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?

No, I haven’t just posted a sign about potential blockages. Read it again.

“Sanity” towels.

If there were towels out there that conferred sanity upon their owners, they’d be worth their weight in gold. Move over Egyptian cotton, we’ve got clarity of mind and absence of nonsense here.

so we see a fair few construction related signs.

I had to chuckle when I saw this though:

There’s definitely some missing punctuation in there, and there are a number of options! Much like the wonderfully named “Let’s Eat, Grandpa! Let’s Eat Grandpa! (Punctuation saves lives)” blog (I am a huge fan of Cori’s), astute comma placement here would be useful.

I think the intention is “Pedestrian, stop! Vehicles (are) reversing.” In that I, as a pedestrian, am advised not to charge blindly around the corner in case an enormous tipper truck happens to be reversing silently (which I think is impossible these days; the number of times I have been woken up by *beep* *beep* VEHICLE REVERSING *beep* *beep*…).

An alternative interpretation is a command: “Pedestrian: stop vehicles reversing!” which is optimistic on the part of the sign-writer, I feel… I don’t have all that many magical vehicle-stopping powers.

And the third interpretation I’ve noticed is the suggestion that the sign marks a place of rest for a pedestrian: “(This is a) pedestrian stop. Vehicles reversing.” Along the lines of “Bus stop. Passengers wait here.” (I’ll admit this one is tenuous).

Anyone see any other interpretations? And anyone see how cleverly I have constructed a similarly ambiguous title?

First, go read this comic about grammar daleks. If you have ever heard of the show Doctor Who (and you would have to have been living under a petrous protuberance for approximately 40 years if you have not), you will get it.

Then, enjoy this week as I relieve myself of the stress of keeping the world’s everyday grammatical mistakes pent up inside. Tomorrow, we have an ambiguous sign where punctuation could save lives; on Friday, a product that would be in great demand if it actually existed, and on Saturday – well I haven’t decided yet.

In the meantime, chime in with your favourite errors! The Musician and Mini-Me cower in shame as The Book Accumulator and I growl “IT!” after every waiter who dares to use “Enjoy!” as an intransitive verb.

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!

“In his experience, it was usually the least assuming guy in the room who turned out to be the most interesting”

Paul Ross lost his job with Wall Street’s favourite law firm when US banks started going under, and when his hedge fund founding father-in-law Carter Darling offered him a job, he was grateful for the opportunity. As the banking crisis deepens and litigators’ knives sharpen, Paul finds himself in a terrible situation – to save himself or his wife’s family?

This impressive debut reminded me of a number of books I’ve read in the past year: Wendy Burden’s autobiography telling the life of the rich and famous, as well as Jennifer Egan’s (irritating) pastiche of interconnected lives, and to a lesser extent John Grisham’s tale of a lawyer who gets in far too deep. However, Alger does what I thought was impossible – she makes the banking crisis interesting and relevant to the average professional. The environment might be foreign to most of us, but the fear of firms going under, of emails being dredged, of lawyers stomping around is one that has simmered in most firms since 2008, and

I didn’t enjoy the way in which the tale was told – from constantly varying perspectives, but apart from a few characters who could have been painlessly excised, the device worked well, keeping suspense up. A few times I felt the suspense was overdone; a chapter would end with some minor revelation but obviously anonymous pronouns, an affair was revealed but the identity of the woman involved was hidden. Nevertheless, this is an impressive debut and I’m sure Alger’s writing will lose some of its overeagerness in time.

Alger conjures the opulent lives of New York’s richest without overdoing it – we have no doubt that these are unhappy people. Paul is overworked but happily married to a remarkably normal woman, annoyed with who he has become without really any way to change it. Carter is simultaneously hopeless and ebullient, lost in the web constructed by those he trusts.

A riveting and impressive debut, with a bit of room for improvement.

Additional information:

Copy provided by the publisher in return for an honest review.

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 352 pages (hardcover)

Order The Darlings from Amazon*

* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting costs.

Filed under: Thriller Tagged: 2012, 8/10, Christina Alger, corporate, family, female author, financial thriller, US author ]]> http://readingwithtea.com/2012/05/11/the-darlings-christina-alger-810/feed/ 1 readingwithtea darlings http://readingwithtea.com/2012/05/09/guest-review-maggie-ofarrells-the-distance-between-us/ http://readingwithtea.com/2012/05/09/guest-review-maggie-ofarrells-the-distance-between-us/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 16:00:01 +0000 readingwithtea http://readingwithtea.com/?p=2617 Continue reading →]]> The Book Accumulator bought this (or I bought it for him?) on my recommendation. This is what he had to say about it:

Here is a very well-written story of two very close sisters, Stella and Nina, of mixed nationality who don’t fit in at school in xenophobic Scotland. The snippets narrated from their school days are riveting, sometimes alarming. One of the sisters carries an enormous emotional load from those early days, a burden which also prevents her from maintaining relationships or jobs that are better than transitory. Jake, a fascinating mix of freedom and responsibility, arrives on the scene from an engrossingly described Hong Kong also with an unusual but more recently burdened past.

The real stuff of the novel is the characters’ dealing with both the weight of their past and the tensions of their present as they attempt to arrive at more manageable and more satisfying lives. Their love story, while far from inevitable, provides the ending for a novel structured in an impressionistic way.

The author’s technique of writing very short “chapters”, i.e. of changing locations and characters and story-lines rapidly, as well as her preference for laying down myriad brush-strokes of detail, are occasionally annoying but generally create numerous admirably charged, colourful and marvellous worlds, both external and internal.

“Whatever they yell, they keep running. The only thing that stops them is the soldiers shooting bullets into their hearts.”

Told in parallel storylines both set in remote Africa, Three Weeks in December chronicles the stories of Jeremy, a young railway engineer sent to oversee the construction of an East African railroad, which has been plagued by malaria and lion attacks, and Max, an American ethnobotanist who is seeking the vine that could make a lifesaving pharmaceutical.

Max, the ethnobotanist with Asperger’s who treks across the world to find a life-saving drug, is by far the more interesting lead character; her literal understanding of the world, her fear of human contact, and her unexpected companionship with the gorillas is captivating and touching. Jeremy is too human – well-intentioned but weak, and plagued by a secret which is somewhat overblown. The key point is that he is powerless to defend his workers, and that his character deteriorates as he suffers the frustration of impotence.

The link between the stories is tenuous and irrelevant and revealed late in the piece, but that doesn’t really matter. Mirroring my reception of the characters, I found Jeremy’s storyline unsubtle, a bit dull and doomed to fail (although this is not intended to be entirely negative – a tragic plot is not invalid), while I wanted more and more of Max’s tale. The writing is deft and elegant without being elaborate; Schulman displays real skill in crafting Max so well.

Additional information:

Copy provided by the publisher in return for an honest review.

Publisher: Europa Editions, 368 pages (paperback)

Order Three Weeks in December from Amazon*

* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting costs.