"I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like" and other books about this magical wordform

When I turned 18, my uncle gave me a book of metaphors as a gift. This is probably because he only sees me once every two years and I'm the only other member of our family that might find this book remotely interesting - and it is. But I also think there's a reason it's been relegated to bathroom reading in our household.

Besides its heartwarming and engaging cover, of course.

Metaphor, as our class text clearly states, is present in every level of our lives. It is in our turns of phrase and essay cliches as well as the fabric of our conversations. As a defense of the use of metaphor in writing as valuable and relatable, rather than lazy and trite, I appreciate this book.

But I don't think that is what the authors intended it to be used for, and, while I find their theory in general mind-bending, I don't particularly see how it applies to me as a writer. In fact, of our three texts, this one seemed by far the least applicable to my writing life.

I was strongly reminded of my literary theory class while reading this text: the magnitude of the importance of metaphor was staggering but distant. Unlike the frustration of Macrorie and the search for peace and learning of Pirsig, I did not connect with this book on a personal level. Where I lived the struggles of the other authors and sympathized (sometimes limitedly) with their experiences, the metaphor study seems too big to be narrowed into one application. It is more like the discovery of a theory than the development of a single rhetorical argument.

In summary, this book while profoundly cool, is going to require a large bit of class discussion before I really understand what it was trying to tell me.