Saturday, December 17, 2011

LIBRARY BOOKS #2

José Saramago's novel The Cave must be the most unreadable book by a winner of the Nobel prize in Literature ever published. The long run-on sentences full of commas but lacking in other necessary punctuation (periods, quotation marks, standard paragraphs) makes this reader feel like a passenger in a car driven by a maniac who ignores stop signs and traffic lights. It's a pity since the drive could have been scenic.

More than just a bad publication, The Cave is an affront to readers. When I see the Nobel winner stamp on the front of a book, I have expectations (or at least hopes) of great literature of the calibre of Albert Camus or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In this case, it is false advertising. Shame on Saramago and his publishers.

Some would argue that I should look beyond the "style that looks forbidding on the page, with its meandering convoluted sentences" but a Nobel-laureate should be chosen for literary style as well as content.

* Added Sept. 2012: Lynne Truss writes in Talk to the Hand:
As I noted in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, good punctuation is analogous to good manners. The writer who neglects spelling and punctuation is quite arrogantly dumping a lot of avoidable work onto the reader, who deserves to be treated with more respect.


In total contrast to Saramago's novel, I would like everyone to read and take to heart Temple Grandin's book Animals Make Us Human. She helps us understand behaviour and emotion systems so we can interact with animals more appropriately. Grandin writes about the "blue-ribbon emotion systems": SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC, LUST, CARE, PLAY and how they define the needs of predator and prey animals. People who use this information can go on to train and socialize animals with gentleness instead of physical or mental abuse.

Monday, December 12, 2011

WINNER!

I'm a winner! It all started when I discovered a blog called Farm Fresh Forensics. I read and I laughed. Read some more, laughed some more. Then I started from the beginning (early posts) and quickly became addicted to the funny, heartwarming and wise posts written by someone I would love to meet. Not long ago there was an invitation to answer three questions about the blog. I won something very desirable: handmade goat's milk soap from Failte Gate Farm in Texas. Yippee! It looks good enough to eat ;-)