3 or 4 essays, I loved. The rest were still high quality but too pedantic at times, and too repetitious (yes, Marilynne, we know you love John Calvin, liberalism, etc. ad NAUSEAM) Her prose is Ciceronian; she piles clause upon clause, upon clause, upon clause, thick with learned adjectives and fractal syntax: a turgid but highly stimulating read - I love Robinson's prose. This is a short collection, just over 200 pages. But it is still slow-going because of her unique prose. There are many excellent sentences and paragraphs in here. On top of the pretty prose, Robinson makes many salient points: on her Christian faith, on the current political landscape in America, on education, on Human Nature. Still, at times she pushes her learned vocabulary to opaque extremes, proving most sincerely that, indeed, when she was a child, Mary did really, actually read books. Big books.

Read "Gilead," her true masterpiece. Or "The Death of Adam," a more fully developed and engaging collection of essays. Really, you can't go wrong reading Robinson. She's a master.