Guilty By Definition - Susie Dent

57%

03.02.25

A competent first novel. Dent seems pleasant and erudite in real life, and this comes across here - it's obviously more than a little autobiographical (apart from the murder bits, I assume). Oxford was the main star but the plot was unusual, if a little confused by the end, and the characters fairly well drawn. It might be Dent's speciality but most of the distracting and irrelevant etymology could have been edited out.

Babel - RF Kuang

 

Didn't finish

I really wanted to read this but it was too much of a workout - both in terms of the library hardback weighing about as much as a small dog, and also in terms of it being really boring. 

Vox - Christina Dalcher

54%
03.06.19

'Overblown feminist dystopia' says one review, and I'm inclined to agree. Only Margaret Atwood should tackle 'The Handmaid's Tale'. Any valid points were mostly lost among the clunky prose, underdeveloped characters and the fact that the whole of America seems to consist of about 100 people in Washington.

Four Letters of Love - Niall Williams

58%
01.08.15

When I was young and romantic, I was a big Niall Williams fan. The photo isn't of my copy but it's battered enough to be. But now I'm older and more cynical, I demand more from my novels than dreamy lyricism and a dash of magic realism. The poetry, however beautiful, isn't enough to sustain the story, and it's ultimately an unsatisfying read.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - Xiaolu Guo

53%
24.02.10

While philosophically and linguistically sophisticated, it was really just a story about a Chinese woman living in London with her loser boyfriend. Anything it had to say about culture clashes, sexual experience and the lonely process of learning was undermined by the fact that her unnamed lover had nothing going for him, making the romance very flat indeed.

Lost for Words - John Humphrys

50%
03.01.05




New year, new harsher scoring system. Language is my specialist area but this does nothing for the cause. So words are used to manipulate, are they? What a unique theory! So writers are ungrammatical, are they? Well, if they don't meet Humphrys' inconsistent notions of language use, they are. And this badly structured book doesn't even hang together as a coherent argument. Which is rather unfortunate, given its subject matter.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss

n/a
26.12.03




It's not really appropriate to grade this short book about grammar and punctuation - but it's fascinating, funny and long overdue. It's probably not a good idea to stoke my editorial obsession further but it's great to see I'm not alone.