While your personal experience gives you insights into the book that I cannot have, I find it encouraging that this books speaks still to those who do not have that degree of personal experience. I would like to know how people who have never lived in the U.S. felt about the book. I know there are many things unique to America throughout that I could laugh at and recall from my own youth.

I can’t help but acknowledge how much my personal experience effects how much I like this book. I am three years younger than Annie Dillard — one of the things that the book does for me (and those of my generation)is not just capture a child’s discovery (which you describe very well), but doing that in the context of postwar America, when both hope and uncertainty were a vital part of the growing up experience. Dillard, in her own subtle way, explores that process very well.

I also lived in Pittsburgh for three years — Sewickley, actually, the village she goes to for the country club subscription dinner-dance towards the end of the book. Pittsburgh has had a rough half century, the decline pretty much starting when Dillard’s memoir begins. Again, she does an excellent job of chronicling what it is like to grow up in a community that is experiencing change that it doesn’t really understand. It has some surprising parallels in the current world.

And finally there are the wonderful small moments that Dillard captures so well it is as if we lived the same life. Like her, I remember well the day the librarian decided to bend the rules and give me a card to the adult library — opening up for both of us a whole new world. And like her I discovered the Modern Library colophon as a quick pointer to great books (although I too found St. Augustine’s Confessions a bit much). I’ve started collecting Modern Library and Everyman’s Library classics in the last few years as a way of reminding myself about my first discoveries of great literature.

This is a quiet, wonderful book. I cannot recommend it too highly to those who have not read it — or underline how rewarding a rereading is. Great review.