This Week In Books: #13
Jan. 8th, 2007 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanIncluding both a book about zombies and one which almost turned me into a zombie.
1) Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss
This book, which is ostensibly about punctuation, garnered a lot of attention right after it was published. Unfortunately, it's not entirely warranted. Truss is an amusing author, but spends the better part of the book (70% or more) bewailing the current inattention to 'correct usage,' than she does to actually explaining what correct usage is. This grousing is often humorous, but can be quite grating at other times, as during the extended sequence toward the book's beginning when Truss belittles one of her readers for wishing there was a good reasource from which to learn punctuation...before spending a good portion of the rest of her book explaining that no hard-and-fast rules exist, or that she doesn't have the time to get into them. So, no Ms. Truss, your book is not, in fact, "the book for [her]!" I also found her bellyaching in the final chapter over the state of punctuation (and grammar and spelling) in text messaging and Internet communication a bit histrionic. These mediums are time-savers; it would be ridiculous to hold a "C u l8r" cell-mail to the same standard as a published work. It's nothing more than the textual manifestation of the preexisting distinction between vernacular and formal speech. That said, Eats, Shoots... is entertaining as far as light reads go, and I enjoyed the historical tidbits concerning various forms of punctuation and their arcane usages.
2) The Columbia Anthology Of Traditional Chinese Literature - Victor Mair, ed.
Or as I like to call it, The Baby Blue Annihilator, this book contains 1,300 pages of Chinese literature in translation spanning everything from the 17th-century B.C.E. oracle bones right up to the end of the Qing dynasty. The strengths of this anthology are its massive scope, the inclusion of heretofore-unpublished translations and works not usually considered "literature," and the copious footnoting of references, translation difficulties, usage, and so forth. The weaknesses are also numerous. The works are only roughly organized by timeline, and there is no index of authors or the works themselves, necessitating that readers first guess into what genre a specific piece might have been included, then search for it there. The inclusion of many different translators has as its corollary the inclusion of their individual styles: some translate place- and personal names into English, some transliterate; some translate every word, others pepper their texts with transliterations, and of these transliterations, not all are footnoted. Finally, there is the fact that the book's editor is a bit kooky. And dear god above, why did he choose Wade-Giles over Pinyin for the anthology's romanization system? That said, all the goodies are here: the Classic of Odes, two versions of Saiyuki, Suikoden with contemporary footnotes, Du Fu and Li Bo, and a lot of really great stuff of which I hadn't been aware.
3) World War Z - Max Brooks
By the author of The Zombie Survival Guide, this book purports to be "an oral history of the zombie wars." It's both plausibly written and in places pretty emotionally wrenching. This last made me feel somewhat guilty for reading it, going from fictional tales of grief and loss before booting up the computer and reading about the exact same horrors happening to real human beings. Brooks makes up for this with several veiled references to current events, which he hints contributed both to the rising of the zombie hordes and the inability of humanity to deal with them in time. When Brooks is at his best, his scenarios are completely believable (i.e. the entertainment industry's zombie protection compound). But, as with Survival Guide, he falls flat when writing characters with whose culture he isn't familiar (i.e. the Korean and Japanese characters do not read like Asians to me, and the gratuitous (and misused!) Japanese was distracting). But all and all, this is a very creepy, excellently executed, and all-around good book.
That will be all.
1) Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss
This book, which is ostensibly about punctuation, garnered a lot of attention right after it was published. Unfortunately, it's not entirely warranted. Truss is an amusing author, but spends the better part of the book (70% or more) bewailing the current inattention to 'correct usage,' than she does to actually explaining what correct usage is. This grousing is often humorous, but can be quite grating at other times, as during the extended sequence toward the book's beginning when Truss belittles one of her readers for wishing there was a good reasource from which to learn punctuation...before spending a good portion of the rest of her book explaining that no hard-and-fast rules exist, or that she doesn't have the time to get into them. So, no Ms. Truss, your book is not, in fact, "the book for [her]!" I also found her bellyaching in the final chapter over the state of punctuation (and grammar and spelling) in text messaging and Internet communication a bit histrionic. These mediums are time-savers; it would be ridiculous to hold a "C u l8r" cell-mail to the same standard as a published work. It's nothing more than the textual manifestation of the preexisting distinction between vernacular and formal speech. That said, Eats, Shoots... is entertaining as far as light reads go, and I enjoyed the historical tidbits concerning various forms of punctuation and their arcane usages.
2) The Columbia Anthology Of Traditional Chinese Literature - Victor Mair, ed.
Or as I like to call it, The Baby Blue Annihilator, this book contains 1,300 pages of Chinese literature in translation spanning everything from the 17th-century B.C.E. oracle bones right up to the end of the Qing dynasty. The strengths of this anthology are its massive scope, the inclusion of heretofore-unpublished translations and works not usually considered "literature," and the copious footnoting of references, translation difficulties, usage, and so forth. The weaknesses are also numerous. The works are only roughly organized by timeline, and there is no index of authors or the works themselves, necessitating that readers first guess into what genre a specific piece might have been included, then search for it there. The inclusion of many different translators has as its corollary the inclusion of their individual styles: some translate place- and personal names into English, some transliterate; some translate every word, others pepper their texts with transliterations, and of these transliterations, not all are footnoted. Finally, there is the fact that the book's editor is a bit kooky. And dear god above, why did he choose Wade-Giles over Pinyin for the anthology's romanization system? That said, all the goodies are here: the Classic of Odes, two versions of Saiyuki, Suikoden with contemporary footnotes, Du Fu and Li Bo, and a lot of really great stuff of which I hadn't been aware.
3) World War Z - Max Brooks
By the author of The Zombie Survival Guide, this book purports to be "an oral history of the zombie wars." It's both plausibly written and in places pretty emotionally wrenching. This last made me feel somewhat guilty for reading it, going from fictional tales of grief and loss before booting up the computer and reading about the exact same horrors happening to real human beings. Brooks makes up for this with several veiled references to current events, which he hints contributed both to the rising of the zombie hordes and the inability of humanity to deal with them in time. When Brooks is at his best, his scenarios are completely believable (i.e. the entertainment industry's zombie protection compound). But, as with Survival Guide, he falls flat when writing characters with whose culture he isn't familiar (i.e. the Korean and Japanese characters do not read like Asians to me, and the gratuitous (and misused!) Japanese was distracting). But all and all, this is a very creepy, excellently executed, and all-around good book.
That will be all.
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no subject
on 2007-01-08 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-01-09 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-01-09 10:06 pm (UTC)Lynne Truss’s strange grammar.
on 2007-01-16 04:48 pm (UTC)Pardon the intrusion--your journal was a stop along a twisty passage in a labyrinth created by the omniscient google, and being a voracious, curious reader I couldn't help but glance through a few posts (and felt a bit voyeuristic doing so; I've never managed to acquire the diary maintenance habit/discipline, and my livejournal is quite empty at this point). I thought you might enjoy this piece (http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/040628crbo_books1?040628crbo_books1") in the New Yorker about Lynne Truss's book. It's partly a catalogue of grammatical errors in Truss's book (I'm no grammarian, so I can't vouch for its accuracy), but also something of a minor treatise on the philosophy of writing.
Bonne année!
Re: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar.
on 2007-01-19 08:58 pm (UTC)Thanks for the heads up on the article. I'd managed to completely miss it when it was published. It was pretty darn interesting, especially when the author sidetracked into the whole discussion of authorial voice. It also helped put into words some of the reservations I had about Eats, Shoots..., as well.
As far as the lj is concerned, I don't mind visitors in the slightest; they're one reason why I post. So, welcome! (Also, I used to be a horrid journalist as well, but I can type much faster than I write, which means I'm actually more liable to do it online.)