Alas, poor Sutherland
Dec. 21st, 2009 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Finished Curiosities of Literature last night. I had been looking forward to it, but I'm afraid it was a disappointment. I loved the idea of it -- a collection of miscellany and trivia from the literary world -- but I could hardly believe how poorly done it was! It looked like it had never encountered an editor in its existence. Misplaced commas (even allowing for differences between British and American systems, they were wildly misplaced), missing articles, and dangling modifiers are bad enough in normal books; in books written by English professors, they're mind-boggling. Even worse were the major factual mistakes: Sutherland misquoted Shakespeare, identified Georgina Hogarth as Dickens's daughter rather than his sister-in-law, named Colin Firth as the star of the 2005 theatrical version of Pride and Prejudice, and referred to Sherlock Holmes as a "medical figure." I'm guessing there were probably even more that I wasn't educated enough to catch. I wanted to rank this book higher because of the great concept and the author's wicked wit -- he has some genuinely funny zingers in there -- but when your book is all about literary facts and you keep getting those wrong (when they're so easy to check, too), you've pretty much undermined your whole project. Wonderful idea, horribly sloppy execution. Two-and-a-half out of five stars.
Now I'm back in the mystery genre with Ends of the Earth by Tim Downs. This is my fourth "Bug Man" novel; I think I'm reading them out of order, but this one was on sale a few weeks ago, so I just snatched it up.
Now I'm back in the mystery genre with Ends of the Earth by Tim Downs. This is my fourth "Bug Man" novel; I think I'm reading them out of order, but this one was on sale a few weeks ago, so I just snatched it up.
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Date: 2009-12-21 04:07 pm (UTC)