Book Review: The War of Art

If you’ve noticed a trend in my book reviews recently (Humankind and The Color of Law), you will have noticed that I have really enjoyed books that I wasn’t too excited to read. Well, unfortunately, the opposite is true here. I really wanted to like this book. It just fell flat for me.

The good news is that it is really short. So, a couple of mornings over coffee and I am on to the next one. Sadly, when the good news about the book is that it is short, it isn’t saying much.

A number of people that I follow and some I know and admire recommended this one. I was really looking forward to it. Instead, I got a message that being a creative is hard and you just have to answer the bell. No shit.

Being a creative is hard. I don’t really consider myself a creative, but I have written about why I write here before, and it is hard. It’s one of the reasons that this blog is so inconsistent. This is my third post this week. You might not see another one for a month. Who knows?

Whenever an agent talks to me about writing a blog, usually because they think it is going to really help their business (it most likely isn’t, by the way), I really try to get them to understand what they are taking on. It’s really time consuming. It takes a lot to pull off successfully. Just this five paragraph review of a not great book is still going to take nearly half an hour to produce. So, I get it. Work is hard. Do the work. There, you’ve now read this book.

It takes a lot for me to really just not like a book. It’s pretty rare. On to the next one. This one won’t be making the reading list.