The A To Z Of You And Me Book Report

Sometimes a book hits you so unexpectedly and you feel as if the world is coming to an end and beginning again in a new and fascinating way. You discover that the words you currently use to define the world aren’t sufficient, that there’s a myriad of words you haven’t discovered and a myriad of ways you haven’t used and combined them. Red roses cease being red, but become a splash of crimson in a sea of green. The sunset transforms into a burst of tangerine against a multicolored sky, instead of simply orange. This book introduces you to a world where language isn’t simply a way to talk, but a way to paint pictures. For me, this book was “The A to Z of You and Me” by James Hannah. Told through the perspective of a dying man named Ivo, the

Prior to reading it, I felt that there was an unwritten code I had to adhere to that dictated how I should write. This code told me I couldn’t use words however I wanted to and that everything I wrote had to be literal so the reader would know exactly what I’m saying. However, in “The A to Z of You and Me”, there are sentences that are left to interpretation. The book is truly written from another person’s perspective. Hannah doesn’t write to tell a story to the reader, but to present another person’s mind to the reader. From this book, I realized how much freedom there is in writing. With phrases such as “blinding blink trails of a dark sun, repeating on her retina” and “straight orange wash of streetlights”, this book revealed to me that it’s possible to bend and break words into phrases that seemingly don’t make sense but can still paint the picture. The first phrase is a strange combination of words, but you can still see the after-image of staring at the sun when you read it. The second phrase uses “straight” and “wash” to describe streetlights, which is unusual, but it easily conveys a picture of a street covered with an orange haze from the street lamps. I was introduced to a new world where I could simply write without worrying about whether my words made sense. It was more fun, I discovered, to write in a way that made sense to me rather than worry about how