1. Room by Emma Donohue
2. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
4. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
5. A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
6. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
7. A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin
8. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
9. The Shack by William Young
10.The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
11. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
12. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
13. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
14. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
15. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
16. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
17. Bossypants by Tina Fey
18. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
19. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
20. Watership Down by Richard Adams
21. The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
22. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
23. Eats, Shoots, & Leaves by Lynne Truss
Yes, it is a book about grammar. And yes it is a hilarious and enjoyable read. These two things are not mutually exclusive.
This is the kind of book that only people who already enjoy grammar and therefore are relatively good at it will read, when really it is the people who hate grammar who need to read it. Alas. Maybe I can sneak in a lesson or two for you non-grammar lovers, thereby improving the world just a little bit today.
What I like about this book is that Lynne Truss, while a “stickler” for proper grammar, holds the same exceptionally reasonable position on it that I do: the point of it is to make reading and writing more understandable, not to make everyone’s life more difficult or to make certain people feel superior to others. We have rules for a reason, but where it makes sense to change them I am all for it.
Even back in 2003 (before the lovable grammar abomination known as Twitter) Truss realized that the internet was changing the written word forever. Email (and I’ll admit, to a certain extent, even blogs) have much looser rules of punctuation than print media. What this book so aptly points out, though, is that the more we rely on the written word (text, email, Facebook) to communicate, the more we need punctuation to communicate specific messages, such as tone. Truss uses this example to show how drastically punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Let’s put aside the fact that I hope you wouldn't be receiving emails from someone who would intend the first sentence. But you can see how leaving out the punctuation on this sentence could literally cause the sentence to mean the exact opposite of what the writer meant.
Truss focuses mainly on the most common mistake seen today, such as those involving the comma and the apostrophe. Sometimes I can’t believe that people still confuse “your” and “you’re;” sometimes I think that they are doing it for the sole purpose of infuriating me, like people who drive exactly the speed limit in the fast lane. But people do. And no matter how casual language becomes, this will never be acceptable. They are two different words with two very different meanings.
She actually does explain some of the more nitty-gritty rules of usage for these things, and I admit that there were some offenses even I commit. She also addressed the issue of the comma that only writers and editors face today: that sometimes it simply comes down to a matter of taste, and no matter how educated you are it is always possible that someone will disagree with you. So please, writer/editors out there, keep this in mind, and don’t argue with me about my comma placement.
Then of course we get into the more complicated and controversial punctuation marks such as the semicolon (which I love) and the exclamation mark (which I hate). Writers have drastically varying opinions on these topics but the average person has no opinion on them at all. I won’t bore you with the details other than to say it was enjoyable for me to explore the conviction with which I hold my own opinions and compare them to those of other writers who also felt that their's was the One True Usage.
One more tidbit that I found both painful and amusing, and then I will stop boring you. Lynne Truss is English, and as in the language itself the punctuation of U.K. English is slightly different than American English. So throughout the book I was nearly driven insane witnessing poor periods being left outside of their respective quotation marks. You may not know that in American English the period should always go inside quotation marks, whether the period relates to the quotation or not, “like this.” The British usage varies, so that sometimes the period is placed outside “like this”. To the average reader this would probably go unnoticed. But since this is a book about grammar primarily being read by people interested in grammar, I found this to be “cruel and unusual punishment”.
Cringe.
Truthfully the Grammar Stickler is a breed that is slowly dying out. You may chose to join us after reading this book, but I will warn you- it is an agonizing existence.
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