I should probably comment on Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek since I excerpted a chunk of it below in an earlier post.

Dillard doesn't exactly explain the premise of her book, but from what I can gather, in a Thoreauvian move she lived alone in a cabin near Virginia's Tinker Creek for several years. I'm still reading it here and there, but I've found it similar to reading a science text book. Last night I fell asleep in a part where she deliberately camps out next to a copperhead. (I'm sorry: who really does that????!) The thing is, before she even gets to the copperhead I know what is coming. She sets out with a sleeping bag, a flashlight, and a sandwich across some fields, presumably to spend a night out under the stars. I'm thinking to myself: Is she insane? She could be eaten by a bear or a snake. Bad idea. But of course she finds the copperhead and decides to camp right next to it! Very saucy of her: "There was something about its eyes, some alien alertness...what on earth must it be like to have scales on your face? All right then, copperhead. I know you're here, you know I'm here. This is a big night. I dug my elbows into rough rock and dry soil and settled back on the hillside to begin the long business of waiting out a snake."

Not surprisingly, Dillard seems sort of superhuman to me. I'm in awe of her capacity for wonder. Here she is explaining her quirkiness in her own words: "I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, 'Do you know that in the head of a caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred and twenty-eight separate muscles?' The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life."