I am unsure where or when I picked up this book. I've had it in my pile for a while now, and picked it up when the slower, non-fiction I've been reading was starting to disinterest me. The book was a slower read than I expected it to be, but I'm unsure where my expectations came from.

The book is about Charlie, a lawyer in Small Town, Georgia, and daughter of a defense lawyer, Rusty, who believes that all people deserve a defense, especially those found guilty in the court of public opinion and unlikely to receive a fair trial or vigorous defense otherwise - you know, the lawyer who is guaranteed to make enemies.

Said enemies take out their vengeance on Rusty's family, and there we have the set up for the main character's demeanor, struggle, conflict, strengths, and development.

This is the first Karin Slaughter book I've read. Mom's favorable opinion of Slaughter's writing influenced my reading the book. There were a number of places where I nodded in understanding of some of the characters' actions, so Slaughter's writing is believable and understandable, which is great.

I just don't know that I'm a better person for having read this book.

Stay with me.

Many of the fiction books I've read have a moral to them. If they lack a moral, then they might contain some incident that causes reflection, a pondering, something to consider that affects the reader's life. Take the Imperial Radch series, for example. Leckie writes about privilege and power and how they manifest corruption, all in the framework of a space opera. Heinlein books were all social commentary.

This book, however, I don't feel that. I don't know the lesson, the moral, the point of the book. Yes, "telling a good story" is a sufficient point to a book, but this one didn't leave me with "whoa, that was a good story," or similar thought.

Eh, I don't know. I'd rate this worth reading if you're a fan of Slaughter. Maybe a Slaughter fan can recommend another book written by her that might better showcase her writing?

She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.
Location 167

I like Gamma already.

"Charlie needs to know that she can depend on you. You have to put that baton firmly in her hand every time, no matter where she is. You find her. Don’t expect her to find you.”
Location 257

She asked, “Whose side are you on?”

“There’s no such thing as sides. There’s just doing the right thing.”

“I hate to blow apart your philosophy, Horatio, but if there’s a right thing then there’s a wrong thing, and as someone with a law degree, I can tell you that stealing the murder weapon from a double homicide, then lying about it to an FBI agent, can land you on the wrong side of a prison cell for a hell of a long time.”
Location 1858

Horrible things were a hell of a lot easier to digest when you took away the emotion.
Location 2214

“I’m not saying anything about how stupid it is to smoke after having two heart attacks and open-heart surgery.”

“That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”
Location 2265

“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”

“Okay.”

“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
Location 2312

During the first year of their marriage, one of their biggest arguments had been over Ben’s habit of taking off his socks every night and dropping them on the floor of the bedroom. Charlie had started kicking them under the bed when he wasn’t looking, and one day Ben had realized that he didn’t have any socks left and Charlie had laughed and he had yelled at her and she had yelled back at him and because they were both twenty-five, they had ended up fucking each other on the floor.
Location 2346

I laughed at this. Why? the Underwear Saga, of course.

Charlie washed clothes. Ben folded.
Location 2372

Yep. Good separation of laundry.

Charlie’s shift from supportive spouse to raging harpy had not been gradual. Seemingly overnight, she was no longer capable of compromise. She was no longer able to let things go. Everything Ben did irritated her.
Location 2379

She had always been drawn to people who were delighted by the world, who looked out rather than in.
Location 3254

They had traveled extensively throughout their marriage, Anton taking jobs or Sam attending a conference with the sole purpose of being somewhere new. Dubai. Australia. Brazil. Singapore. Bora Bora.
Location 3270

A massive, reversible toll lane cut through the center of the interstate, catering to all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.
Location 3500

Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.
Location 3703

Rusty remained unmoved. “Death snickers at us all, my dear. The eternal footman will not hold my coat forever.”
Location 3803

She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse. Her tea sachets were inside. Charlie said, “We have tea here.”

“I like this kind.” Sam dipped the sachet into the water.
Location 3916

I understand this, too.

They might have been magnets, but they were of unequal power. Everything Sam knew, Gamma knew more.
Location 3958

“Do you think I should do it?” Charlie considered her answer before speaking.

“Would the Sam I grew up with do it? Maybe, though not out of any affinity for Rusty. She would be angry the same way I get angry when something isn’t fair."
Location 3965

Charlie lifted her chin. They could be in a western, or a John Hughes movie if John Hughes had ever written about aggrieved, almost middle-aged women.
Location 4186

The Wilsons took the lack of information with a type of resignation that seemed ingrained in their souls. They were clearly part of that forgotten swath of poor, rural people. They were accustomed to waiting for the system to play out, usually not in their favor.
Location 4633

She had so many things wrong with her body that she could not imagine why someone would purposefully damage themselves.
Location 4932

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.
Location 5377

“A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial."
Location 5410

“I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.”
Location 5415

Rusty said, “A father’s job is to love each of his daughters in the way they need to be loved.”
Location 5444

“You’ve always said that everyone deserves a chance.”

“They do, but I don’t have to be the one who gives it to them.”
Location 5451

“What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it’s worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.” He waved his hand in the air. “Or not, in some cases.”
Location 5454

“Charlotte has always been a pack animal. She doesn’t need to be the leader, but she needs to be in a group. Ben was her group.”
Location 5458

"He’s either involved somehow or he’s an idiot.”

“I told you stupid breaks your heart.”
Location 5479

Her druthers were always to apply logic to a problem, but as with the weather, life existed in a delicate dynamical balance between the fields of mass and motion. In essence, sometimes shit happened.
Location 5782

“I was so relieved when it happened. You don’t realize when you’re that young that you’re going to get older. That there’s going to come a time when you’re not relieved.”
Location 5969

She used the back of her hand to rub her eyes. “I saw Dad do this closing argument once. He talked about how people always obsess about lies. Damn lies. But no one really understands that the real danger is the truth.” She looked up at the white casket. “The truth can rot you from the inside. It doesn’t leave room for anything else.”
Location 6011

“Ben would be happier with someone else.”

“Utter bullshit,” Sam said, her tone clipped. “You have no right to decide on his behalf.”
Location 6281

Of course, she was still pedantic and annoying, but that came with being their mother’s child.
Location 6310

Okay, this is one of the shorter books on my "I have read" list that I don't count as a book, per se. I read it in a dead tree format. It contained words on the pages. The whole object had a cover, title page, copyright, and sections. It qualifies as a book in every legitimate definition of the word.

But it's too short for my book reading count.

This is a printing of David Foster Walace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. If I had heard it at my college graduation, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have understood it nearly as well as my current day self does. I'm pretty sure if my 21 year old self had understood his words as well as current day self does, my life would have been significantly different.

I'm also pretty sure my 60 year old self will want to smack my current self upside the head, for STILL not understanding these things.

It's a 20 minute read, available in many places online (and in video format, if that's your thing). Worth reading / watching / experiencing.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
Page 33

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Page 54

This book was recommended in a slack channel I'm in, along with How to Write Short. The two books together helped her write better copy for a site she was developing. Having recently read Draft No. 4 and How to Write Short, I read this one, too.

The book has two big sections. The first section has a series of short sentences giving writing advice. The second section contains examples of writing, along with a critique of the examples. I enjoyed reading the second section. The first section annoyed me.

A series of short sentences would be fine if each of the lines were actually a complete sentence. Instead, the book is formated with choppy lines that break apart longer sentences.

So, imagine reading a book.

Where each line has a fragment of a sentence.

And you are supposed to know.

That it is actually a single sentence.

One naturally pauses at a period.

Which is not how this book is meant to read.

The pause habit is not breakable.

In a single book.

Yeah, so the first section annoyed me. Despite this annoyance, the advice is good. I was amused at how much of the advice I ignore, especially when it comes to pronouns. I am so bad with my use of pronouns. In particular, I use too many of them.

Anyway, main themes of the book:

1. Use short sentences, you don't need long sentences.

2. Have meaning in each sentence.

3. Trust yourself. Give yourself authority. Write about what interests you.

4. Notice things.

5. Don't use cliches. Question any sentence that appears unconsidered or "naturally."

6. Learn grammar so that you don't annoy the reader with bad grammar that they might not know about but can sense.

7. Writing is hard work, flow is a myth, "naturally" is, too.

8. Don't use an outline. Sure, take notes, use notes, but don't use an outline.

9. Don't talk down to the reader. Trust the reader.

10. Compose and edit at the same time.

I strongly disagree with the "don't use an outline" advise. At the risk of violating the "don't assume what the author meant" advice elsewhere in the book, perhaps Klinkenborg meant don't be a slave to the outline. Organizing a pile of notes into a coherent work is pretty much creating an outline on the fly. Outlines aren't abdicating thinking about one's writing, it's actively thinking about one's writing and creating a giant note about the direction one wants to go. Nothing wrong with that creation.

I'm not sure I recommend the book, despite learning a lot from it. I did remove a lot of pronouns in this review.

The biggest lesson I learned, however, was, "Don't format a prose book in poetry style, it annoys the reader."

Everything in this book is meant to be tested all over again, by you. You decide what works for you. This is perhaps the most important thing I have to say.
Page 2

Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is.
Page 2

Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.

Know what each sentence says,

What it doesn’t say,

And what it implies.

Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.
Page 3

It’s hard to pay attention to what your words are actually saying. As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying. Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial.
Page 4

Write these things down—the contents of the noise in your head as you write.
Page 6

These assumptions and prohibitions and obligations are the imprint of your education and the culture you live in.

Distrust them.
Page 6

What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too.
Page 7

The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making Says nothing about its necessity.
Page 12

Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you,

The prose of law, science, business, journalism, and most academic fields.
Page 12

That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools:

The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow,

The ability to speak to the reader in silence.
Page 13

No two sentences are the same unless they’re exactly the same, word for word.

(And, in a lifetime of writing, it’s unlikely you’ll ever write the same sentence twice.)
Page 19

I laughed at this one.

The purpose of a sentence is to say what it has to say but also to be itself.
Page 21

No sentence can afford to be merely transitional.

If you’ve written clearly —

And you know what you’ve said and implied

As surely as you know what you haven’t said —

The reader will never get lost reading your prose

Or have trouble following you without transitions.
Page 25

In journalism, the equivalent of the topic sentence is the notorious “nut graf,”

A paragraph that tells you the content of the article you’re about to read,

As if you couldn’t proceed without a précis.
Page 26

I'm delighted to have learned about the nut graf in Draft No. 4.

If you love to read — as surely you must — you love being wherever you find yourself in the book you’re reading,

Happy to be in the presence of every sentence as it passes by,

Not biding your time until the meaning comes along.
Page 26

They recall the moment, as children, when we came upon the phrase

“And then one day.”

You know exactly how those four words feel.

You know exactly what they do.
Page 27

I love this. And then one day.

Were you asked to write in order to be heard, to be listened to?
Page 30

We forget something fundamental as we read:

Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.

We can’t see all the decisions that led to the final shape of the sentence.

But we can see the residue of those decisions.
Page 32

Imagine the reason behind each sentence.

Why is it shaped just this way and not some other way?

Why that choice of words?

Why that phrasing?

Why that rhythm?
Page 34

What you write—what you send out into the world to be read—

Is the residue of the choices and decisions you make.

Choices and decisions you are responsible for.
Page 36

Start by learning to recognize what interests you.

Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,

So they never learn how to notice,

Not even what interests them.

Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed,

Already sifted and sorted and categorized

By everyone else, by people with real authority.
Page 38

There’s always an urge among writers

To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses

Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible,

As if every perception ended in a trope,

As if the writer were a dynamo

Turning the world into words.
Page 40

Don’t let the word “years” alarm you.

Think of it as months and months and months and months.
Page 46

Yes!

This is surprisingly hard to do at first

Because our reading habits are impatient and extractive.
Page 49

And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself,

Camouflaged by familiarity.
Page 50

Try reading your work aloud.

The ear is much smarter than the eye,

If only because it’s also slower

And because the eye can’t see rhythm or hear unwanted repetition.
Page 50

How well you read aloud reveals how well you understand the syntax of a sentence.

Do you remember, in school, going around the room,

Each student in turn reading a paragraph out loud?

Remember how well some students read and others, how badly?

It was a difference in comprehension,

Not of the sentence’s meaning,

But of its texture, pace, structure, actuality.
Page 52

Don’t read straight through without stopping.

Read until your ear detects a problem.
Page 52

How many sentences begin with the subject?

How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject?

Or with a word like “When” or “Since” or “While” or “Because”?

How many begin with “There” or “It”?

What kinds of nouns do you see?

Abstractions? Generalizations?
Page 56

Are you using “with” as a preposition or as a false conjunction, a false relative pronoun?
Page 57

You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syntax to write well.

But you do need to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

Between active and passive constructions.

The relation between a pronoun and its antecedent.
Page 57

You need to look up even familiar words every time you have a doubt

And especially when you don’t have a doubt.

That is, very often. That is, every time you write.
Page 58

You’ve already looked up every word you don’t know.

Haven’t you?
Page 61

Oops.

So why not give up the idea of “flow” and accept the basic truth about writing?

It’s hard work, and it’s been hard work for everyone all along.
Page 67

The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense,

Exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.
Page 68

It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence

And adjusting it until you can.

Just as it’s always useful to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.
Page 74

Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state.

Daily.

Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences — will not.

That distinction is worth keeping in mind.
Page 77

Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions,

With anything, starting from nowhere.
Page 80

Composing a sentence always involves revision

Unless you write down the words of a sentence exactly as they pop into your head.

And why would you do that?
Page 86

So, you’ll be revising each sentence as you compose it.

Composing each sentence as you revise it.
Page 90

What writers fear most is running out of material.
Page 96

You want to begin the piece, not introduce it, which is the difference between a first sentence already moving at speed and a first sentence that wants to generalize while clearing its throat.
Page 102

Don’t get trapped by the thought of writing sequentially.
Page 104

We’re always hastening to be done writing,

But we’re also hastening to get out of the presence of our thoughts.

Everything about thinking makes us nervous.

We don’t believe there’s much of value to be found there.
Page 107

My thought was, "Who the f--- thinks this?"

The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written.
Page 108

How do you decide what works?

What do you do when your sentences seem to waver in quality and value before your eyes?

You read what you’ve written, and it looks good.

You read it again, and it looks bad.

You read it a third time, and now you can’t tell.
Page 110

You can almost never fix a sentence —

Or find the better sentence within it —

By using only the words it already contains.

If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing.
Page 113

Accept it: you’ll surely fail again and just as surely succeed.

There’s nothing linear or steady in your growth as a writer.
Page 115

And yes, you may begin a sentence with “but.”
Page 119

YAY!

Use the simple past tense —

Avoiding the layering of several pasts —

And give the reader clear temporal clues when needed.
Page 121

Our lives are full of endings.

The sun goes down every day.

We ask for the check.

Eventually it comes.

How broad a hint does it take to make a reader who lives on a planet full of endings
Page 121

Why reproduce the whole scene when only one moment matters?
Page 123

A reader who’s opened a book to its first page is in a tender predicament,

Whether she’s standing in the aisle of a bookstore or sitting at home.

All the authority belongs to her — the authority to close the book.

And yet she’s willing — yearning — to surrender her authority to the author

And keep reading.
Page 127

You’ve been told again and again that you have to seduce the reader,

Sell the story in the very first paragraph.

(Nonsense, but it explains a lot of bad writing.)
Page 128

I laughed at this one, too.

No subject is so good that it can redeem indifferent writing.

But good writing can make almost any subject interesting.
Page 129

People clamor to tell their stories in words.

This doesn’t make them writers,

Nor does it make their stories matter.
Page 130

You may be used to denying your perceptions and dismissing your awareness.

You may be caught in a constant state of demurral.
Page 131

Watch for the chronic language of self-disparagement,

The moments when you say, “My problem is …” Or “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

If you say these kinds of things, you probably say them out of habit, almost unconsciously.

This is a product of your education too, at home and at school.

Pay attention to it.

Recognize how harmful it is.

Its message — subliminal and overt — is that your perceptions are worthless.

Do everything you can to subvert this habit.
Page 131

Part of the trouble may be this:
You’re afraid your ideas aren’t good enough,
Your sentences not clever or original enough.
Page 132

It’s surprising how often ideas that seem obvious to you
Are in no way apparent to the reader.
And vice versa.
What seems like common sense to you may come as a revelation to the reader.
Page 132

Some people think that discipline is imposed from without,
Regular hours, strict containment, rigorous exclusion.
Some people think discipline is revealed from within,
Enlightenment, purity, solidity of intent.
Discipline is nothing more than interest and expectation, a looking forward.
It’s never hard to work when you’re interested in what you’re working on.
Page 133

But what if you hate what you’re working on?

It helps to examine the content of your loathing.

What is it you hate?

The movement of your ideas?

The nature of your prose?

The obligations and prohibitions you still secretly honor?
Page 134

It’s surprising how often the trouble with a piece of writing

Has nothing to do with the writing itself.
Page 134

One of the most powerful feelings a writer experiences while working

Is a sense of obligation, of having to make a sentence or a paragraph

This way or that way, being obliged to write that sentence or that paragraph.

It’s a terrible feeling and always a sign of trouble.
Page 136

Don’t preconceive the reader’s limitations.

They’ll become your own.
Page 139

The books that trusted you most may be the ones you love best.
Page 140

You’re not responsible for your readers’ ignorance,

And they’re not responsible for your erudition.
Page 145

“Done” isn’t absolute or arbitrary.

Nor is it really about learning your limits as a writer.

It’s a compromise.
Page 146

“Done enough” sounds too callow to describe the compromise,

So call it “perfection enough,”

As perfect as possible under the circumstances.
Page 147

The better question now is the more fearful one: “How will I know when to stop revising?”
Page 148

Let yourself ask the question why.

Why is the author choosing this word, writing that sentence that way?

Don’t expect to find an answer.

Expect to find some possibilities.
Page 162

This passage has no larger purpose than to exist, to work out, for a moment, the possibilities of some sentences.
Page 166

Reading these sentences — and my commentary on them — you’ll be tempted to side with the writer, to think, “I know what he means” or “I can see what she’s saying.” But that’s because it feels so normal to try to deduce the meaning of the sentence instead of observing what its words actually say.

We’re so trained to read for meaning — to look through the sentence to what we think is the author’s intention—that in our search for it we’re prepared to disregard the literal significance of the prose itself.
Page 169

Don’t make time or frequency an attribute of the vehicle. Let the time or frequency indicator stand on its own. Cars flash past us now and then.
Page 184

He hunched his shoulders, placed one arm on his left leg, and slid into the passenger seat before reaching across his body for his seatbelt.

Can you actually visualize this action? No. Descriptions of physical action require incredible care because we read them with our bodies as well as our brains.
Page 185

Her clothes were nondescript, a white t-shirt and jean shorts.

And yet the writer can describe them. How about She wore a white T-shirt and jean shorts?
Page 193

Dying!