The book 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves',  by an amusing lady named Lynne Truss, is a book about punctuation: Though this seems like a dull premise for a book which is meant to be read from cover to cover, it turns out (in the hands of Miss Truss) to be rather entertaining and enlightening.

Truss is seemingly obsessed with punctuation - at least it seems this way from what I gather from her writing in this book - and this obsession serves the purpose of keeping the reader entertained during the book. If, like me, you have found yourself scowling internally at badly punctuated signs (to borrow an example from the book; a banner outside a petrol station reads: "Come inside, for CD's, Video's, DVD's, and Book's") you will enjoy reading about someone else's take on the problem - it's funny because it's true. If, however, you don't even notice these signs, you may enjoy the humour as more of a look at a crazy lady taking little things way to seriously. Moreover Truss is just a good writer who's skilled at her craft and this comes across strongly as you get swept along in a seeming tangent of humour and forgotten grammar.

The Book has seven chapters: an introduction; one on the apostrophe; one on the comma; one on colons and semicolons;one on the exclamation mark, the question mark, italics, the quotation mark, the dash, brackets, and the ellipse (a lot for one chapter); one on the hyphen; and a - sort of- conclusion. It all makes for a quick and strangely enjoyable two-hundred or so pages to read, and I can't say I didn't learn a thing or two from it either.

I shall certainly be keeping this book on hand when I'm working on my writing in the future, even though it may not a have an index - as a review named Kevin helpfully points out on the book's Amazon page - I can see myself reaching up for it more often than I should like to check that I really am putting that comma in the right place.

The Literate Badger

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My Synopsis:

“Did anyone hear the interrobang?” Lynne Truss leads us on a journey through the world of punctuation, bad and good. An honest, enjoyable book, which is easy to read from beginning to the end and has a few things to teach the reader along the way.