Reading With Tea

These are the grammatical mistakes that REALLY bug me.

1. less/fewer – gets top billing because of how common it is. Drives me crazy every time.

2. using “enjoy” as an intransitive verb. I cannot simply enjoy, I must enjoy my dinner, my food, my evening, my grammar dalek habits.

3. using an apostrophe to indicate a plural. There have been angry review notes about this one on my audit files. Worse when the rule about words ending in s followed by an apostrophe is correctly used while making a mistake (e.g. There were two thesaurus’).

4. there/their/they’re

5. it’s/its

6. were/we’re

7. refusing to acknowledge that “data” is a plural noun and therefore claiming that “these data” is wrong. I’ll accept “this data” as common usage, but don’t tell me the plural is wrong.

8. amount/number. Amount of cheese, number of cheeses. It’s really not that hard.

Any travesties I’ve missed?

This week’s Musing Monday asks:

Do you tend to read to the end of a chapter or can you stop anywhere?

So many memories of telling The Book Accumulator that I’d stop and go to sleep once I just finished this chapter… only to go flying past the chapter and on for another half hour – totally unintentionally! It turns out that I pay very little attention to chapter breaks (except when they are every three pages!) so there’s no point telling myself I’ll read to the end of a chapter.

I do a large amount of my reading on the Tube/bus/aeroplane and therefore *have* to get off at a particular point, I would constantly be missing my stop if I wanted to finish the chapter! And if I’m reading in the evenings, I have to put the book down whenever it occurs to me that it’s bedtime, otherwise I will keep reading into the wee hours (as I did twice last week!)

How is it the middle of May already? I’m not OK with that. I feel like the year has swept by without me noticing because I’ve been caught up in my work cloud. I’ve got to address that if I’m going to feel like life is going well.

Reading this week:

I’ve had a great week for reading – two books I expected to potter through and give 5 or 6 out of ten to will be getting at least 8.

Lisa Jewell’s The Making of Us isn’t deep but it is riveting and she’s not afraid to create characters who could have been so much more. I stayed up too late to finish it.

Shiela Dalton’s The Girl in the Box was a review copy from LibraryThing and I’ve not had the best luck with these, and when it became apparent that this was a murder mystery with no mystery as to the identity of the murderer but only as to the motive, my expectations weren’t very high. I was absolutely engrossed in this – there are only three main characters but they are truly fascinating. I stayed up very late finishing this one.

And at the start of the week I enjoyed Cristina Alger’s The Darlings as much as I had expected it to – a twisted family drama with the backdrop of the global financial crisis.

A great week for reading. The next book has a lot to live up to, but I’m confident that Alice Zeniter’s Take This Man will do the job.

I’ve read 25 books this year, which I think is pretty good going considering how many 50+ hour weeks I’ve charged this year, but it’s well behind the rate I need for 100 in the calendar year. Just as well I’m going to the south of France in July (cannot. wait.) on a train – I’ll need two pairs of shorts, a few T-shirts, my swimmers, and I’ll fill the rest of the suitcase with books. No weight limits on trains…

In real life this week, our prospective landlady accepted our negotiations on the rent so we have definitely got a house to move into in mid-June! (eeeeep, that’s only 4 weeks away…) I’m worried that I’ll overhype it in my mind, but it’s such a relief to have the whole property issue sorted out. I’m sure I’ll start making “things I won’t miss about East London” lists shortly!

The Physicist and I went out to see the Avengers movie last night – it was fantastic. I’m not saying it’s high dramatic art, but somehow that all-star cast has got together with some decent CGI and a funny script and delivered a night of pure, true fun. I think my favourite comedic moment in cinema for the last few years is now the bit where Loki is busy insulting the Hulk: “I am a god, you dull creature…” and Hulk just picks him up and thumps him about like a ragdoll, muttering “Puny god.” as he stomps off. It’s such a “boy” film – but P and I were both shrieking with laughter and loved every minute.

Today means more work, but that’s ok. There’s probably brownies in the kitchen forecast.

See those scribbles at the top of my credit card receipt from a dinner?

there were more on the back (click to enlarge).

Apparently the several cubic feet of blank or scrap paper near my desk weren’t sufficient… this piece of calculus had to be done on a receipt!