Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
By Lynne Truss
204 pages
Time to read: Too long (About 2 weeks)

Like any great book about grammar, Eats, Shoots & Leaves has a good deal of bite. Truss rags on everyone — especially Americans — for relaxing standards of punctuation while exploring usage and anomalies of commas, semicolons, periods (or full stops, as they say in Britain), etc. It's an informative book, especially because Truss discusses the differences in American and British usage, but a lot of the grammatical knowledge is basic if you've taken a good copy-editing course. Luckily, Truss makes up for that with her intelligent writing that made me turn to the dictionary at times. (Most of the words I was curious about weren't in my two paperback dictionaries, so I suggest having a computer, large dictionary or pencil and paper nearby if you care about such things.) This is one of the better modern reads about grammar-related issues.

Good Omens

Author: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Length: 369 pages
Time to read: Approximately two weeks but I work two jobs

I loved this book. It moves quickly and it's very funny. Basically, it is about the Apocalypse and how an angel and a demon try to stop it from occurring. There are lots of little threads that run through the book and the authors very neatly refer back to them and tie everything together at the end. It's a very enjoyable read and I would recommend it if you are looking for some nice light fiction with a bit more substance that chick lit.

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls
By Zoey Dean
293 pages
Time to read: Less than a week, while moving

I wanted an easy read for my first week of work. It was.

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls follows Megan Smith, a highly indebted Yale graduate, as she struggles to stay on her feet by tutoring (and while tutoring) the infamous Baker twins, billed as the new Paris Hilton and friends. Their partying ways begin to catch up to them, however, and Duke officials tell them they would have to actually earn their way into the freshman class. Their grandmother hires Megan to help them get there.

Megan spends most of the book in Palm Beach — a distance from her East Coast life — and begins to feel pulled between her two lives ... and the two sides of the twins. The plot is fair, but Dean falls short of the characters' full potential. The twins are hard to follow (something Megan could agree with) and not nearly as nasty as one would expect from filthy rich girls.

A good read, but nothing remarkable.