Most people aren’t as troubled by punctuation errors as Lynne Truss is, but they should be. Misplaced apostrophes, commas gone AWOL, and over-effusive exclamation points all come under Truss’s persnickety and humorous purview. In the lovely new edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Gotham, $25), colorfully illustrated by The New Yorker cartoonist Pat Byrnes, not only will readers learn the difference between colon and semi-colon usage, they’ll do so cheerfully, fully entertained by the lively artwork accompanying the text. When Truss writes about walking around with a Sharpie and an apostrophe on a stick to correct the errors that she sees everywhere, you’ll laugh. This book is a must-have for punctuation sticklers.
James Wood, a staff writer for The New Yorker and lecturer in literature at Harvard, describes the devices a novelist uses to convey a story to the reader. How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24) covers a wide range in the genre, from the novels of Austen to those of Graham Greene. Reading Wood’s slim and erudite guide to literature caused me to plan a rereading of Flaubert, who “decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realistic narrative.” Wood cites passages from John Updike’s The Terrorist that significantly added to my understanding of the different ways the puppeteer was pulling the strings. Wood is a friendly, plain-speaking guide, even in areas where the layers of the creative process get dense. What do Austen, Roth, and David Foster Wallace have in common? The use of different registers, which is a literary way of saying the author uses diction specific to different characters, whether vernacular, pompous, or clichéd.
In Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (Doubleday, $24.95), Jay Parini, a novelist and teacher, has compiled a list of literary works that were instrumental in “shaping the nation’s idea of itself” by having “shifted consciousness in some public fashion.” Parini’s selections include the novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; essays, like The Federalist Papers; and biographies, like Mary Antin’s The Promised Land. This collection will make a wonderful reading list for a class or bookgroup. Parini’s own essays weave a history of each work with his take on the author’s intentions and the effect the book had when published.
