Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

The title of this brief punctuation overview is the punchline of a joke, involving a panda and a gun, that highlights the importance of the aforementioned language conventions.. I identified easily with the author's convulsions at the sight of prominent punctuation errors, and sympathized with her reasons for writing this book. However, I did not personally benefit from it much, for I was aware of most every aspect of usage that she discussed.

Truss's perspective, though, was refreshing. She described perfectly the lonely, blighted existence of a grammar "stickler" and assured me that I am not alone. I also appreciated her clarification of language, and the English language especially, as not a rigid construction of hard, set rules, but as an ever-evolving system of communication. But of course, that is not to say that because the conventions of language are flexible and changeable, they can be ignored completely. Rather, punctuation is essential, and a common set of rules necessary, for discourse between the writer and the reader to take place.

Punctuation can alter meaning drastically, as Truss wittily exhibits. For instance, is the Bible verse:

"Verily I say unto you, today you will be with me in paradise"

or should it be:

"Verily I say unto you today, you will be with me in paradise"?

Terribly important points of doctrine hinge on that comma, whose position is indiscernable because the ancients had no punctuation. Soul sleep or instant entrance into heaven? Punctuation is crucial.

Truss hashes out the nuances of usage and concedes that in some instances, the correct way is a matter entirely of taste. That is a comfort to me, for I punctuate mainly by ear; that is, I use whatever sounds right when I am reading silently.

I think the possessive apostrophe is one of the majorly abused conventions, and also one of the most clear-cut ones to define. Misuse of apostrophes irks me as much as it did the author.

I am glad I read this. It got me thinking deeply over my grammatical habits, and it reinforced for me the desperate importance of proper punctuation. The book was nicely concise, and I would recommend it heartily to the English language's habitual offenders.

Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller

My first conclusion about this book came in the beginning chapters, where I was struck by the shortcomings of the author's style. Rather than a pleasant, accessible, conversational tone that would have been awfully appropriate for a book on conversation, Miller had a high school-essayish sort of approach, with an attempt to sound learned and proper coming off as more pretentious and amateurish than anything else. I, of course, live in mortal fear of falling to the same fate, but that is beside the point. I am not an elderly man positing myself as a witty, expert conversationalist.

Miller, in fact, came off rather snobbishly. I understand his righteous intellectual anger at the state of reasonable, rational discourse in America, but dismissing all Bible-believing Christians as unconversable was fairly harsh. Many of them might be unable to hold an intelligent conversation, but certainly not all of them, thank you very much.

Miller was often tedious, too often really. His haphazard history of conversation was not particularly enlightening, though his piece on Spartan society gave me something to think about. Apparently in Spartan society boys, from a young age, were consigned to the army and assigned an older "mentor," in a form of state-sanctioned pedophilia. Fascinating stuff. Anyways, the opinions of Hume, Johnson, Montaigne, et. al. on every subject, including each other, failed to excite much interest in me.

The modern history was nothing I did not know already. Kids instant message instead of talking face to face. Texting is destroying the language, whittling it down to nothing. Political rhetoric is emotionally charged, making it nearly impossible to reason out issues rationally. But I don't think the conversational landscape has any more weeds now than it ever did. Just because Miller's golden age - the 1700s in Britain - had a few intellectuals espousing the joys of discourse, it doesn't mean the society's state as a whole was rosy.

In a culmination of inadequacy, Miller ends on a dour note. One should never do so in such a book, even if it is justified. A pessimistic outlook is an insult to the reader, essentially telling him that even though he now has all this information and is as enlightened on the subject as the author, he is not capable of improving the general situation. Like, "This is the way the world is, and there is nothing you can do about it." My deepest desires are for arresting conversations, and I'm not giving up just because Stephen Miller is. Though they have been few and far between, I have had excellent conversations before, and I expect to have some more in the future. All hope is not lost.

Jeeves in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse

Coming up with original comments to make about books in a series that are so similar to one another is hard. Wodehouse just has a knack for not fixing what isn't broken. I had to check my pronunciation of his last name. It is "wood-house," as in Emma. Because I typically come across new authors over the Internet or in books, I don't always hear names, and I need to take care of my pronunications, for it could turn embarrassing. I was fortunate I never referred to Albert Camus and Marcel Proust before I learned how to pronounce them. They were French, though, so I suppose I have an excuse. My British pronunications are usually spot-on, though one does have to watch for the worcestershires and gloucesters and whatnot.

Anyways, I can make at least one new observance here. Jeeves in the Springtime was a collection of some of the first Jeeves and Wooster short stories. The characters seemed rather embryonic in form, at least compared to what I had read and seen beforehand. In the first story of the book, Wooster becomes acquainted with Jeeves, and they have a few fallings-out before Wooster acknowledges Jeeves' mental superiority. Herein lies the basis upon which the other stories are built.

In the eponymous story, Jeeves is engaged, disengaged, and re-engaged, in a Wooster-ish fashion that I found detracted from his normally aloof, unadulterated ethos. I prefer Jeeves to be the uninvolved, almost asexual manservant he appears to be in the later works. It adds to the delightfully confounding dichotomy of the superior man subservient to his inferior. It would seem that Jeeves has no other ends, that he desires to attain nothing else in life, but the satisfaction of his employer. It is this distinct irony that perpetuates the humor in these books.

So there you have it. Some quasi-intelligent musings on my gym literature. I couldn't do cardio without it.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone began rather slowly, "mawkishly" even, as someone on amazon.com described it, with a sensational account of the theft of the eponymous stone from a sacred Hindu temple. The story then skips to a succession of first-person narrators, each relating their part in the mystery that surrounds the presentation and subsequent disappearance of the Moonstone on a young lady's birthday.

The narration gains traction as the novel progresses. Many characters are woefully two-dimensional, but somehow this did not diminish my delight in the book. By the middle of it, I was actually reluctant to put the book down, a rarer and rarer experience for me. No, the characters were not credible, nor was the plot, but I was entertained nonetheless.

And perhaps that is exactly why I was entertained. It has always been a maxim of mine that good fiction consists of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Ordinary people in ordinary circumstances are beyond boring, and extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances can sometime be a bit over the top.

I am sure there is something wrong with my fiction-is-only-as-good-as-the-level-of-entertainment-it-provides philosophy on literature. Nevertheless, I shall persist in it until I can convince myself of something more intellectually forthright.

But it was a fun book. The Moonstone, at least, can only be worth as much as it entertains, for by any loftier measure it would not register very highly. Still, T.S. Eliot did call it "the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels," which has to lend the book some credibility.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

I don't know who or why or how or what, but I just did not like this book. I suppose it was a character study. That is often a good way to say a book was plotless and incredibly boring- as this was.

Perhaps I am not doing The Warden justice. It did have a romance, and the prose was not nearly obscure. It is just that everything was so flat. The book was like a children's primer. Of course, it did not help that my edition had a rather large font and cute little illustrations.

The Warden is a clergyman appointed to oversee some aging, retired field workers. A young activist-type decides the Warden is paid too much, and that more of the money he receives should go to the old men. So the kid conjures up a lawsuit. Unfortunately, he loves the Warden's daughter, and she pleads for him to give up the suit. Alas, it is too much for the Warden. He resigns his post, the girl marries the young guy, and everyone is moderately happy at the end, except for the old men, who have lost the best master they could have over greed for money they never got.

"Pedestrian" is the best I can do to describe the book. "Dull", "flat", "uninteresting" are close contenders. What more is there to say? I am sure the book had some sort of merit as social and political commentary at some point, but now even I, an unabashed Anglophile, can derive little of enjoyment from it. It is so hard to say intelligent things about a boring book