"After graduating college, I entered the high-paying, hard-charging world of retail -- bookselling, to be specific, where I served as an assistant manager for a chain. I will never forget certain books that were the rage then. One of them was Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I may be wrong (memory is as suspect as Lee Harvey Oswald, remember), but I recall a picture of a woman sitting on the bank of a creek staring down on it. It looked none too appealing.

Many decades later, with the odometer much higher and the gas tank indicator lower, I picked it up from my classroom library where it had languished untouched by any student for the many years I have taught. Rough, meet diamond. Dillard is not only an accomplished amateur naturalist, she is a writer of no small means. The vocabulary is as rich as the creek, the fields, the forests she wrote of, and the allusions to texts and authors equally impressive.

Granted, some sections were more a hardship than others, but this was usually due to topic, not writing. That is, I might not care as much about extended narratives about plants or seeds, but couldn't resist all the musings on insects and parasites despite myself.

The closer for me is the philosophy. It's not really a philosophy so much as an outlook on life. The world, so often ignored and taken for granted by each of us every day, is a constant miracle in ordinariness. Its simplicity is complex beyond imagination. Dillard not only gets that, she serves as a docent to share that -- all with a very human voice, the type of voice you would like to call friend and walk the afternoon beside if you could.

1-800-DIL-LARD, are you there?"

"Baldacci wrote this in 2005 but is still a good read. The plot, as told by four old friends, is complex but very believable. At some points, the story seems a little drawn out, but overall, I enjoyed it. The shadows of current politics is chilling."