Book #84: What of the Night

Title: What of the Night
Author: Stephen Carter

I've read several of the essays in Stephen Carter's collection What of the Night in Sunstone, and once I realized that they were, for the most part, previously published essays, I wasn't sure that I would enjoy rereading them (although I liked them the first time). But I was surprised and pleased to see that although the essays likely were not written with a collection in mind, the ordering of the essays, although not strictly chronological, tied them together in a way that made them seem richer by being together. I feel that I got a better picture of Carter as a man and a writer and a thinker by reading them together than I did when I read each one separately. As a new MFA student, I was also heartened to read about Carter's own assertion that he went to school to learn how to write because it wasn't something that came naturally to him. It gives me hope that I, too, will one day be able to call myself a writer.