Off with his heading

I haven't posted for a few days, which is something I dislike.  I try to avoid leaving gaps in my shit pensées.  Well, there's history to think of, isn't there?  The reason for the vide is that I've had a book review to write.  I do this for work from time-to-time.  It's usually a pleasure.  I get sent a book about a sport I may or may not be particularly interested in.  I read it; pen 350 words about it and post it off.  It's quite good fun.  It's also a useful discipline.  Sport is inherently dramatic, so unless the book's premise is so thin, it's transparent or it's been written by a primate, there's usually some literally succour to be had.

Occasionally though I have to plough through a stinker of a book.  It's only really happened once in my journalistic career.  When it does though, it's torture.  To have to read a book you dislike is a mediaeval cruelty.  It's especially so for someone like me, who's not in the first flush of youth.  I only have so many books left to me in my life.  I don't want to be wasting one on a bot-boiler.  Unfortunately, the book I've just finished is an absolutely stinker - boring, overlong...crap basically.

The worst aspect of this prose failure is that the subject matter should be fascinating.  But the author mistakenly thought that research would make up for any shortcomings in his writing ability.  It won't of course, not unless he's trying to have a PhD dissertation accepted.

Despite this, the book could have been redeemed.  A descent editor would have set the writer straight in a heartbeat.  Unfortunately, most publishing houses have decided that editors are superfluous to requirements.  The spurious reasoning behind this move is that editors are expensive, it being a skilled trade, and they slow the process of the book to the marketplace.  Also, all the shit on the web that people clamour to read hasn't been proofed and/or tweaked, has it?  People don't care about that stuff these days.  We've moved on.  It's Hammertime - get with the programme.

Yes, but I don't pay £12.99 for access to a single web site, do I?  And, believe me, if I did, I'd expect it to be expertly written and proof.  

Just like the guff I set down.