Reading habits in the modern age

Tuesday 1 April 2014

I'm a big fan of lists. I have a list to keep track of what I'm doing and what I'm supposed to achieve every day of the week, partly because of OCD and partly because I'm too hopeless to remember everything I have to do (sometimes I even list the individual steps of 'hanging out the washing' and 'bringing in the washing' just to feel the sense of accomplishment when I cross them off). So for a few years now I've kept a list of books to read, and more or less pondered through it chronologically. This, I take it, is not abnormal. Most readers seem to resort to lists to realise their reading aspirations. Got a recommendation? Put it on the list. A friend or lecturer writes a novel? Put it on the list. An interesting-looking book wins a prestigious award? Put it on the list. An extreme but admirable instance of this practice would be the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge, which illustrious word-man Patrick Lenton is currently undertaking over at Going Down Swinging.

Reading ... TO THE EXTREME.

(Credit)

Despite my appreciation of this simple form of time management and goal achievement, however, I've recently had to abandon my list in favour of a spreadsheet.

I know, right? What a sign of the times. What a statement for the digital age. What a symptom of actual obsessive-compulsive disorder. But yes, I'm afraid it is so. In the fast-paced, time-poor world of a tech-savvy Gen Y bibliophile, a list simply will not suffice. There is so much to read, and every year stacks a heap more onto the pile. In the words of the 'grim narrator' in Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, 'There are many things to think of. There is much story' (2008, page 263).

The Book Thief predates doge, I believe, so that turned out to be an unfortunate choice of phrase.

On top of the library's worth of literature to read, there's the smorgasbord of platforms on which to read it: the traditional printed book, audiobooks, ebooks, podcasts, even tweets or, if you piss off the right person, text messages. And what are you supposed to do when someone decides to make a movie of a book on your list? You want to read it before it comes out, so you have to skip ahead. And don't your friends who get published deserve your immediate attention? What about when a friend loans you a book and you want to get it back to them? Or worse, when someone buys you a book and expects you to have read it by the next time you see them? And how do I make sure I'm getting the right nutritional balance of genre and literary fiction, classics and contemporary, fiction and non-fiction? Throw a few literary journal subscriptions and university readings in there and your literary lifestyle is a nightmare. The linear chronological hierarchy of the humble list simply cannot keep up with the postmodern pastiche, the multifarious mayhem of intersections between platform and genre and kind and motivation that is modern reading.

Lacking some kind of futuristic Deleuze and Guattarian reading rhizome, however (I'm not that tech savvy), the best I can do is a spreadsheet which, in its current, incipient form, looks like this:

Blue is reading, green is read.

In case you can't see at that scale, it's currently divided into ten different columns: 'classics', 'contemporary', 'literary journals', 'non-fiction', 'recommendations', 'friends' (someone I know with a book), 'movie adaptations', 'audiobooks', 'masters' (books I'm reading for research), and 'favourites' (works whose authors I like so much I want to read their entire oeuvre). This kind of compartmentalisation captures all those types of books and the motivations for reading them I outlined above and systematises them, something I find way more satisfying than I should for some reason. So far (nascent though it is) it has proven a more democratic way to read, varying my literary diet in a very enjoyable way.

But as if all this wasn't enough, the spreadsheet comes with some attendant 'rules' I automatically seem to follow. I started this 'list 2.0' reading a recommendation from my nan, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, so that's where I started on the chart, moving laterally across the columns from there through my old lecturer Christine Howe's first novel Song in the Dark, the launch for which I attended a shamefully long time ago and which I have only just read now thanks to this new system, and onto Tim Winton's short story cycle The Turning, which I wanted to read before I saw the new film adaptation(s), before coming to John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, a seminal metafictional text my supervisor advised I read for my masters. And around here is where it gets complicated, with audiobooks, classics and literary journals (favourites is a new column).

As part of my 'traipse through canon', I want to read a great swathe of classic literature right from the beginning (hence The Epic of Gilgamesh). But I don't just want to read it: I want to read it critically, take notes, write down quotes, and do parallel research so I can write about it. All this takes time and space and energy that I don't always have when I've just got a few minutes to do some reading (as the interminably slow crawl of my progress bar on Goodreads currently attests). Furthermore, when I set out to tick a canonical book off my list, I usually buy a nice hardcover addition to add it to my collection, and these can be unwieldy to carry around. So I've decided to have a hardcover classic on my bedside table at all times, reading it whenever I get the chance to read at home.

More portable literary journals, conversely, I take out with me when I know I've got to wait in a doctor's surgery or at the bus stop, or for when I'm on the train. I like to think of this as doing my part to increase the visibility both of reading as an activity and of the journals as viable leisure-reading publications for those who cannot abide the inanity of Zoo or Cleo or Woman's Day or The Daily Telegraph, not that anyone's going to look at me in public and think, 'Woah, that guy's cool, I'm also going to read.' It's silly, because I'm often on my phone just like everyone else, but when I'm on the train and see everyone looking down at their iPads and iPhones instead of reading books I (somewhat irrationally) feel like literature is losing the war, which accounts for this little bit of perceived literary exhibitionist pageantry.

And finally, audiobooks. I love them. If you take nothing else from this otherwise largely pointless and meandering post, take this: buy audiobooks (and no, this post is not sponsored by Audible.com, although, if you're reading this Audible execs, maybe it should be). They're a fantastic way to turn mindless tasks and unproductive spans of your day such as walking to the shop or driving to work or doing the dishes into time well-spent (although, of course, a certain amount of mind-wandering time is essential for reflection and spontaneous thought). Podcasts are good for this too, notably the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. They're also fast, to some extent because of this capacity to be listened to any time, anywhere. They don't require dedicated time to sit and read. They don't busy your hands and eyes, just your ears and mind. It's for this reason, looking at my chart (and, for that manner, my reading catalogue), that I appear to get through them about four times faster than physical books.

In some ways, this aspect of the audiobook is all that gets me through my job. I'm an editor who works on billion-dollar submissions for tender. That's when the state government is like, 'We want a hospital designed and built and run and cleaned and maintained for thirty years', and a bunch of companies are like, 'We'll do that for teh monies!' and then the state is like, 'Well, tell us how you're going to do all this stuff better than your competitors by responding to hundreds of pages of questions and specifications'. These companies hire the company I work for to read the thousands of pages they generate in response to these questions and critique, edit, proofread and, in some cases, rewrite them, making sure they answer the question and flow nicely and such. Which is hard because this stuff is mostly written by non-writerly engineers and financial people and architects and lawyers and other people who don't do words that well (okay, it's mostly the engineers who are trouble). Given that it's usually just me and my boss working on all this for about six weeks and getting paid quite well, we are under a lot of pressure, which means ten to fourteen to eighteen-hour days and all-nighters as the deadline approaches, which means very little personal time, which means those precious spare moments I do have are extremely valuable. During these weeks, all that keeps me sane is living another life in the gaps between periods of work through audiobooks. Waking up, eating breakfast, catching a taxi, walking to the office, taking my lunch break, brief trips to the bathroom, showering, ironing my clothes: these become the only moments I have to myself, and it's wondrous being able to fill them with literature instead of only the banal mechanics of eating and washing and moving between spaces.

My good friend and fellow aspiring author Gilly put me onto audiobooks a couple of years ago when she advised that they were a good way to get on top of all the readings we had to do for our Theory for Practising Writers classes. I'll never forget the experience of my first audiobook, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and how much more emotive it was when read passionately aloud, or Jeremy Irons reading Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita (and then having weird incongruous flashbacks when we visited Westminster Abbey and he narrated the audiotour).

'Jeremy's ... iron?'

(Credit)

Audiobooks can even facilitate the reading of bad books, so you can tune out for a while as the voice actor makes the effort for you. Perhaps if I'd read the works of Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan in physical form instead of as audiobooks, I would finally understand those people who purport to 'throw books across the room' when I came across the more politically questionable and gender essentialist passages therein.

But the speed of audiobooks does make them a good way to get through a lot of your reading list  (or matrix, as the case may be) quickly. I started out using them for university readings as Gilly suggested, then commenced my 'traipse through canon' with them, downloading audiobook versions of the public domain classics for free through Librivox (although there is obviously a compromise in quality with these). But I actually found I was racing rather than traipsing through canon in such a way that I was forgetting what I'd read and, of course, I couldn't take down notes and quotes as easily.

This is the one drawback of audiobooks for me (apart from the fact that the audial equivalent of losing your page is much more frustrating!). You lose the ability to go at your own pace, unless you want to distort the sound laughably by using your device's 'slow down' or 'speed up' functions, and even then. With literary fiction, I love to take my time and luxuriate in the language, going back to read over certain passages a few times, relishing the look of the words on the page. That's why I've largely started listening only to pure entertainment-value books as audiobooks, mostly (very bad) fantasy like Feist, Jordan, Collins and Goodkind and some not-bad fantasy like Martin and Pullman.

So you can see how a matrix becomes necessary to track all of these literary endeavours. I'm reading hardcover classics in bed at night, laptop by my side to take notes; I'm reading literary journals on the train and in waiting rooms, flaunting the covers for all to see; I'm filling the banal gaps in my existence of shopping and putting the washing on (and hanging it out and bringing it in and folding it) with terribly written fantasy adventures, all the while proceeding through a rotation of award-winning contemporary fiction, non-fiction of interest, recommendations from friends, books for research, books by friends and books with impending film adaptations. I'm just not the type of person to spontaneously pick up the next thing that takes my interest. For whatever reason I have to feel like I'm reading it all, covering all bases, playing all angles. Let's just hope this level of obsession never escalates. If I ever start talking about book algorithms and reading dice-rolls, you have my permission to commit me.

Thanks for reading,

LPL
Facebook | Twitter

References

Markus Zusak's 2008 novel The Book Thief, published by Picador.

A repudiation of spelling nazism

Tuesday 27 December 2011

There was a time when I probably would've proudly identified as a spelling nazi. I think I first heard the term some time in high school, when you're eager to define yourself and will seize upon any idiosyncratic characteristic that vaguely applies to you and claim it as your own. But when I got to uni, I started seeing other people who called themselves 'spelling nazis', and it wasn't pretty when viewed from the outside, with matured eyes. It was just so clearly about attention. 'Look at me!' they seemed to be saying. 'Aren't I just so quirky? Aren't I so individual? Aren't I so smart? Aren't I just so ob-sessed with all things literary?'

It didn't help that most of these self-proclaimed spelling nazis weren't actually so great with spelling and grammar. Most of them were studying English Literatures or Creative Writing, not English Language and Linguistics.* (Evidently) they hadn't done any outside reading on language. They didn't have any real understanding of grammatical concepts or language philosophy; they just had that innate, approximate proficiency with spelling and grammar that is pretty much the best result that can be achieved by the implicit system of teaching grammar I mentioned in the last post.

*Obviously not to denigrate the worthy disciplines of English Lit or Creative Writing, in which I myself am undertaking studies. It's just that in those two, it would be quite easy to carry on at the same level of grammatical capability as at high school, without any real understanding (until Editing, perhaps, in Creative Writing). While doing English Lit, Creative Writing and Linguistics constitutes probably the most comprehensive study of the English language available at undergraduate level, it's really Linguistics that I credit with forcing me to think about language enough to move beyond the level of the 'spelling nazi'.

Yeah, this is pretty much how it is.

And then that obligatory, awkward class in first year came around, where your tutor hands back the first assessment of your degree and makes a big speech about how many people in the class didn't reference correctly and how many spelling and grammar issues there were. And there would be the nazi, sucking up to the tutor and declaring how they can't stand when they see spelling mistakes, and they think it's such a shame that no one can spell any more. And they'd always finish with a faux-self-conscious laugh and say, 'But then I'm a total spelling nazi, so maybe that's just me.'

To me, then, spelling and grammar nazis are usually just over-compensating. As perhaps is connoted by the name, they're using their often uninformed proficiency with grammar to try to gain power over others. Very often when any contentious grammatical issue arises in class, often at their own instigation, their formerly self-extolled body of knowledge is shown to be built on false precepts. They frequently have an outdated propensity towards prescriptive, rather than descriptive, grammar. They learn what they think are the 'rules' of grammar, largely propagated by misinformed primary school teachers, and apply them unquestioningly, not knowing that many of these rules are wrong. And so they go on through life, arrogantly insisting, for example, the legitimately anglicised plural octopuses become octopi, decrying the ending of sentences with prepositions, and denouncing the starting of sentences with and. Octopus has Greek roots, not Latin and, as such, if we insist on being pedantic, should technically be realised in its plural form as octopodes. The ridiculously popular notion that sentences should not end in prepositions, as Bill Bryson points out in his thoroughly entertaining and insightful book Mother Tongue (which I highly recommend as a humbling device for any spelling nazi clinging obstinately to prescriptivism*) seems to be founded merely on the fact that the word contains the prefix pre-. And as for not starting sentences with and, what possible justification could there be for the imposition of such a rule other than the self-realising argument that 'it's bad grammar'?

*I have a copy if you know me and want to borrow it.

The long-term popularity of these false (or rather, arbitrary and unnecessary) rules has gone some way to giving them the weight of truth, but even this hiccough in linguistic history has enriched language. We now have the option to adhere to these rules if we want to sound formal in, for example, an academic context, but we can remain unconstrained by them in more casual or expressive discourses like everyday speech or fiction. To insist that sentences not end in prepositions in any other context, as Susan May does, is completely absurd, and I defy any prescriptivist to explain to me why it isn't without saying, 'It's just bad writing.' 

Susan May's post actually defeats its own argument. Not only does she state that '[n]obody says, unless you are English gentry perhaps, 'From where is that noise coming?'', but she also keeps ending sentences in prepositions, sentences that sound perfectly natural, and then having to re-word or rearrange them so as to avoid doing so. But what's wrong with ending a sentence with what I'm talking about? Nothing! May seems to think that any sentence ending in a preposition is automatically invalid and sloppy, and needs to be changed, but that this is okay because the alternative is always less clunky. I have less faith. Take, for example, Churchill's famous debunking of the preposition rule (which I actually think is misattributed to him, but nevertheless): 'This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.' In that case, and in many others, it would be much smoother to end the sentence in a preposition, i.e.: 'This is the type of English I will not put up with.' May might contend that another verb phrase besides 'put up' should have been used, but I believe it's silly to disqualify certain phrasings from writing arbitrarily. Nazi discrimination is what it is.

In the old days, grammar and linguistics weren't about observing how language works, but about making up rules for how it should work, about glorifying Latin as an ancient, 'pure' language, and about ensuring any words inherited or imported from other languages continued to be used in the way their original languages used them so that, for example, they retained their original plural forms instead of gaining English ones. They were about Proper Sentences and prer NUN sea ayshun, to borrow from Arundhati Roy. In other words, they were prescriptive. Luckily for us, we've moved away from all that and accepted that language is a fluid entity, and this fluidity is to be celebrated, not castigated. It's what has led English and, indeed, language on the whole to flourish.

'Of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist, lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pull from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a spluttering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy. The hulk of a charred Panzer. The underside of a granite boulder. The first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterrenean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.'

With their limited understanding of language, though, spelling and grammar nazis tend to default to prescriptivism – the result of caring about language, but not knowing much about it. Nazis and prescriptivists alike, then, refuse to accept or are ignorant of the fluidity of language and seek to pin it down. They regard any change or evolution within language with hostility, as an 'attack', or as 'erosion' or 'perversion'. If their attempts to censor new developments and neologisms in language were always successful, we would be deprived of some of our richest and most useful expressions. Fortunately, they rarely succeed, and the people behind them tend to become history's fools when the grammatical concepts they denounce take hold and become fundamental parts of common vernacular.

Sometimes, of course, language is 'under assault'. Sometimes it's used in a way that will not aid its development, a way that is redundant or banal or that obfuscates meaning. Pontification on language should be reserved for these instances, not organic occurrences which may sound different or silly, but which ultimately enrich language and expression. Those who rail against developments and changes in language should be regarded with automatic suspicion, and their arguments need to be examined. Is the change actually occurring and, if so, is it actually a bad thing, or just a different thing?  Sometimes, however, even changes for the worse end up becoming standardised, and we just need to accept this.

Are you picking up on any resemblances here? Outdated doctrines? Unquestioning belief in unfounded rules? Unreasonable opposition to change? Yep, that's right. Prescriptivist spelling nazis are the linguistic equivalent of sociopolitical conservatives, except with much, much less ground to stand on. Is it any wonder I'm scrambling to dissociate myself from them? 

The prescriptivist–conservative parallel is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the dynamic between French literary legend Marcel Proust and his contemporary Louis Ganderax, as explored by philosopher Alain de Botton. 'For Ganderax', says de Botton, 

     the priority of good writing was to follow precedent, to follow

     examples of the most distinguished authors in history, while

     bad writing began with the arrogant belief that one could avoid

     paying homage to great minds and write to one's own fancy. It

     was fitting that Ganderax had elsewhere awarded himself the 

     title of "defender of the French Language." The language needed

     to be defended against the assaults of decadents who refused to

     follow the rules of expression dictated by tradition, leading 

     Ganderax to complain publicly if he spotted a past participle in

     the wrong place or a word falsely applied in a published text. (93)

Sound familiar? Ganderax is a grammar nazi! What's scary is that you could easily replace a couple of words there and he would sound just like an American Republican politician.

Conversely, Proust had a much more sensible view of language:

     The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame

     Straus! ... This man who is so sceptical has grammatical

     certainties. Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even

     grammatical ones ... [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our

     choice, our taste, our certainty, our desire and our weakness can

     be beautiful. (94)

It's troubling that France's attitude to its beautiful language seems currently to be rather more Ganderaxian (?) than Proustian, with the notorious Académie française constantly making its restrictions on the way the language can be used. Perhaps that's only what's needed to protect against the culturally imperialistic incursions of the anglosphere, but isn't the very idea of 'protecting' a language from influences pointless and counter-productive? An interplay of languages can be beneficial. Something like 30% of English words, in fact, came from French, remnants of a time when England was ruled by francophones. Imagining where English would be now, without that influence, is impossible; it has benefited immeasurably. Now the tables have turned and English is the dominant tongue seeking, if you will, to pay off its loan, but French doesn't want it. It's isolating itself from an exchange that could well promote growth. Who knows what effect this stifling will have on French? If French became as beautiful as it is via a process of change, what will ossification do to it? Won't it only make English a more attractive option, and French increasingly out-of-touch and incapable of keeping up with demand?

When we looked at de Botton's essay in WRIT316: Advanced Editing for Practising Writers, my lecturer Dr Chrissy Howe, knowing how zealous an editor I was, expected me to come down on the side of Ganderax, to take issue with Proust's wishy-washy approach to language. When she said so, I launched off on a massive tirade basically comprised of everything I've said so far. Just because you love language doesn't mean you have to be a grammar nazi.

The fight with prescriptivism takes place on a million battlefields every day. The latest instance I've come across was in the debate between YouTube atheist Cristina Rad, or 'ZOMGitsCriss' (who appeared in the episode of Q&A Til and I went to see) and another atheist named Kate Fahr going by the name of 'BionicDance'.

I think this is really at the heart of what I find so frustrating about spelling nazi prescriptivism. There's nothing more irritating (and cringe-inducing) than watching someone belittle someone else for a reason that you know is totally unjustified. Fahr's video response to Rad, declaratively titled 'You ARE TOO an Agnostic Atheist' was smug and patronising, delivered in an indescribably (but nevertheless infuriatingly) condescending tone. It opened with a melodramatic sigh and the statement, 'Folks, when someone's wrong, they're wrong, and they should be called out on it.' Too right. She then went on to use the phrase you see and kiddo to top and tail every other sentence, and kept on saying, 'I don't know what else to say to you', like an eccentric, longwinded aunt lecturing her niece or something. On top of all of that, she kept making these weird faces at the end of every point, as if to say, 'Oops, you were wrong – how awkward for you.'

Can't you just hear your mum saying this to you?: 'If you want to actually discuss these issues rationally and reasonably, like an adult, well, you're going to have to accept the fact that some of the things you don't like apply to you.'

The issue of agnosticism vs atheism is a different one which I hope to treat in the future, but for now, Fahr's criticisms of Rad were totally wrong, founded as they were in prescriptivism. Rad asserted that she is not an agnostic, but an atheist. Fahr responded, 'But you see the truth is, that is what you are. You just don't realise it because your definitions are wrong.' I almost can't even imagine a more typically prescriptivist argument. Fahr makes an appeal to what she calls the 'correct, etymological definitions' of the words to prove her point, interrogating what those words' morphemes (a- gnos -tic and a- the -ist) mean in their root language. Her claim is that the former means 'without knowledge' and the latter means 'without belief'. As Rad rightly retorts, though, these etymological definitions actually have little to do with the words' actual meanings today, as is the case with most words due to the process I call semantic decay. Fahr keeps on talking about words being 'etymologically incorrect' and 'technical, etymologically correct definitions'; she wants to prescribe how words should be used according to their etymology, but Rad knows that 'the value of words is given by how people use them'.

At the end of the day, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as Dr Shady Cosgrove taught me, are all about clarity. It only takes a little extrapolation to get from clarity to expression, expression to communication, communication to connection, and connection to empathy. Prescriptivists and spelling nazis, conversely, are about stasis and homogeneity: expressing yourself in a rigid, unchanging, 'correct' manner which then stymies diversity of communication, and thereby affects connection and empathy – just one more reason I feel the need to discredit it. Although it can be difficult, we need to learn not to regard change with automatic revulsion, but to interrogate each new development based on its own merits, not only in language, but in life.

That's all for now, but check the comments below for my model of a spelling nazi's response to this post.

References 

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television episode, 'A Philosophical Q and A' from its television program Q&A, Season 4, Episode 34.

Alain de Botton's book chapter, 'How to Express Your Emotions' (85–103), in his book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, published by Vintage International in 1998.

Bill Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, published by Penguin in 1991.

Kate Fahr (BionicDance)'s video 'You ARE TOO an Agnostic Atheist' from her YouTube Channel 'Rabid Lesbian Atheist of DOOM!'.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's sketch, 'Tricky Linguistics', in their television series, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Season 1, Episode 3.

Susan May's post 'How do you solve a problem like prepositions?' on her blog, An Adventure in Words: Ideas, Information and Inspiration, from Friday 7 October 2011.

Cristina Rad (ZOMGitsCriss)'s video 'I am not an Agnostic Atheist. Seriously' from her YouTube Channel 'k-rina'.

Cristina Rad (ZOMGitsCriss)'s video 'Belief. Knowledge. Agnosticism' from her YouTube Channel 'k-rina'.

Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, published by Harper Perennial in 2004.

Book review: tina fey's bossypants

Saturday 23 July 2011
(Updated Wednesday 4 January 2011)

After a semester studying abroad, I recently spent forty-six hours straight languishing in Heathrow Airport, a fact to which I'm sure any of my Facebook friends will attest, due to the incessant status-update plangencies that would have been plaguing their feeds. Awaiting the time of my appointed, triumphant (or, rather, bedraggled and slightly malodorous) return to Sydney for such an expanse of time demanded considerable intellectual sustenance, but with internet access costing ten pence per minute and my Australian–UK adapter for prolonged use of phone, laptop or iPod out of commission, I was obliged to purchase more books from the limited selection of an airport-sized WHSmith.

Evidently my subconscious thought I was in need of cheering up because the two books I selected were Terry Pratchett's 679th Discworld installment, I Shall Wear Midnight, and Tina Fey's autobiography Bossypants. I think it must've been how hot she looks on the cover that made me choose to read Fey's book first:

Yowza! (A quote from Don Fey, Tina Fey's father, on the back cover under the heading 'advance praise for Bossypants' reads 'I hope that's not really the cover. That's really going to hurt sales.'

There's a certain puerile pleasure that comes with finishing a book in a single day, a psychological relic, perhaps, of a time when the measure of your coolness was how quickly you'd read the latest Harry Potter. In the case of Bossypants, however, I can't help but feel that it wasn't my reading prowess that accomplished the feat (especially since I'm not actually that fast a reader at all), but a certain ... 'thinness' in the book itself. At 277 pages, it felt a bit slapped together and brief, especially towards the end when Fey begins recounting individual scenes from 30 Rock and reproduces the entire transcript from her notorious Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton Saturday Night Live skit, not that I didn't enjoy reading both of those. 'I could go on,' says Fey at one point, after having listed three or four lines-worth of luminaries to have emerged from an improv company she belonged to, 'but my editor told me that was a cheap way to flesh out the book' (81).

Reading it, though, you understand why Bossypants isn't a seven-tortuous-years-in-the-making magnum opus. You wonder, in fact, how she managed it at all, in spite of her insistence that the stress levels of her writing job are comically minimal (on a graph comparing them with those of miners, Chilean miners, and active military servicemen) and her hatred of being asked 'how she juggles it all'. I'm not sure about dismissing the difficulties of her working life by comparing them with the stress experienced by soldiers – it's not all about stress; it's about how much time you have in the day, which seems very little in Fey's case. The airiness of the book isn't necessarily a bad thing, anyway. It just makes it one of those 'light reads' you're always hearing about.

Besides, I don't think Fey has to try that hard to be funny. It felt effortless. Reading the book, I found myself lying on the floor of the Heathrow Airport Terminal 3 seating area pissing myself every couple of minutes, much to the annoyance of everyone trying to sleep around me, I'm sure. The funniest parts for me were those where she created an irregular mental image, such as in one of her tips for 'me time' activities when you have a baby: 'Say you're going to look for the diaper crème, then go into your child's room and just stand there ...' (243) or when she recounts receiving a Modess 'my first period' kit from her mother: 'I shoved the box in my closet, where it haunted me daily ... Everytime I reached into my closet to grab a Sunday school dress or my colonial-lady Halloween costume that I sometimes relaxed in after school—"Modesssss," it hissed at me. '"Modesssss is coming for you" (13–14). Or else it was the times she just slipped a joke in there with you barely realising until it hit you: 'Of course I know now that no one can "steal" boyfriends against their will, not even Angelina Jolie itself', or 'I'll bet Margaret Thatcher would say the same if she were alive today.* [And then, in a footnote] *Apparently Margaret Thatcher is alive and says of course she would have told the nanny about the problem and she thinks I am a complete chickenshit' (257).

It was lucky for all of this hilarity, because if you'd asked me if I wanted to read a book whose subject matter dealt predominantly with the female experience of puberty, beauty and appearance issues, feminism, motherhood, and photoshoots, you can guess what my answer would've been. YES PLEASE! But yeah, couldn't quite escape the fact that the book was marketed to women, which I didn't know when I bought it. 'It's not quite as quease-making as when you lose your tampon string,' she says of putting in contact lenses, 'but equally as queasish as a self–breast exam. If you are male, I would liken it to touching your own eyeball, and thank you for buying this book.'

But the book did irritate me every now and then. I got over the self-deprecating ugly jokes after a while. I mean, she's effing gorgeous, with a MILF rating off the charts, so what's she talking about!? I don't necessarily think it's fake humility, I just found it excessive. Maybe Australians have a more refined sensibility to self-deprecating humour, since it's like, our thing.

And all that talk of the facial scar! She kept on going on about it and I was like, huh? What is she talking about? I've literally never noticed it. In fact, I still can't find it anywhere on her face. Maybe it's makeup, or airbrushing, or distraction by her general hotness, or the fact that I've apotheosised her to the extent that I can no longer detect any form of imperfection in her person, I don't know. Actually, you know what it probably is? My habit of not paying attention to/retaining information about things I don't care about. Maybe if I watched Mean Girls again, I'd see it and be like, 'Ohhhh yeahhhh!' Any excuse to watch Mean Girls again ...

'Ugh, my facial scar is huge.'

Also, I think her editor was a bit overzealous on the quotation marks, there. It could've just been that they were all double quotation marks, but they really stood out to me, often as not really being necessary. It kind of made it feel like an awkward email from your best friend's mum, who's enthusiastic about the internet but hasn't quite mastered the conventions of e-communication yet and says things like, 'I heard from "our little girl" that you guys all had fun at the races last weekend! :D Did you make any "big wins"???!!! :oP'

And I'll admit, I was also a little disappointed with the number of mentions of God. You let me down, Tina. But my God-mention tolerance level is significantly lower than the average person's. It's not like she was preachy, or anything. I just expected such an obviously liberal, talented, intelligent woman to be ... irreligious.

Those small and few (is there an antonym for 'multifarious'? There should be ...) reservations aside, Bossypants was a hilarious "light read", as they say!!! :o) !!!?!