A grab bag - sometimes funny, sometimes sly. If you didn't know that Brontë is a 'patriotic' re-rendering of Irish surname Prunty, or why we say Shavian, Bellovian etc. but we have no adjective for Jane Austen, and these things interest you, then this is a place to spend a little while. Sutherland is a witty enough MC, with a broad literary church that even goes as far as to include a synopsis of the neo-Nazi fantasy opus Kingdom Come.The structure is loose, ranging around names of authors, money talk, size, titbits of info, misconceptions and conceits, dates of lesser known milestones. Well worth reading if you're a reader, and less so if you're not, but then the title took care of any doubts on that front, didn't it?The Carlyles and Tony Blair and Norman Mailer get a right shafting, but then Mailer's The Naked and the Dead gets given its due late in the piece. Blair telling non-painter Ian McEwan that he was a fan of his paintings is probably worth the price of admission by itself, as is McEwan's citing of a non-existent article in Enduring Love that most of the Stateside critics took at face value.And the Guinness-endorsed guy (Howard S. Berg) who reads 25,000 words a minute - what's he reading at the moment? This is a series of short anecdotes about authors and books, such as the origins of the Brontes' odd last name. Tolkien is mentioned in an entry about Amanda McKittrick Ros, born in 1860 in Ireland, who Sutherland names as the worst novelist of all time. Supposedly Tolkien and the other Inklings would sit around reading from her work, seeing who'd be the first person to laugh. A sample opening sentence, from Ros' Irene Iddlesleigh: "Sympathise with me, Indeed! Ah, No! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn."
Do You like book Curiosities Of Literature (2008)?
"The perfect bedside book for insomniac bibliophiles" (David Lodge)
—SultryBubbles
A very 'literary' book. Interesting content, but not a light read.
—SKye
Interesting, gossipy stories about well known literary figures.
—sravs
Ragbag of literary (ish) anecdata. Slightly interesting.
—najouael
