Review: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

This seems like one of those rare books that was probably a lot more fun for the author to write than for the reader to read. The premise is great: to tell the same short story in 99 different styles. It’s super creative and amusing just how many different ways you can convey more or less the same info. But when trying to actually read this, I ran into a few issues: (1) many of the styles are borderline nonsense and unreadable and (2) even with all the creativity, reading the same thing 99 times gets fairly boring.

Still, I love the basic idea of the book, and I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have been far more interesting if he wrote it in the styles of different authors. E.g., Here’s the story as it might have been written by, say, Arthur Conan Doyle, Cormac McCarthy, William Shakespeare, Lee Child, and so on. I think that would’ve been a lot more fun to read.

Rating: 3 stars