Annie Dillard

THE BOOK NOOK JUNE Read Options:

What would you like to read with me in June?? I have not read any of the following but they are on my list or in my stacks. Please pick one.

Here is a bit about them:
1. Marjorie Morningstar =Novel by Herman Wouk, published in 1955, about a woman who rebels against the confining middle-class values of her industrious American-Jewish family. Her dream of being an actress ends in failure. She ultimately forfeits her illusions and marries a conventional man with whom she finds sufficient contentment as a suburban wife and mother, thus finally coming to accept her parents' values.

2. The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek = An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons -- a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.

3. The Doctor's Wife = "Lydia Haas has devoted herself to Jesus, her church, and her husband. Only recently, now that it's too late, has she understood how much she has sacrificed to all of them." "Michael Knowles is a rising young doctor, an ob-gyn at a prominent hospital. He is a man committed to his principles, to rescues with uncertain outcomes, and to his wife and the life they've made. He never intended to have to make a choice." "Annie Knowles is the "doctor's wife." The first time she walked into their 1812 Federal-style home in High Meadow, an idyllic town in upstate New York, she thought she'd be happy there forever. But that dream wore thin, and another man - a colleague at the local college where Annie teaches - is insinuating himself slowly, surely, passionately into her life." Simon Haas's paintings of his wife, Lydia - dating from when she was a child - made him famous, and infamous. The story behind those paintings, and behind his marriage, is not one Simon chooses to tell. Until he meets Annie Knowles.