Category: Literacy

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Book Him, Danno

Went to a Trivial Pursuit party, oh, about 40 years ago, held at the home of a guy who owned a moving company. OK, that’s trivializing his company. What he moved was HOUSES (was fun being a minor part of the move when he moved some Army barracks that had been declared surplus).

What impressed me most about the evening was not how trivial the Trivial Pursuit play was but his library. It was a mezzanine floor that encompassed three sides of the great room where we played our mini single-elimination tournament. I do not recall anything else about the house, but that library has featured in more than a few of my dreams over the years since. . .

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“It’s Only Words” #4,276

If you see any form of “decimate” used in any text published in this century, you can be at least 90% certain it is misused. Even the most corrupt definition listed by contemporary lexicographers seems to be eschewed by at least 90% of contemporary speakers of English, because words only USED to have meaning.

(Most “readers” in English-speaking countries will not be able to understand the above text.)

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It’s a Thing, Ya Know. . .

It’s been several years since I have been “trapped” by a listserv-posted novel. New chapters (or just pieces of new chapters, in some cases) posted at regular or irregular intervals, as the writer is able or as the writer simply feels like doing, just does not appeal to me, especially since everything is usually first draft, unedited.

But. . . yeh. in my sporadic armchair pseudo-anthropological dabbling in understanding the background of a subset of 20-something or 30-nothing grups, I usually read some litrpg/isekai/wuxia fiction each week, out of the usual 10+ books of various genres (including a few non-fiction from varied subject lines). So, I was snagged by a Royal Road thread featuring a variation of isekai-wuxia I had not run across before. Only 20 chapters on RR, so. . . Patreon. But no, not paying $8/month to have instant access to new material, etc. The book is better-written and more interesting than 90% of the its genre, but not THAT musch better-written or interesting.

Winds of Destiny: A Cultivator’s Odyssey. Fluff, but entertaining and not even nearly as badly-written as most normally published self-pubs available on Amazon.

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“I do not think that means what you think it means.”

Grammar exercise for the day. Diagram:

“After a long sleepless night, [Character Name] comes across a man chasing a woman thief named [Other Character Name], who soon becomes [Personal Possessive Pronoun] loyal ally in the wild.” Lil clue: as it (rather much) later turns out, the sentence does not actually say what the writer intended. *smh*

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Ain’t Got Time for This Crap

Any writer that wants to be paid for their work and yet

  1. Disrespects their readers by typing crap and
  2. NOT hiring a literate proofreader/editor

should be taken behind the woodshed for a wee bit of “education.”

(The spur this time was “Senor” for “Señor”. . . after too many other execrable stupidities. Just not going to read anything else by this producer of stuff unworthy of even being used for fertilizer.)

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CMS Apocalypse?

Premise of a fiction series.

FORTUNATELY, I read the author’s intro before committing to the series that might have had potential for having some interesting information gleaned through some storytelling. But, given one sentence early on, I was able to avoid further brain-damaging text. Whoever edited the book missed a gross mismatch between a plural noun and a singular pronoun. A further glance down the page and, yep: grammar being sucked like dead bunnies through a straw. I ain’t got time fer that. 😉

I’ll add to my infopack on CMSes and EMPs with info from elsewhere, TYVM.

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Semi-Good News

There are kids’ writers who have some pretty decent books out, still. Surprising? IKR? *heh*

I recently read the first two books in a juvie (“YA”-ish) semi-hard sci-fi and feel I can recommend them for my Wonder Woman’s libraries (though they’re only available in ebook and paperback *sigh* Both formats have school library problems). They’re about the level of the Tom Swift, Jr. sci-fi in terms of actual hard science, IOW, more hand-waving than _actual_ science, and the kind of fudging of science foundations that had me sometimes rolling my eyes in 4th grade, but still better written and with a much more “civilized” world view than many YA books nowadays. (Yes, I still submitted word usage errors for correction, but not as many as I have come to expect in even tradpub books nowadays.)

The series begins with Awakening by Randal Sloan.

Six books in the series, but I think 2 will do it for me. As with most juvies, the plots and characters are just too predictable – a net positive for YA/juvie books, IMO, but less so for most adult readers.

Another series I am even more sold on is the City Spies series by James Ponti. Yes, the characters and plots are pretty standard (with some interesting variations), but the books are just so very well-written (and pretty darned well edited!) that the first chapter of book 1 (read at a school librarians conference) sold me on the series. And yes, my Wonder Woman reports that her students are rightly as appreciative of the books as I am. 🙂