From the back cover:
“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. ‘Book love,’ Trollope called it. ‘It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.’ Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in [a] chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.”

—from How Reading Changed My Life

Review:
This book was really short, so I reckoned on being able to get through it quickly. Turns out I got bogged down quite a bit in the beginning, but eventually made my way through it. There were many observations that resonated with my own experience, including a hypothesis for why women in particular seem drawn to fiction and this bit here:

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is.

How often I have encountered that perception!

There were a dozen or so top ten lists of recommendations at the back of the book. I took the time to comb through all of the unfamiliar titles and ended up adding about twenty to my “must read someday” list. This book might not’ve excited me with its ruminations upon reading, but at least it came from someone who loves the act as much as I do and who could direct me to books I’d not previously discovered on my own.

From the front flap:
Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now “txt msgs,” we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it.

This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross’s epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

Review:
This book on punctuation is interesting enough that I read it in two sittings. Throughout the first, I was rather irritated. Having been urged to give reign to my inner stickler, I was then repeatedly confronted with the British practice of putting concluding punctuation outside of quotation marks and found it extremely irksome.

Recovering somewhat, I persevered and particularly found the chapter on the semicolon and colon to be illuminating; I even took notes! I’ve personally used them sparingly and only when sure I was correct, but it turns out there are some other occasions when using a semicolon is appropriate. I also liked the notion that the comma is a “grammatical sheepdog,” herding groups of words together into clusters that make sense.

The book’s also fairly amusing, though Truss’s dire prognosticating does get a bit old after a while. I’m annoyed by errors too, but I personally don’t see a future where internet shorthand will be commonplace in official print. There will always be morons, but there will also (hopefully) be sticklers.