Book Notes
I’ve just finished reading Lynn Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and just in time to catch up on an old New Yorker that included a review of the punctuation guide. I had to go back and see it for myself, but the NYer’s right: she misuses punctuation right from the start. It’s an entertaining book, without question, so long as you can endure her style, which consists of endless repetitions of jokes and punch lines, and her deep and abiding abhorrence of electronic-media abbreviation protocols, i.e., the use of punctuation as an aid to telegraphic text in emails and SMS. While I do endeavor at every opportunity to use full sentences and accurate punctuation (except in SMS, where telegraphy is the normative pattern), I do think she’s gone a bit balmy in just how far she takes her objections. I did learn a couple of nice rules for hyphens, but nothing at all of the seventeen rules for commas or for semicolons and colons that I didn’t already know, which does little for my sense of inadequacy on those points. The best thing about the book, in the end, has to be the frequent examples where various persons have “hanged [themselves] on a comma.”

This morning, I began reading Drylands, a novel by Thea Astley, a celebrated Australian writer who, coincidentally, died last night, just shy of her 79th birthday.