“The greatest pleasures of this book are its provocations, which are inseparable from its prose. Ms. Robinson channels the cadences of Emerson and Whitman and says that she owes the stately shape of her sentences to her school-days reading of Cicero. ‘I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for,’ she writes, ‘and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail to find these words.’ On the evidence of language itself, she marvels at the capacity of human perception. She describes the wonder expressed by a group of French students about the number of English words that describe light—glimmer, glitter, glisten, glean, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine—which testify to a human need for distinctions beyond the bare essentials. Words like ‘grace,’ ‘soul’ and ‘miracle,’ she suggests, speak to registers of experience that even the most secular among us are reluctant to relinquish. When I Was a Child I Read Books may seem like a book addressed to Christians—some of the essays have the whiff of the pulpit—but Ms. Robinson’s church is exceptionally broad. Her essays are psalms to an indivisible America.”—Thomas Meaney, The Wall Street Journal
