How to Burn This Book

Have you ever wanted to burn a book? Was there ever a time that you felt so strongly about the content in a story that you needed to just eradicate the book from existence? Well, if you have, then you might just love Evan Witmer’s collection of short stories in How to Burn This Book. He has compiled ten different short stories into one collection that provides you reasons to burn the book (and even encourages you).

The main thing I really liked about this book is the concept. Though, I did not get the actual urge to burn the book, I really enjoyed how that idea was the structure of the collection. Witmer added a reason why the book should be burned after each short story, and I looked forward to seeing what he said was outrageous enough about the story to want to burn it. I also think that the collection is much more connected and flows from story to story very fluidly with the overall concept imposed over them. I haven’t read Witmer’s previous collections, so I don’t know how those were structured, but this one works well as a book and as individual stories.

I also really liked Witmer’s writing style. Even though this is only a collection of short stories, he has a very sophisticated writing style that made these stories very mature and interesting. I find that sometimes short stories aren’t the best representation of an author’s writing, but I think that all of the short stories were very strong with a really solid writing style. It makes me wonder what he could do with a full-length book. If you are a big fan of writing that has a lot of maturity to the storytelling, I think you will really enjoy reading these stories.

Of course, I am a fantasy fanatic, so I do wish that this collection of stories was completely made up of full fantasy stories.  There are several fantasy stories, and they are, for the most part, well-built fantasies considering the small amount of time it takes to create a fantasy world. However, there are several that are not fantasy related which is such a shame when he does so well with building magic, magical creatures, and otherworldly concepts in a limited number of pages. The other non-fantasy stories, were still good, but didn’t capture my interest the same way the fantasy ones did.