I’m at a lost what to say this evening, so I thought I’d do a book review. The book of choice is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower; the seventh and final book in the series.

The series is King’s most accomplished work to date. They make you realise just what a clever writer King really is. The world of Roland the Gunslinger and his ka-tet consisting of Eddie, Susannah, Jake and the adorable Oy comes to a stunning conclusion in this seventh instalment.

What struck me was how clever King writes. He incorporates himself as a character in the story, and I don’t mind admitting I shed a tear at events that unfolded towards the end. I won’t reveal what happened at the end, but it was fitting. I was tremendously satisfied when I finished this book.

All in all, although King tends to waffle at times, and you sometimes just wanna scream “get on with it, man!”, The Dark Tower series was definitely a series worth persevering with. It took King a long time to write the series, but it’s been worth it.

I had to laugh, but in order to tell you about why I had to laugh, I have to make a confession about what some of you may consider as “eew”!

I’m a bogside reader.

There.  I said it.

How has this confession come about?  Quite simple, really. I’m reading Kate Fox’s Watching the English at the moment, and I had to laugh at the coincidence; I was reading about bogside reading, wait for it, when I was on the bog!

There are many English people – particularly males – who find it very hard to defecate at all unless they have something to read.  If there was no proper bogside reading, they will read the instructions on the soap-dispenser or the list of ingredients on the spray can of air-freshener.

Fox, Kate, Watching the English, p221

Ho hum! That’s very true of me!  However, I do not have a bogside collection of books and magazines.  I tend to take a book or magazine into the loo with me.  According to Fox, this makes me lower-middle or middle-middle.

There you go.  There’s one more thing about me that you did not want to know!

Having just finishing reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, seeing as I enjoyed it tremendously, I thought I would write a review.

Now, you wouldn’t think that a book about punctuation would be a source of laughter, would you? You’d be surprised by Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Lynne Truss’ writing style is to be commended, simply because she makes what many people would think a stuffy, academic, and above all, boring, subject, actually quite amusing.

Truss appeals to that ‘stickler’ in me who finds mis-punctuation by the masses pretty damn annoying, such as: placing the apostrophe in the wrong place; not using commas or using too many commas; not knowing when or how to use colons and semi-colons; when to use single and double quotation marks etc. There’s even a ‘Punctuation Repair Kit” in the book, with adhesive stickers of apostrophes, full stops, question marks, exclamation marks etc. so any old stickler can stick ‘em where he or she spots a punctuation no-no and corrects it. The idea just tinkles me pink!

I’d like to quote Truss at page 136,

“Victor Hugo[,] (…) when he wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling – reportedly telegraphed his publisher with the simple inquiry “?” and received the expressive reply “!”

To me, that quote sums up the nature of Truss’ book. It demonstrates just how important punctuation is to the English language, and how it should be preserved against an influx of new technologies which are influencing the way we write English, which is causing us to neglect niceties such as spelling and punctuation. It also shows just how expressive punctuation – that is, without any words at all – can be.