Summer is for reading. Just ask anyone. Some summers lend themselves to great sprawling 12-course feasts of books -- that's when you tackle Tolstoy or Proust or Steinbeck or whatever your personal reading Everest might happen to be. Most of the titles I have queued up this summer are lighter, chick-lit-and-its-offshoots fare... crack-pipe novels that amuse and divert and that, for the most part, mingle to become indistinguishable before they are forgotten altogether.
Still, I try to be somewhat selective. If the book looks like utter crap, if there's not even an attempt to twist formula, or if I just don't like the look and feel of it, I'll leave it behind. (Yes, sometimes I have to pick it up. Book psychometry can be a vital tool in choosing the right book, and should not be scoffed at.) But if it passes the test, it comes home with me to join the queue. And I have a reasonable expectation that I won't be dissatisfied.
At this point in my reading career, I'm not looking for true love. When I play the game of listing the books I'd save from the world library if it were on fire, I know that Bridget Jones will never replace Alice Liddell, or that I'd even think about grabbing White Oleander if I didn't have Ozma of Oz. Even though I enjoy much of the current light reading, it's rare that it can find its way onto my bookshelf, or into my heart, for good. But that's all right. That's not what these books are for. All they have to do is entertain me for a few hours. It doesn't sound like much to ask, does it?
Yet I am still shocked when I find mistakes lurking in the text of these books. You'll note I didn't say "typos." To me, a typo is "wehn" instead of "when." It's not "waste" instead of "waist." And that's what I saw this morning. Twice. On the same page, so there's no mistaking it. I was close enough to finished that I didn't pitch the suddenly offending book across the room. But I put the book on another mental stack (I have a lot of those) -- books that were proofed by spellcheck.
While I know books, publishing and authorship aren't quite the arcane, mystical arts I once thought they were, I still harbor some literary illusions in this life. And one of them is that books don't go to press without a proper proofreading, by the eyes and brain of someone who knows the difference between "your" and "you're," "they're," "their" and "there," and all the rest. Doesn't somebody have to sign off on these things? Doesn't the author read her proofs? (And, if the author can't spell, doesn't she know someone who can?)
Fluff is all well and good, but it should at least be fluff of the highest order. A book containing such egregious whoppers might divert, but it will never win me over completely. It will never become part of the personal Suki collection, to be dusted and moved and schlepped along with Watership Down and Gone with the Wind and all the rest. (Say what you want about Margaret Mitchell, but I bet she could spell.) Every time I passed it by, I wouldn't think of all the fun I'd had reading it. I'd just be reminded of how much time and space it was waisting.
Posted on July 24, 2004 to fussbudget
Previously: Inconceivable.
Next Time: Pictures of You: The Cure in Concert, Houston, TX, August 2004
Main: cleaning out ferryboats
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