Image of typewriter by Audrius Meskauskas from the Wikimedia Commons.
Guardian books blogger Sam Jordison has bucked the chirpy tone of those Best Books of the Decade pieces we’ve been bombarded with lately with a column soliciting readers to contribute their picks for the worst books of the noughties. Jordison’s piece isn’t as snarky as it may sound on first glance (though many of the readers’ posts surpass expectations). By honestly discussing the decade’s stinkers, Jordison hopes to restore a little balance to our collective memory of the decade about to pass into history. As he eloquently puts it: “To remember only achievement and worth is to ignore the vast majority of our cultural experience. It helps create that strange cultural telescoping that makes us think that the past was always better; that odd warping of collective memory that enables us to recall even the 1970s fondly.”
Over at the Times Online, Erica Wagner looks at the various superstitions that both plague and enable the working lives of authors, focusing on the strange spell the common typewriter casts over its willing word slaves.
Carolyn See’s witty review of The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch should be a tonic for those people who shout at their televisions when they hear an anchor person mangle proper English usage. The bad news for such purists, according to Lynch’s book, is that English is the most unwieldy of languages and has been largely defined throughout its short history by its unwillingness to conform to grammatical orthodoxy. Too bad, eh?
