I Don't Buy Books. Usually.

I don't buy books. Usually. However, a few months ago I purchased used copies of Time and Again by Jack Finney and A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek by Annie Dillard on
e-Bay. Why these two?

Time and Again is a novel that encompasses a bit of a mystery, but although the plot holds my interest, it's the method of time travel that compels me to reread it, that and the exceptional feeling of living along side illustrator Simon Morley as he returns to New York City in the late 1800's. The time period from 1880 or so through the turn of the century and on, when so much was brand new and exciting: telephones, radio, automobiles, airplanes, even elevators, has always fascinated me and captured my imagination.

It was a simpler time, with less stress in many ways, but the romance dissolves and reality kicks in when Simon talks to a bus driver as his horse slips and slides in the snow and a bitter wind numbs both mind and body. He has to stand, the driver explains, because once a man returned to the station frozen to death in his seat. Then there's the description of entering a lobby full of spittoons. Finney switches again, to tell of a magical night when Manhattan was alive with young and old enjoying the new snow and crowding the streets in horse drawn sleighs. It's a wonderful book and one that I'm glad to own. And, it has a sequel, Time after Time, which was given to me as a gift.

I read less than half of Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek before I returned it to the library a few years ago, not out of boredom, but because it was just too full of possibilities for me to continue. Since I'm a nature lover and love to write, I found myself wanting to comment, or enlarge on her writing on each page. Almost every paragraph spun out at me like a writer's prompt, a call that hates to go unanswered. There was also the opposite feeling I get each time I'm face with awesome writing, "Pull the plug on the computer and bury the manuscript--you haven't a chance in hell of becoming a writer."

Perhaps.

But I intend to keep writing and to go back to Tinker's Creek with Annie Dillard and old New York with Jack Finney "Time and Again."