Hello fellow writers, and Happy Thanksgiving to the 5000 ish of you students who are in the USA.

This month’s book review is of Suppose A Sentence by Brian Dillon, a series of essays based on sentences he’s been collecting for 25 years, all stored in 45 notebooks.

Many of these sentences are from notable writers, like Joan Didion, James Baldwin and Samuel Beckett, but they are also from unexpected sources. Joan Didion’s sentence is from a photo caption she wrote for Vogue in the 1960’s, for instance. This is a most literary approach and a most quirky one, which makes this book memorable, in my view.

The full video of this book review is now at Lesson 54 of the Complete Freelance Writing Course, and there are a couple of practical experiments for you to try out, based on Brian Dillon’s analysis.

The book is a timely reminder that truly great writing may be beyond AI, and that, say, to combine the intimate and the detached with the mastery a writer like Hilary Mantel does, may remain a mysterious human capability. But AI, thanks too for the marketing advice!