On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a re-read for me (from before I started keeping a list), and I found King's advice, style, and experience with writing to be everything one could hope for. Direct, efficient, and validated by success. While he does speak to the use of crude language in your writing, and when you should and shouldn't use it, he sure uses a lot of it himself. In his quest to be true to himself as a character, he drops a lot of f-bombs and other colorful terms. This tells me that his true self is crass and unfiltered, which is a great way to be true to a character, but this is nonfiction. I'm less interested in the character of Stephen King, and more interested in his content, so I don't know if all of that was necessary, but whatever. So I dropped a star because I can't recommend this book to all audiences of aspiring authors, but if you can handle the adult content and want to be a better creative writer, this is a great read.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pros:
Events from the Holocaust are so much more real and disturbing when you get to know someone who lived it. And that is what this book does. You get to know Anne as a person, with all of her strengths and weaknesses. You feel her fears and frustrations, her petty disagreements and her adolescent highs. When those final entries come, and you sense some maturity coming to her, and with it her growing fear, the events of the times take on new meanings. It was an awful time to be alive, and and this book does an unusually effective job at portraying it.

Cons:
I don't think I needed to read the definitive edition. The entries of a young woman going through puberty were not meant for the public, and even if they were, I didn't gain anything from them. They don't add to the experience or the message of the book, so I can see why they were edited out of the mass-market version.