BOOK: Pity the Reader (2019)
Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
Year: 2019
Author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. & Suzanne McConnell
Length: 721 minutes / 12.02 hours
People will always ask successful writers how they do what they do. What tricks do they have? What techniques make their writing timeless? Kurt Vonnegut is definitely a successful writer, so we'd want to know how he writes so we can apply his lessons to our own work. I picked up this book thinking it was like Stephen King's On Writing, not initially realizing that this book was released over a decade after his death. Consequently, this book was a disappointment.
I would say that Vonnegut did not actually write any of this book. If he had, I'm sure it would have been much shorter. Instead, we get a pseudo-biography of the man who wrote such classics as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle. This is a book written by Suzanne McConnell. And while she may have been close enough to Vonnegut to glean...