Yay! and Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Hilarie from Never Not Reading has honored me by nominating me for the Kreative Blogger award! Thanks Hilarie!

Rules for accepting the Kreative Blogger Award require me to list seven of my favorite things, and nominate seven other fabulous blogs.

Seven of My Favorite Things
1. Family

2. Friends
3. My Dogs and cats

4. Reading
5. Knitting
6. Sleeping
7. Chocolate

Seven Amazing Blogs I would like to nominate:

1. Mari at Marireads

2. The Yarnerinas

3. Karoline at Karoline Knits

4. Knitandplaywithfire

5. Trish at Trish's Reading Nook

6. Jeane at Dog Ear Diary

7. Holly at ProseKnitic

I read all of these blogs as often as possible and hope you enjoy them as much as I do.


Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss

I've probably just violated one of Mrs. Truss' rules (and that apostrophe may be the second violation, but I don't like the look of Truss's and Perdue is telling me Truss' is acceptable) by italicizing the title, but I don't like bolding titles because it looks silly, kind of like you're shouting at someone, ergo the italicization. After all, she does say that we all have our preferences and should use them, so I'm going to. That was the first good thing I got out of this book. My punctuation may not be quite as poor as I thought (although I may be wrong there too...). A lot of my more questionable grammer and punctuation is simply a matter of taste, so yay!

The second good thing is that aside from making me much more aware of punctuation and it's usage, this book cleared up a few things for me, like the usage of semi colons, which have always driven me crazy.

The fact that she's discussing punctuation in a prose form, as opposed to text book form (snore), makes it a lot easier to stick to listening to someone go on a bit about punctuation, the reasons for it and the decline of what is a really useful tool. Her examples make that point. It was quite often fun to study how the meaning of a sentence could be completely altered by adding or removing a comma, as in the book's title.

Although she is a self-professed punctuation stickler, her self-deprecating tone coupled with her admission that some punctuation is down to taste and style and her short histories of punctuation, which demonstrate the changeable nature of languages, prevented the book from reading like a rant from some punctuation stickler with a stick, um, clutched firmly in their hand. I quite enjoyed reading this book and wish more people would, if not because they love punctuation, but simply to increase their awareness of it and how helpful it can be.

Totally unrelated to this, of course, is that I realized work was becoming too demanding for me to concentrate on serious books in my free time, so after finishing Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I "re-read" (audio books) the Twilight series. They're not very well written and there's way too much angsty teenage romance, vampire or no, for my taste, but still somehow a good story (if you don't get it, don't ask, because I can't even explain it to myself, let alone anyone else). It was great not having to concentrate or think for a while. Now I'm back to "the Grind" and am finishing off The Pickwick Papers.