my heart move. I can't critique the content or the language - as usual her language is almost separate FROM her writing - it is as though she uses words and language in and of themselves and doesn't always concern herself with where it leads or what they do.
The analogy that keeps coming to my mind is a bril More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Laura rated it:

Ugh...Dillard says she's not going to write another book as this is, in her opinion, the best work she's ever produced. She cut the manuscript back from 1000+ pages to its present form, which is way too choppy and terse for my liking. This could have been an interesting story about how love changes as people change but the writing made it hard to focus on the narrative and characters!

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 08, 2011

Charles rated it:

The Maytrees is a curious book.

The storyline is sparse, but it is only a gossamer vehicle for the prose, the grandiloquence of language. I was not bothered by the non-linearity of the narrative, but, I was, at times, annoyed by the inconsistencies of the timeline. Her sentences were staccato, ranging from the caliginous to the nacreous to the opaque. I was not bothered by the vocabulary, although vast, but I was by some of the unusual (?wrong) usage. She is, incontrovertibly, a More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2008

Victoria rated it:

Sometime last fall, I read a review of this book in which the reviewer criticized Dillard's arcane and at times unintelligable syntax. I remember the reviewer essentially quoting an entire paragraph, then writing "What does this mean?" I began this book committed to proving the reviewer wrong. At first, I was worried. Too many passages were bewildering, vague, and opaque. But as I got going, I began to appreciate Dillard's willingness to leave things unexplained, to let some phrases an More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 07, 2008

Cat rated it:

I really love Annie Dillard. I cannot express how "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" shook my world, only to say that I refuse to let anyone borrow my worn paperback copy not because I'm worried about not getting it back, but because I am so mortified by some of the 18-year-old thoughts I scribbled in the margins the first time read it. That's how bad it is.

So, it's hard to express my level of disappointment with "The Maytrees." It's a book that is far to contemplative to More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 10, 2008

Lucy rated it:

For a book about love, it's kind of a downer. There are too many exquisite lines to put this into a "waste of time" category, but as a whole, I can't claim this to be a favorite.

What I enjoyed was Dillard's ability to put a unique feel to common experiences. For instance, when Maytree looked at his wife, she wrote, "After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home."

Or.
More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

May 05, 2008

Shaindel rated it:

I *just* finished reading this book, and I'm sure I've got to let it resonate a bit. First, let me say, this is an important book to read. Annie Dillard is doing something really interesting here, but I'm not sure quite what it is--which is part of the quiet and beauty of the novel.

There is one plot twist at the beginning (which I won't give away), but I think it was a brave direction for Dillard to take. At some times, I liked the "distance" from the characters. They l More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 02, 2007

Nate rated it:

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who bothered to look up pauciloquy on page 70, and was bothered to note that this $110.00 word meaning "brevity of speech" was not only archaic (as of 1913) and misspelled (Dillard spells it "pauciloquoy"), but also not as good a word choice as "terseness" IMHO. Not only does this word describe Lou's character to a T, but also describes the writing style in this book that pretends to be a poem, but happily is not.

So the boo More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 09, 2007

Alicia rated it:

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard is a stunning work of fiction, following a couple through their life, both together and apart. I like these kind of novels, where quiet, profound moments lead toward something greater than it's parts.

The author's use of language takes your breath away. She is a truly gifted novel who packs a whole lot of impact into a tiny novel. The sheer depth of this novel is astounding. Absolutely lovely novel.

Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree marry and create More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Karima rated it:

that pauciloquy means "brevity of speech."

from James Davidson (read his full review at amazon.com. It's terrific.)

Annie does have a way with words. And maybe it's just me, but for some of the words--words like: halyard, pauciloquoys, culch, mesoglea, spicules, and littoral--I had to have the American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition, faithfully by my side to refer to rather frequently. What good fortune for me then that Annie Dillard, so I noticed, al More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Patrick rated it:

This is a book I will remember. That said, the first third of the book was a bit of slog, and I do have a few complaints. But all-in-all it's a beautiful story.

It's an introspective and consuming look into life, love and death.

It seems to me that we learn about the characters in a novel via three vehicles; what they do, what they say, and what they think. This book leans heavily on the latter. From what I know about Annie Dillard (an introspective recluse), this is no More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 07, 2008

Karen rated it:

This books really surprised me. I don't want to give it away, but I found the Lou character to be a bit unrealistic. The descriptions of the Cape and Provincetwon were vivid and beautiful, but I thought the book was a bit too slow moving for me. The writing was really thick in terms of vocabulary and meaning. I could see and English professor using just one page of this book for an entire class.

I liked 2 quotes so much I wrote them down

"Her face was his eyes' h More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 17, 2009

Elizabeth rated it:

I've been enamored of Annie Dillard since reading Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek. Her body of work is primarily non-fiction, so I grabbed this quickly to see how she would handle fiction.

On one level I was disappointed -- the characters are so eccentric and quirky, and the narrative so sparse and staccato, that I was put off.

Yet her language is so exquisite that I was captivated, and as I reflected back on the story, I found it more interesting.

Annie Dillard must c More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 26, 2008

Judy rated it:

I have loved Dillard's nonfiction, so when I saw this little book of fiction, published in 2007, I snapped it up. It's a difficult book to describe. Elegant. Evocative. Quiet. Poetic. NOT a page turner. Sometimes, however, that is okay. This is definitely a book to read rather than listen to, as you have to go slowly to soak up all the beautiful imagery.

The plot involves a young couple, the eponymous Maytrees. Dillard follows their courtship and the early days of their marria More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 25, 2011

Gretchen rated it:

This book is quite good in some ways and quite flawed in others. First of all, it should be read twice. The first time through you are getting the lay of the land, so to speak – discerning how you should read it. Dillard is a poet, and that’s evident in this book. The story is in service to the style, rather than the style being in service to the story. One person in my book group said it’s about different ways to love, and that observation does shed light on the book. Another said it is a More...

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Jan 14, 2011

Jim rated it:

From my blog: http://www.jamesrament.com/book-review�...

The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard (1945-), published in 2007

I'll start with a confession, actually two: First, Annie Dillard is one of those authors that reinforces the fact that sometimes I prefer books to people. I can become engrossed in her writing—contemplating difficult sentences or paragraphs over and over, wondering where meaning is found for us mortals—without a care for humanity at large while doing so. Reading he More...

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Jan 09, 2011

Margaret rated it:

I first heard about Annie Dillard's The Maytrees nearly three years ago when it was a PEN/Faulkner finalist. At the May 2008 award ceremony, an audible sigh of disappointment came from the audience when it was announced that Dillard was not able to attend the event. Susan Richards Shreve did the honors of reading a passage, and, in my opinion, it was the finest writing we heard that evening. Since then I've had it on my to-read list; at some point I picked up a remaindered copy. Finally, during More...

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Nov 17, 2010

Colleen rated it:

Is Dillard the Miles Davis of writing? She can tell a good story and she creates phrases that take your breath away, but her style, especially in this book, is an acquired taste--which is how I feel about Davis (and dark beer, Pedro Almodovar films and exercise). This family tale is told in a filmy, poetic, half-sentence style, which is hard to follow for a while, leaving me feeling tepid about the story. But my nodding head jerked awake when THE STORY got interesting (around page 60ish). As the More...

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Dec 30, 2009

Deidre rated it:

Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

After reading the book, I searched for the New York Times Book Review to see what the reviewer had to say about Dillard. In the past, I’ve not cared for her writing, and so I’m glad I didn’t read it before finishing the book, because words like “pompous” and “redundant” might have frightened me off. (Although, overall, the reviewer liked the book.)

Someone on NPR interviewed her – Scott Simon, I think - More...

1 comment like

Oct 21, 2009

Poiema rated it:

Is Annie Dillard a philosopher? A poet? A naturalist? Or a storyteller?
It's difficult to determine by the reading of her most recently penned novel, The Maytrees. Of those four distinctions, Annie's storytelling seems to be the weakest, apparently used only as a vehicle by which she might display her other gifts.

The novel is billed as a love story, the romantic history of Lou and Toby Maytree. Dialogue is spare, almost non-existent. In its place we are invited to share th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 17, 2009

Melissa added it

I can't say I loved or hated this book. It is painfully beautiful. The story is painful to read, and Dillard's exquisite writing makes it even more so. I read most of it on a train from Seattle to Portland in the March rain. It was visceral. I could not finish it on the train, and when I finally did complete it at home, I didn't know how I felt.

The writing is simply beyond praise. I was vaguely dissatisfied with the characters some aspects of the plot. Dillard uses her story t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 12, 2009

Mary rated it:

whew! a few quotes will have to suffice here b/c, well, dillard is ultimately un-paraphraseable (b/c her power is in the very details that would be glossed over in a pitiful paraphrase):
-Philosophy, Lou thought and so did Cornelius, had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark. Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called “ultimate concerns,” unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or dr More...

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