A solid collection of essays on the writing life, Daschunds, grief, and sadness. I have read anything by this author before but this is good writing.

(The publisher sent me this book along with a book I won from a LibraryThing Giveaway). ( )

Very detailed and interesting review of essays. ( )

I found this book of fifteen essays really slow paced. I also had trouble understanding some of the essays. Maybe it was just too over my head. I really tried to finish this but I couldn't get through it.

Fifteen essays make up this uneven collection. I found them all difficult to read for various reasons. I wasn't impressed with her Room in London, it was just blah.

Time and Biology: On the Threshold of the Sacred was so full of literary name dropping that I never figured out what Pritchard herself was trying to say. I don't mean name dropping in the gossipy sense that she claimed to personally know these writers, but, rather there so many brief quotes that I was annoyed that the essay was written show how well read she is. Sixteen pages of that.

Doxology is thirty boring pages about her dog. Her grief of her parent's deaths, the title essay, rates only twenty pages--much of it about the cost and procedure of cremation. There were also brief, lightweight pieces on Walt Whitman and Georgia O'Keeffe. There are other short pieces that aren't especially memorable.

Finding Ashton, about a US female soldier in Afghanistan, was moving but there was too much about Melissa Pritchard and not enough about Ashton Goodman.

"Still God Helps You": Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave is the most powerful essay in the collection. It is a well written piece of social journalism. Here Pritchard lets Manyuol tell his story with a minimum of insertion of Pritchard's feelings and beliefs. This was the sort of writing I had hoped for when I requested the book, I wish there had been more like it. ( )

As a fan of Pritchard's writing I was excited for the chance to read this essay collection. And it didn't disappoint! The best part of this book is that it didn't feel like you were reading a collection of disconnected essays- more like you were having an afternoon chat with a friend. Highly recommended!

I enjoyed reading these essays. Pritchard's language is elegant and clear, sophisticated but not pretentious. She seems to approach the essay in the spirit of the original etymology -- to test, to try, to weigh -- and so some of selections may be too brief or too meandering for readers who expect an essay to have a clear thesis or theme, thoroughly elaborated. I was able to just enjoy the ride, and at the end of each essay, I had a list of interesting questions I wanted to explore in my own writing, topics to research, and books and other texts to hunt down and read. That's enough for me.

I think I would have liked some more organization to the collection, be that thematic sections or some thread that I could trace through each essay. Additionally, at times I thought Pritchard overdid one of her recurring themes: writers "as priests, as prophets, as soul transformers" and books as "devotional objects." I suppose in many ways I agree with her about the potential of literature and the responsibilities of artists, so this may just reflect my constitutional dislike for quasi-mystical hyperbole (and my skepticism towards anyone who puts herself and her fellows up on too high a pedestal). ( )

This is an extraordinary collection of essays. They range from meditations on writing to odes to her dog to an examination of a life of a young man who escaped from slavery in Sudan and made his way to the US. From the seemingly mundane to the sacred, Pritchard writes in a marvelously clear voice that illuminates the power and importance of the writing life. ( )

A Solemn Pleasure is a fantastic book of essays. From a brief stay in London, to the death of the author's mother, and the story of a child slave, each one makes you think. I laughed, was frankly envious of one, and cried at several others. My favorite essay might be Doxology, about the author's Dachshund; though A Room in London is a close second.

One thing I loved about this book is that the writing is up close; personal. I felt less like I was reading a book of essays, and more like I was having a series of long conversations with a friend. Anyone who enjoys reading essays will love this book.

(Full Disclosure: I received a review copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program). ( )

I wanted to love this book of essays but I felt pulled in many directions and I could not find a unifying theme, or even a unifying voice. The essays range in tone from the whimsical to the elegiac. Some feel like fragments of something that might have been good if Pritchard had spent more time on them. Some drag on, in particular the one titled "Doxology" which may have been meant to be funny. I feel as if these fragments of writing were written by different people and for different audiences.

Although this collection is published in a series entitled "The Art of the Essay" I feel the book instead shows ways the essay can stray, examples of how a potentially good essay can be led in fruitless directions when an author spends too much time alone and without editorial feedback, or tries too hard to innovate in a category of writing that is already well understood. I could have done without the lists, the unexplained fragments of poems, the portentous quotations that just lie there on the page and aren't discussed in any way by what follows from the author.

The most maddening piece of writing in this collection was an 'essay,' and I do apologize for writing air quotes just then, entitled "On Kasper Hauser." Kasper Hauser is a great topic for a thoughtful essay. But Pritchard's 'essay' in this collection is nothing more than a page and a half of her experience of writing an essay about Kasper Hauser, an essay not published here but that was apparently published in Conjunctions magazine. All we get here is a page and a half of description of Pritchard's experience of writing an essay about Kasper Hauser. She ate scones at the time.

This volume is lauded in many blurbs on the back which just makes me feel that the literary fiction community of writers is an incestuous group of back scratchers. ( )

In A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard paraphrases a Sufi parable for one of her essays titled “Elephant in the Dark.” To me it captures one of the most compelling thematic arcs of her collection: the slipperiness of art or art’s ‘many-sidedness’:

“Some Indians kept an elephant in a dark room. Because it was impossible to see the elephant, those who wanted to know something about this exotic beast had to feel it with their hands. The first person went into the darkness and felt the elephant’s trunk and announced, This creature is like a water pipe. The next person felt the elephants’ ear an asserted, No. It’s like a giant fan. A third person felt the elephant’s leg and declared, That’s not true. This animal resembles a pillar. A fourth person felt the elephant’s back and concluded, Not at all. It’s like a throne. Different points of view produce different opinions. If someone had brought in a candle, they would have all felt like fools.”

In many ways, art can be described as this kind of groping around in the dark—a necessary attempt at guessing the higher truths. Pritchard uses this folktale to preface one of the more didactic essays in the collection that discusses fiction writing technique, but to me it also encompasses Pritchard’s larger intent: to argue and show that art is a form of transcendence, that it can bring a little light into a largely banal world, that writing can be “active prayer.” The essays in A Solemn Pleasure might be seen as mere inspirational accounts but they are done remarkably well: they elevate your sense of creative purpose and also teach something practical about that kind of creative living. Pritchard is exhorting us to think grand but stay grounded. To Pritchard, writing isn’t a job or a vocation—it’s tantamount to a kind of divine calling—but one that shouldn’t keep you above the fray or inflate your sense of importance or intensity of your ‘suffering.’ I did roll my eyes at some of the heavy-handed attempts to deify the writing experience (evoking the American Transcendatalists; think Emerson and Thoreau) but looking past these moments there were some gems that were just the right balance of the personal, philosophical rumination, and reportage that I find strikes the right flavor profile of essays I enjoy.

Some noteworthy pieces in A Solemn Pleasure:
- “A Graven Space” (on painter Georgia O’Keefe, “an artist of uncommon and cultivated paradox.” It is an essay where Pritchard argues that we need to demystify the idea of creation: “Many of us stay busy inventing reasons not to create—we complain, while, and will not work because we are terrified of doing so…”; “crank down the pedestal.”)

-“Still God Helps You: Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave (a retelling of Pritchard’s experience meeting and helping 33-year-old William Mawwin, a student in Phoenix, Arizona, a man who survived slavery in Sudan; feels like a straightforward human interest reportage piece and yet Pritchard draws out strong lessons on empathy and importance of the writer-as-witness)

- “Decomposing of Articles of Faith” (more a prose poem than an essay that alternates lines of a prayer with transcendental musings)

- “Time and Biology: On the Threshold of the Sacred” (explores whether writers and artists have a kind of ethical or moral responsibility or whether there is such a thing as art free of a moral or political stance of some kind.)

It’s hard to categorize the kind of writer Pritchard is. Some essayists have that writerly lyrical power that wow you with the sheer force of their writing; others have a strong narrative bent, a knack for drawing you in with their storytelling; others have that journalistic smarts and can weave in the personal with contemporary and historical analysis, drawing from current events and footnotes; others still can be profound just by their navel-gazing self-examination, revealing themselves in ways that reveal the world. What I don’t like are writers who go full-tilt digressive, who think the essay grants them license to verbal-vomit all over the place; some readers like that kind of hazy brushstroke, but I don’t usually or can only tolerate it in very, very good writers (see Rebecca Solnit). To her credit Pritchard’s writing feels tighter than most mainly because most of the essays here are relatively short and focused, either topically or conceptually. That said, Pritchard’s essays don’t jump out for being exemplars of any of these aforementioned styles. But in some way, this made A Solemn Pleasure so delightfully readable. Pritchard wasn’t straining herself like a singer hitting those high notes she has no business hitting (which is what I felt was the main problem with much-hyped Empathy Exams from Leslie Jamison.) At the same time, there are no standout essays here, no one single piece that truly bowled me over. Overall, pretty solid as a whole. And I will take away the parable about the blind men and the elephant and Pritchard’s wonderful lessons on the writing life. ( )

This was a thought-provoking set of essays, highlighting various aspects of a writer's life... inspiration, growth, dedication to the craft as opposed to the paycheck.

While not all of the essays resonated with me, personally, I particularly liked Elephant in the Dark for its exploration on what perspective truly means, A Graven Space for the push for women to be true to themselves as artists, and Decomposing Articles of Faith, if for no other reason than the beauty of her words. ( )

These were a pretty heady, but incredibly well written, bunch of essays on a range of topics, but most had some thread into what it feels like to live a writer's life, or maybe more accurately, an observer of life to enable one to write. Being a writer, I thought I would find a bit more inspiration here (especially on the art of essay, which I'm just learning about), but really there are the thoughts, opinions and feelings of the writer. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but for whatever reason, I found these really slow going and not that enjoyable. For a reader to spend this much time in another person's thoughts probably only works if she resonates with the author; and I did not feel that connection. However, I have vowed to let some time pass and give them another go. It is the kind of writing that did make me think and consider in a new way, and there were moments of discomfort, and that is powerful writing. ( )