Annie Dillard, The Living ****

The Living paints an astonishingly clear and poetic picture of life on Bellingham Bay in Washington during the second half of the nineteenth century. Every page has at least one beautiful image; the edition I read even has a great photo on the cover. It's one of those books that gives such a sense of (time and) place that the plot barely matters to me. Which is a good thing, because The Living barely has a plot, and the story it does tell peters out almost 100 pages from the end of the book.