If it weren't for goodreads, I could imagine that no one else on earth would find the near fetish-like pleasure I found in this tiny little book. I cherished this thing like a teenage boy oggles over a centerfold, privately, under the covers, with a yellow glow from my bedside lamp, deconstructing sentences like porn deconstructs a woman's body. Fish (oh, I wish that were not your name) illustrates the finite forms of the limitless conveyor of all meaning -- the sentence, in a way that makes all great writing fresh and newly amazing. I have an urge to read the first sentence of every novel I own, a novel in itself, just to pick apart the form each author used to slice that first piece of cake. Of course Fish covers some old favorites, some Dickens, some Austen, but he also includes some amazing analysis of Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford. He even goes hip and takes a sentence from Tana French! I'm still not convinced that Gertrude Stein ever succeeded in her goal of keeping language ever in the present, each word with equal weight, but maybe that's because I don't believe that each word IS equal. I might even try a few of Fish's suggested exercises -- well, I did try in my head, but there is yet no evidence. I want to experiment on my son with one particular exercise: Write out Lewis Carroll's 'Twas Brillig, and ask him to replace the nonsense words with real ones. Will he be familiar enough with the work each word performs to know what kind of word fits where? That's part of what makes the poem so brilliant -- it uses language form to convey meaning, without loading the words themselves with any meaning at all. (Also, slithey toves are awesome.)
This is required reading for every writer and every reader reading above the Grisham/Picoult threshold. I withhold one star 'cuz he started getting preachy and exalted at the end, too worked up, perhaps, in his "last sentence" chapter to make a calm landing on his own last sentence. But I forgive him. All the sentences in the middle were just great.