I regret to have to say I dislike Annie Dillard's prose style enough that I wasn't able to make it through that famous book she wrote. Um, the one about the pond, or whatever it was.

But I did babysit for her 5 year old daughter Rosie once, when I was in high school. What a rambunctious kid.

Um, the one about the pond, or whatever it was.

corrected:

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I regret to have to say I dislike Annie Dillard's prose style enough that I wasn't able to make it through that famous book she wrote.

Oh, good, I was sitting here thinking, "Oh, dear, there goes my literary sophistication, that's some fairly overwrought stuff."

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (I just went and looked it up.)

I am more an E. B. White kind of prose style fan.

Yeah, Annie Dillard is a little ... well, overwrought is as good a word as any. For me, anyway.

Roger Zelazny would go off into flights of twisting imagery, but he used it to describe a specific event/process/proceeding, and it was easy to skip if I wasn't in the mood for a verbal acid trip.

I like the way she wroughts!

Though admittedly "prose stylist" is a kind of back handed compliment comparable to "writer's writer."

But I am not the type of reader who insists that prose be transparent, a clean glass pane. I often prefer the stained glass window approach.

This surprises us not at all.

My favorite Annie Dillard quote:

I don’t do housework. Life’s too short and I’m too much of a Puritan. If you want to take a year to write a book, you have to take that year, or the year will take you by the hair and pull you toward the grave. Let the grass die. I let almost all my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.