On Writing Well, William Zinsser
You read The Elements of Style. You implemented its advice. You know when you should use a comma and when, you shouldn’t. But after learning the inner workings of correct punctuation—and the correct use of the em-dash—you thought, “Yeah, but how do I write good? Gooder? No…more goodly.”
Enter William Zinsser, who wrote On Writing Well not to compete with The Elements of Style, but “to complement it. The Elements of Style was a book of admonitions: do this, don’t do that. What it didn’t address was how to apply those principles to the various forms that nonfiction writing and journalism can take.”
The amount of times I was reading this book and stopped to tell Wiff about it numbered in the hundreds. Every few pages I’d underline something and run to tell her about it. After a while, anytime she saw me pick up the book she’d slip out for a walk. This is the best book on writing I’ve ever read.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
If you ever have a bad day, remind yourself that things could be worse. Maybe you got fired, but at least you have a roof over your head. Maybe you hit your shin on the bed frame, but at least you’ve got a bed to sleep in. And no matter how bad things get, at least you’re not one of the millions of political prisoners who were forced to work in Soviet labor camps—although banging your shin comes close.
In 1945, Solzhenitsyn, a decorated WWII officer, wrote a letter criticizing Stalin. Soon after, he found himself in a Soviet labor camp doing an 8-year stint. After he was released and immigrated to the United States, he wrote One Day, the first in-depth look into the life of a prisoner in the gulag system.
I read this because it was on the reading list for the Moral Obligation course James Stockdale taught at the Naval War College. And I’m glad I did.
