I'm reading a book about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore at pres. It's a bit verbose, but I'm sufficiently interested in the subject matter to plough on and get through the 500 pages. What the length of this pot-boiler does illustrate is the shoddy state of the book editor's craft.
Editing is one of those skills that bean-counters mistakenly think is largely superfluous - a nice-to-have, but non-essential. This is the same kind of flabby thinking that leads newspapers to laying off hacks and employing brand consultants. A quick perusal of the some of the shite that gets passed off as on-line journalism these days should disabuse anyone of that misconception. Good editing, like good journalism, is transparent, unostentatious. You only notice its absence. Consequently I find myself reading far too many rambling ill-disciplined books these days. It's doubly annoying as they don't appear to be getting any cheaper to reflect the wretched economies apparently being made. No.
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