Robert Day’s Reviews > Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction > Status Update

Finally finished all the exercises. Loved some and the rest were okay.

These exercises lead me towards things that I have already done. Perhaps I should have written this book and these exercises. Perhaps I will.

Six out of the twenty exercises completed, some more successfully than others. Then again, some of the exercises are better than others.

I read a bit of one of the stories to the wife and when I'd done she said "that's just how you write." In the light of my last comment about this book being an object lesson in how not to write, I'm not at all sure that this comment pleased me.

This book is teaching me so very, very much about what not to write like. Most of the stuff here is like the very worst experimental fiction, the kind that baffles and bores in equal part. Don't waffle, baffle or bore, Robert.

An essay about headaches that is really excepts from a journal the author kept about his headaches. Is this art? Who am I to say.

Very diverse essays. Makes me think that I can do this. Heck, it even makes me think that I'm already doing this!

I have no appetite to tell you anything about what I've just read.

You know, this is really good. It's a collection of essays and stories that really make you (me) think, but then, after each piece, there's another essay about the original essay by the same author. Genius! Thing is, they are all true (as far as anything can be true) stories.

Strange but enjoyable fusions of one style with another. The art of the possible.