Suppose a Sentence

One of the best books out there that truly makes readers ponder the depth of the sentence. Forget Stanley Fish’s academic forays into grammatology. This tiny book will help you commune sacredly with the soul of sentences and their myriad complexes of meaning and nuance.

Delighted in absorbing Brian Dillon's virtuoso performance, as one would a soloist's concert featuring myriad composers of stylistic variety. I found almost every essay to be a precious, delicious rumination. BRAVO, Brian Dillard!!

In search of a good book on — and in — plain English, I came to this one.The search continues.About forty pages along, the author forces a choice. Read the rest or do a thing of parallel value like straighten shavings peeled into curls by a wood plane. Close call at the time. Stuck with the book.Mr. Dillon’s method is to select sentences, skin them, examine and judge them. After reading several examples, life seemed unimproved by eight pages to extol or even explain one sentence. Some of his choices could not be diagrammed with a French curve and a T-square.A number of others are raised from the arcana of library stacks only to become victims of the authors style. Sometimes oiled by ego and waxed with conceit, he is not above doing a hoity-toity nostril dance on his reader.He also can be a drifting current of anecdote, silhouette and related samples from other works of the sentence’s parent. At this, Mr. Dillon is redemptively skillful. From a few syllables of written DNA, he clones profiles of his preferred writers, some inviting enough to pursue, others to flee from at once. Either way, the profiles are vivid, and stick.So, 3.7 (rounded) stars, less from affection than for grudging regard.

Loved this book. If you are a word nerd and appreciate the multi-dimensional aspects of language, you will enjoy the author's eloquent paen to sentences he loves.

This altogether excellent collection of literary essays examines the sentence as the key unit of prose. Through focused, often probing, analyzes of a range of authors, Dillard’s reflections on composition fascinate. Tending in interest to the decorative, stylistic, and atmospheric (with writers like Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, and James Baldwin) often favored, I found my tastes at times colliding with his preciosity.

...and always find a memorable, if difficult, phrase that opens a door to meandering thought. Perfection. Suppose a sentence.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve read my snob book for the year. This brilliant collection of essays had me hungering for the lunatic-fringe side of writing. Only an insane writer would carefully read and reread passages to discern the meaning and syntax of sentences. Forget about sentences! Let’s take a cakewalk down the etymology of weird words. The words chosen by the author were often obscure and pedantic, like peripatetic, parataxis and paratactically. Remember Mr. Ramsay going from P to Q in "To the Lighthouse?" I’ve gone there now too! This book made me quite mad and I don’t mean angry. I was vexed. On every page, I was forced to look up the meaning of multiple words. Then I did something awful. I made sure I owned those new words. I geeked-out for hours using my newfound, far flung snob lexicon to write sentences, sometimes awful, sometimes spectacular.

A famous good sentence is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The examples in this book suggest the second clause, at least, is true of sentences as well. It may give you a thrill of Schadenfreude to see how Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett sometimes wrote with a leaden pen. But your bad writing will never be bad in the same ways as theirs.The author has included not just those two, but many long and awful sentences for his meditations. The sentences were selected as examples of writing that the author admires. His commentary runs verbose and precious, and occasionally dissolves into a gush. A few examples, but only a few, are interesting.

Forensic analysis of great writing for intelligent readers. Perfect.

A wonderful exploration of the beauty to be found in a single sentence.

A different perspective on writing and literature. Lively and insightful.