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ateague73's review
3.0
This is a book of trivia about books and authors, basically. Normally, I'm a huge sucker for that kind of book. My problem with it was the vast quantity of typos! If you're going to spend that much money to have a book produced in hardcover, wouldn't you take the time to check that sort of thing? I'm just saying.
Also, there were some fact checking problems. For example, he mentions that the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice has made about $121M. Then he says something about women wanting to look at Colin Firth's nipples through a wet shirt. Oops! Colin Firth was in the 1995 made for TV movie. Things like that made me not entirely trust his other assertions.
Also, there were some fact checking problems. For example, he mentions that the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice has made about $121M. Then he says something about women wanting to look at Colin Firth's nipples through a wet shirt. Oops! Colin Firth was in the 1995 made for TV movie. Things like that made me not entirely trust his other assertions.
thatpaintedpony's review
3.0
I found this book quite enjoyable. It was irreverent and pointless and I rather like that sometimes. However I did find quite a few typos in the text, and in some places I found the sentence structure to be confusing. The author tends to interrupt herself a lot which I find hard to read, especially in a non-fiction book, and sometimes the sentences after the interruption didn't match what went before. I also question a lot of the sources used as there isn't a bibliography and the author cites websites quite frequently. Over all though, I enjoyed the conversational pace and the interesting factoids about novels and their eccentric authors.
scotchneat's review
3.0
How can this book not be made for me? Weird facts about classics in literature and the authors who created them. Find out what happened when a certain wag submitted the opening chapters of "Pride and Prejudice" to some modern publishing houses as a new book.
Sutherland conveniently divvies up the curious facts in easy-to-read chapters dealing with illegal substances (smoked and drank), phrenology, good and bad gunshots and asthma.
One thing is clear - normal people probably won't be great writers, so stay weird.
Sutherland conveniently divvies up the curious facts in easy-to-read chapters dealing with illegal substances (smoked and drank), phrenology, good and bad gunshots and asthma.
One thing is clear - normal people probably won't be great writers, so stay weird.
lieslindi's review
Oxford University Press published his earlier books but I guess Sutherland has come down in the world. Teaching at Cal Tech doesn't strike me as slumming but maybe to OUP it is. This book is from Skyhorse Publishing, and I'll go out on a limb here and posit that Skyhorse doesn't hew to the same standards OUP does.
This is even worse in its proofreading and typesetting errors than How to Read a Novel. It is rife with stray commas ("Baird's Trilby is, significantly like... (86); "downstream, exploitation" (197)) and even commas instead of words ("Is the Potter effect, good thing?" p. 215*). AIDS is rendered as Aids. Most egregiously, toward the end of the book, a glyph began to supplant single quotation marks.** The house font where I once worked was incomplete. When you viewed nonprinting characters in Microsoft Word, you'd see a rectangular glyph instead of the usual dot that indicates a space. I have never seen, even in faux Austen sequels from vanity presses, such a glyph in a printed book.
Aggravated, I checked the book's front matter, registering the change of house and seeing that it was printed in China. That didn't strike me as unusual or problematic, since just about everything is made in China. So I just now pulled two recent hardcovers ('Tis and Order of the Phoenix, since they were in immediate, non-cockatiel-disturbing reach), and both were printed in the United States (the McCourt says "manufactured"). So maybe printing in China is another proof that Skyhorse is a cut-rate house.
Sutherland says it's interesting to teach reading to non-literary folk like Cal Tech students. He told of one student who dismissed an entire novel because the welding or soldering the protagonist used to smuggle his weapon on the undercarriage of his car wouldn't work. For that reader, because of that minor metallurgical detail, the book was broken, didn't cohere, didn't work. I empathize.
* The Potter effect is a bad thing in this book since its "manufacturer" didn't know how to typeset a fraction. It's not 93 quarters ($23.25!) but 9 and three quarters, 9.75.
** Which are stupid anyway. 'Tis might be a contraction for "it is" or it might be the start of dialogue. A line of speech might read
'We should be careful of the others' but you don't know whether that others is possessive or the end of the speech. It's craziness!
This is even worse in its proofreading and typesetting errors than How to Read a Novel. It is rife with stray commas ("Baird's Trilby is, significantly like... (86); "downstream, exploitation" (197)) and even commas instead of words ("Is the Potter effect, good thing?" p. 215*). AIDS is rendered as Aids. Most egregiously, toward the end of the book, a glyph began to supplant single quotation marks.** The house font where I once worked was incomplete. When you viewed nonprinting characters in Microsoft Word, you'd see a rectangular glyph instead of the usual dot that indicates a space. I have never seen, even in faux Austen sequels from vanity presses, such a glyph in a printed book.
Aggravated, I checked the book's front matter, registering the change of house and seeing that it was printed in China. That didn't strike me as unusual or problematic, since just about everything is made in China. So I just now pulled two recent hardcovers ('Tis and Order of the Phoenix, since they were in immediate, non-cockatiel-disturbing reach), and both were printed in the United States (the McCourt says "manufactured"). So maybe printing in China is another proof that Skyhorse is a cut-rate house.
Sutherland says it's interesting to teach reading to non-literary folk like Cal Tech students. He told of one student who dismissed an entire novel because the welding or soldering the protagonist used to smuggle his weapon on the undercarriage of his car wouldn't work. For that reader, because of that minor metallurgical detail, the book was broken, didn't cohere, didn't work. I empathize.
* The Potter effect is a bad thing in this book since its "manufacturer" didn't know how to typeset a fraction. It's not 93 quarters ($23.25!) but 9 and three quarters, 9.75.
** Which are stupid anyway. 'Tis might be a contraction for "it is" or it might be the start of dialogue. A line of speech might read
'We should be careful of the others' but you don't know whether that others is possessive or the end of the speech. It's craziness!
skjam's review
3.0
This is a book of trivia, factoids and amusing stories about the world of literature. The author is a professor of English literature, so he knows his stuff. The book is organized by loose themes, beginning with food (both as featured in literature, and as eaten by authors.) There are bits on authors’ pen names, sales figures and famous deaths. After the index, there’s an essay on “the end of the book” where Mr. Sutherland muses whether the codex book as we know it will soon vanish, replaced by electronic media or even telepathic communication.
The illustrations are by Martin Rowson, who is in the old style of detailed editorial cartoons, and give a very British feel to the book. (The words are less obvious about it.)
Being relatively widely-read, I had run across many of the factoids before, but there were some I had no idea of, or had long forgotten (like the true fate of V.C. Andrews.) Mr. Sutherland makes no pretense of being neutral in his opinions–he’s particularly scathing about the Left Behind series. His writing is informative and readable; it might be worthwhile to look his more serious work up.
As with many other trivia and lists books, this is less something one would buy for themselves, and more something to buy as a present for a relative who loves reading. As such, it’s good value for money–but given that “mature themes” are discussed, I would not recommend it for readers below senior high school age.
The illustrations are by Martin Rowson, who is in the old style of detailed editorial cartoons, and give a very British feel to the book. (The words are less obvious about it.)
Being relatively widely-read, I had run across many of the factoids before, but there were some I had no idea of, or had long forgotten (like the true fate of V.C. Andrews.) Mr. Sutherland makes no pretense of being neutral in his opinions–he’s particularly scathing about the Left Behind series. His writing is informative and readable; it might be worthwhile to look his more serious work up.
As with many other trivia and lists books, this is less something one would buy for themselves, and more something to buy as a present for a relative who loves reading. As such, it’s good value for money–but given that “mature themes” are discussed, I would not recommend it for readers below senior high school age.
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