Children | Consecration | Knowledge | Motivation | Worship

A PRIVATE LOVE AFFAIR WITH BOOKS
One last item from Annie Dillard’s book, which is simply rich in quotable stories from childhood. She tells of the powerful impact of the Homewood branch of the Carnegie Library system in Pittsburgh. Her mother drove her to the library every two weeks. There she found books that opened up powerful and fascinating worlds to her. It was a love affair with reading that began there: This was the most private and obscure part of life, this Homewood Library: a vaulted marble edifice in a mostly decent Negro neighborhood, the silent stacks of which I plundered in deep concentration for many years. There seemed then, happily, to be an infinitude of books. I no more expected anyone else on earth to have read a book I had read than I expected someone else to have twirled the same blade of grass. I would never meet those Homewood people who were borrowing The Field Book of Ponds and Streams;…