Eats, Shoots and Leaves — Lynne Truss

Rating: 4/5

This is a short, fun, improbably successful book that manages to be both informative and hilarious at the same time. And amazingly enough, it does so on the subject of English punctuation. Lynne Truss is a British author who has been a punctuation stickler all her life. She addresses the use and abuse of all the common punctuation symbols, from the comma and apostrophe through the subtleties of the dash and ellipsis. Although I’m not perfect at punctuation, I tend to have a pretty good eye for spotting gross errors. Ms. Truss liberally salts her text with examples of the most hideous punctuation misuses, and usually adds on a sarcastic comment or two that pretty closely mirrors what I was thinking when I saw it.

This book actually does accomplish a purpose other than ridicule and humor, however. It is full of useful information on the subtleties of using punctuation symbols effectively. In addition to the lists of rules for using punctuation symbols such as the comma and apostrophe, there are many examples of both effective and ineffective use of punctuation. There are many places in the text where she shows a snippet of text punctuated two different ways. Sometimes the effect is a stark distortion of meaning; sometimes it’s a very slight change of emphasis. Often the resulting differences are hard to actually put into words, but they are there.

I had purchased this book for my Mom as a birthday present. I have fond memories of helping my Mom grade her college English papers when I was in junior high, and sharing a good laugh over the best examples of the horrific illiteracy of the students. I remember being somewhat scandalized that these college students — almost godlike creatures to an eighth-grader — wrote such pitiful English. After Mom finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves, she was kind enough to lend it back to me. I had originally expected to read this book and solely be entertained, and was pleasantly surprised to also learn many rules I never knew about the proper use of punctuation.

The book takes only about three hours or so to read, as it is written in a very conversational style that makes even the driest minutiae go down fairly easily. I greatly enjoyed it, although I do think that the subject matter is not going to be of true general appeal.

The Baroque Cycle — Neal Stephenson
Quicksilver
The Confusion
The System Of The World

Rating: 4/5

Quite a few people dislike these books, as they are “neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring.” (John Heywood, 1546) Personally, I thought the series, taken as a whole, was magnificent.

Quicksilver introduces readers to Daniel Waterhouse, a Fellow of the Royal Society. He’s also the son of Drake Waterhouse, a notorious smuggler and Puritan stalwart who was on intimate terms with Oliver Cromwell. Daniel’s roommate at Oxford is Isaac Newton, in whom Daniel immediately recognizes an unequalled genius. Plague, fire, war, and intrigue affect the lives of Daniel, Isaac, and the other members of the Royal Society as they pursue their researches into new fields of Natural Philosophy. We are also introduced to Jack Shaftoe, a syphilitic Vagabond and opportunist, and Eliza, a Qwghlian girl abducted into a Turkish seraglio. Jack rescues Eliza during the sack of Vienna and together they pursue opportunity and profit across Continental Europe.

The Confusion follows Jack as he criscrosses the world on one misadventure after another, and Eliza as she continues to grow in power and influence in European society. Massive plots, schemes, and conspiracies are launched, mostly to go wildly astray. Political and economic struggles dominate this book, as Louis XIV, the Sun King, tries to achieve dominance over England, Holland, and Spain, opposed by William of Orange. Gottfried von Leibniz, the House of Hanover, and even Tsar Peter the Great are drawn into the machinations as well.

The System of the World rejoins Daniel as he returns from America at the request of Princess Caroline of Hanover. Isaac Newton is running the English Mint, and English coinage is acknowledged as the best in the world. He is opposed, however, by Jack Shaftoe, now known as Jack the Coiner, who has his own motives for trying to subvert the English currency. Daniel has a full agenda, from helping to reconcile Newton and Leibniz to constructing a “Logic Mill” for Peter the Great to figuring out who is trying to kill him with phosphorus bombs.

Some of the reason that many people are ambivalent about these books stems from the fact that Neal Stephenson is well-known and has an extensive fan base for his over-the-top writing style and his corpus of science fiction works. Some of those established fans were not interested in a long series of novels that were set in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with heavy emphasis on the sociology, politics, and economics of the period, and no futuristic technology. Some other readers whose preferred genre is historical fiction were not enamored of the liberties he took with historical characters and his gonzo, “sugar cocoa puffs” writing style (as my friend Garrett puts it), not to mention the science-fictional sensibilities he brought to his portrayal of the emerging technologies of he 18th century.

If you look for things to dislike about this series, you can certainly find them, whether you are focusing on style or substance. The books are both long and long-winded; Neal Stephenson has striven to adopt at least some of the styles of writing contemporaneous with his setting, and this can be hard to follow at times. The first book meanders quite a bit, setting up the backstory and characterization while not seeming to make much progress in terms of plot, while the second book jumps to an entirely new set of characters as they partake in some highly improbable adventures. A lot of history gets bent throughout the series to allow the protagonists to appear in and influence, “Forrest Gump”-style, many of the major world events of the time. The ending to the series is somewhat abrupt, with some significant questions unanswered.

But, like a goldsmith assaying the fineness of a well-minted guinea, I find that the gold in the Baroque Cycle far outweighs the base metal. Every facet of this novel series is extensively-, almost obsessively-researched. The setting is very immersive, even if the plot events are often over-the-top. The central characters are fully-rendered in full human detail. His primary three fictional protagonists are the most fleshed out, but he also invests a lot of effort into plausibly portraying the human thoughts and goals of his ancillary fictional characters and the myriad of historical figures that pass through his work. Much of the length and wordiness of the series is devoted to establishing the setting and characters so that the reader is fully submerged into the author’s vision of Enlightenment-era Europe, and I believe he succeeds completely.

As far as content, Stephenson cooks a very eclectic stew, as he often does. Science, alchemy, propaganda, sex, war, squalor, philosophy, piracy, mathematics, disease, counterfeiting, baksheesh, religion, slavery, the stock market, politics, insurance, coffee, dueling, mystery and love are only some of the ingredients he uses. If it happened between 1680 and 1710, it’s pretty sure to be in the series somewhere.

One of the most frequent complaints about Neal Stephenson is that his endings are unsatisfactory. While I won’t claim I was completely happy with the way the Baroque Cycle concluded — there were several things I was still curious about that the various epilogues did not cover — I would rate this the most satisfying ending to a Stephenson work to date. There was an actual denoument, although shorter than in most non-Stephenson novels, and the explanations of what many of the characters were doing or were going to do after the pivotal events were believable and true to their personalities.

All in all, I highly recommend this series, although you will spend a lot of time with it.