BOOKreMARKS: Reading Burdens

I can hardly wait to finish the books I’m reading. Not because I’m glued to the stories unfolding, but because I’m dragging myself through each chapter in hopes that the next one will be better than the last.

It’s probably just a timing thing—my selections are out of sync with my frame of mind. Or it’s a bad combination of topics. I usually have at least one book that’s so arresting I can hardly take a break from it. Unfortunately, that is not the case with my current selections.

One book credits two editors for its completion, but it could easily have used two more. Plodding through misspellings, extra words, and random punctuation slows my reading and comprehension and accelerates my heartbeat and irritation. I could stop reading the book, but I don’t want to miss any of the charming anecdotes about transspecies friendships buried in it. I’ll trudge on.

Another book started out well, but the middle chapters reverted to backstory. As important as this biographical information may be to the author to convey, I find it nearly irrelevant (and, I’m ashamed to admit, uninteresting to me). I’ll continue reading, though. The final third of the book promises to return to the original topic that hooked me in the first place—living with brain damage.

The one work of fiction I’m reading isn’t really a struggle, but I confess I’m having difficulty remembering who all the characters are of all the subplots. My spirits improved last night when the narrator’s own mother exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, not another character. There are far too many already, and all these minor ones, what’s the point?”

Thanks for putting it bluntly. I feel better knowing I’m not alone.

[Art by Milton Avery.]

BOOKreMARKS: Anthologies, Part 2

 Well, well, well.

Had no intention of revisiting yesterday’s rant, but a recent discovery requires a correction and a mea culpa from me. Apparently, when I searched for clues regarding the authorship of a story in the anthology I mentioned (but didn’t name, thank goodness), I searched at the wrong end of the book.

Last night, before I started reading a new section of the dog anthology, I skimmed the table of contents and right there in front of me was the clue I’d earlier missed. Each work of fiction was clearly labeled “A Story.”

Duh.

Now the editors of said dog anthology have returned to their elevated position on my admiration meter. I’m sorry I doubted them—I hate it when my heroes fall.

But my rant still holds. Other anthologies have erred (honest) on this subject and stirred my ire.

Whew! Glad that’s off my chest. Thanks for listening.

[The anthology cover pictured is not one I’ve read, so I have no idea where it stands on the subject of mixing fact with fiction.]

Oh. One more thing. The title of the Norman Rockwell magazine-cover art used in yesterday’s post is hardly legible. The work is called “Fact and Fiction,” hence its inclusion.

BOOKreMARKS: Anthologies Tap Pet Peeves I Didn’t Know I Had

I’ve read a fair number of anthologies this past year. Some have been great reading, others just so-so. Yet regardless of the quality of writing, I’ve learned that a single editorial omission can really tick me off.

The other night, while reading an anthology of dog stories, I stumbled on the very first page of one selection. The writer of the story, a woman, opened her contribution with a reference to her “wife.” Assuming that this was a true narrative as the others before it had been, I made the short leap of faith that the author was a lesbian. But soon, little clues were dropped to indicate that the narrator was a man.

I stopped reading and looked again at the short bio included in the back of the anthology. (Bios, I’ve learned, are a critical element of anthologies for me. They give insights about the writers and context for the story; they help me decide whether I want to read more of a writer’s work. I give a thumbs-down to anthologies that are bio-less. Also, I find it frustrating when anthologies that contain a mix of contemporary authors and those from previous centuries omit birth/death dates in the bios.) It gave me nothing.

Next, I put the book aside and searched the Internet for an explanation. Had the wrong author been cited with the story? Had a simple editorial mistake sent me on this hunt?

No, as it turned out. The story was, indeed, written by the woman whose name was published beneath the title in my anthology. The story had also been published previously in a journal or two, but (and it’s a BIG BUT) the story was FICTION! That is to say—because I think our society is often confused about the differences between FICTION and NONFICTION (Isn’t that right, James Frey, Mike Daisey, Jayson Blair?)—this story was NOT TRUE. It was a fabrication. The incident described in the story did not really happen; the people of the story were characters conjured in the author’s imagination.

The good news: I could finally stop puzzling over the story and just read it for its entertainment value.

The bad news: The editors of the anthology fell a notch or two on my admiration meter. Certainly this wasn’t the first anthology I’d read that mixed fact with fiction. I simply expected more of these particular editors.

For the record, I don’t oppose combining fact and fiction. I just want a heads-up about it. I want it clearly labeled—especially in a thematic anthology that may be read for reasons other than entertainment. Maybe it’s a book of surgeons’ life-and-death experiences, or mountain-climbers’ biggest challenges, or, as in the case of the anthology that got me kvetching in the first place, a book about the human-canine relationship. Readers should know whether they’re reading fact or fiction before they: 1) Try to replicate a situation described in the story; 2) Use information from the story to resolve a real-life problem; 3) Retell part of the story at a cocktail party; 4) Assume connections between the story and its author; and 5) Use parts of the story for educational purposes.

Oh dear. How I’ve gone on about this. I’ll stop now.

There is a silver lining in all this, though: I regard my reading as further instruction toward editorial mastery. I hope to one day curate my own animal-related anthology and when I do, I’ll have a long list of Dos and Don’ts to follow. I’m grateful to the editors who have pioneered the way before me.

A WordGazing Holiday

Today is National Proofreading Day, which seems an appropriate time to post this ad I noticed in the New Yorker:


Look closely at the first line of reverse type. Some would roll their eyes or mutter a “Geeze.”

Me? It just makes me sad.

WordGazing: Finally, Justice Will Be Served

I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE
PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

The text above is on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in D.C. Not only is it carved without punctuation, it’s also paraphrased.

Yup. Not really a quote. And not even the gist of the original utterance, which is:

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.”

What’s more, when you think about the abundance of material the highly quotable Dr. King provided us, why in the world was this chosen in the first place?

The truncation was a “design change” according to Ed Jackson Jr., the executive architect. He ran it by the oversight body, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and they didn’t have a problem with it. Neither did the Council of Historians.

Shame, shame, shame. If space was really an issue, then the solution was not to abbreviate but to choose different material. A quote that’s paraphrased isn’t a quote. Period. PERIOD, screams the editor in me.

I don’t expect architects to understand the problem with this kind of language bastardization, but I certainly expected more from the historians who approved it.

The good news today is that the stone-chiseled text is going to be fixed. Not sure how, but I’m glad someone in D.C. finally saw the light.

Here’s a King quote that speaks to me, that reminds me how to live my life:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The Curse of the Proofreader

Contrary to what you might think about proofreaders and editors, we don’t LOOK for mistakes when we’re not working. Mistakes seem to gravitate toward us.

A moment ago the word priviege spoiled my morning reading of a deftly written essay. A week ago there was a typo in my fortune cookie. (Does that render the prophecy null and void?) Ten pages into Stanley Fish’s How to Write A Sentence is a word that should have been singular but made its way into print as a plural. A job application asked if I was persuing a degree.

Oh, I could spend days listing the typos I’ve read this year alone—on menus, signs, press releases, news reports, television graphics, ads—but I’d prefer to forget them. I cringe when I see them, though there are a few of my ilk who delight in the mistakes of others—enjoy playing a game of “Gotcha!” with all printed materials. I’m more forgiving and feel bad for both the writer and the proofreader/editor when typos pop out. Do you understand how disruptive typos are to me? How they mar my pleasure and interest when reading?

There’s one exception. The other day, I was at my computer when an ad cried out for my attention. Typically, I ignore online ads, but this one made me laugh (after I recovered from my initial shock). In big, bold, uppercase letters it read:

INTROUDING the Must-Grab Flavors
of Mock-Tail Season
New _______ Mocktails

In addition to the butchered first word of the teaser, the company couldn’t decide* how to spell mocktail for their new product. (New products generally mean newly coined words and require corporate editors to create new rules for their style guides. Marketing campaigns that bypass the editor are often strewn with inconsistencies like mock-tail and mocktail.) Or maybe the joke’s on me and I’m just not fluent in Mock English (or mock English, or mock-English, or Mock-English).

When I’m working, I stalk typos. When I’m not, they stalk me. This is the curse of my profession. Oh woh iz mee.

* Arguably, perhaps the editor chose to hyphenate the word when used as an adjective and close it when used as a noun. However, that’s an odd choice in this era of dehyphenation.

[Photo from I Can Has Cheezburger; proofreader’s marks by Eve Corbel.]