That’s for sure …

… A Good Editor Is Hard to Find by Cassandra Nelson | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Which brings us to Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends, edited by Benjamin B. Alexander. Insofar as books are windows to the soul, this one is quite a conundrum. O’Connor possesses one of the sharpest minds readers will ever encounter, and her dry humor and understated brilliance are at their best in her correspondence. The Habit of Being, an earlier and more substantial collection of O’Connor’s letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1979, is a treasure. But here her words have been arranged and edited so bizarrely and so sloppily that the overall effect of the book is to drive a careful reader mad.