Holy the Firm

Another key benefit of e-books is ease of highlighting and organising your notes. Cal Flyn, Five Books deputy editor and herself an author, recommends Holy the Firm, by Annie Dillard, as a case study of how useful this can be:

“Annie Dillard, the American nature writer, is one of my favourite authors, having the most wonderfully erudite, transcendental style—every sentence is a flight of literary prowess—and so my e-book copies of her books are absolutely grafittied with electronic highlighter pen. Clicking through to my Kindle ‘notebook’, I find them all neatly gathered and colour-coded—exactly the sort of thing I don’t have the discipline to keep up otherwise. These are things I wouldn’t want to forget: “There are two kinds of nun, out of the cloister or in,” she writes in Holy the Firm. “You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer”. It’s a beautiful book, and I’m glad I can refresh my memory of its brightest parts so easily. The same goes for her most famous work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (“This is the now, the flickering, broken light…”). She’s an artist. I can’t recommend them enough.”

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