Dog-eared Pages

We went to the library today, because I’d read everything in the house and was starting to get shaky. Mrs. Cat and I took turns watching over Cub so we could each look around in peace. I was sitting with him in the Kids’ Room, idly scanning the notices on the wall advertising their reading groups. The posters had cute doggie pictures on them, and theoretically clever captions to entice the patrons to attend. The first one had a picture of a dog in a snow drift, and the caption read: “It’s to cold! Let’s go inside and read a story!”

Really? You used the prepositional “to” instead of the adverbial “too”?

The other one that caught me showed a dog on its back in the grass, and a caption that read: “I don’t know how to read, so I just lay in the grass and listen.”

Holy shit. I hope you’re not going to be teaching grammar in these classes, because you don’t know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. “Lie” (intransitive – no direct object) means to recline on a surface; “lay” (transitive – takes a direct object) means to place something on a surface.

I started to go to the desk and ask if they had any grammar guides, and why weren’t they using them, but Mrs. Cat came back at that point so I could browse instead of start a fight.

I always check out the “New Fiction” shelf first, to see if there’s anything out there I missed hearing about on the grapevine. I saw two books out of a series by Justina Robson. This is the first part of the capsule description on one of them:

“Ever since the Quantum Bomb of 2015 things have been different; the dimensions have fused and suddenly our world is accessible to elves, demons, ghosts, and elementals…and their worlds are open to us. Things have been different for Special Agent Lila Black too: tortured and magic-scarred by elves, rebuilt by humans into a half-robot, part-AI, nuclear-fueled walking arsenal, and carrying the essence of a dead elven necromancer in her chest, sometimes she has trouble figuring out who she is.”

The capsule also mentions the Fae, and at some point in this series, Lila goes to Hell. I’m assuming that’s where she picked up her half demon-half elven boyfriend, who’s also an international rock star.

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s like the author took books by Tolkien, Gibson, Asimov, Rice, Hamilton and Pullman, threw them in a blender, drank the resulting mix, then vomited it into her word processor. The series may as well be called My Story Idea Stew

When I hear writers bitching about how hard it is to get published, I have to wonder if it’s not just them. Apparently you can get just about any ol’ word salad out in print.

Speaking of unnecessary books, Mascot Books is rolling out Bo, America’s Commander In Leash next week. This is just the latest in a series of books “by” or about presidential pooches. Bush’s (R-ead my lips) Millie had one. Even Ted Kennedy’s (D-iver down) dog got a deal.

It’s not really that I object to a company cashing in on all of the “excitement” the media has drummed up about that fucking dog (you know, rather than focusing on the fact that the economic underpinnings of this country have been hauled off and sold as scrap metal), but was a grammatically-correct title too much to hope for?

The publisher’s website states that the book is "the first children's book starring the most famous dog in the world."

Oh, really? So the debut of Lassie Come Home in 1940 means nothing? Clifford the Big Red Dog appearing in 1963 has been forgotten? For God’s sake, The Poky Little Puppy is sixty-seven years old (that’s 469 in dog years).

Goofy? Pluto? Marmaduke? Any of these ringing a bell? There are three-year-olds in Jakarta who can’t find the United States on a map, but I guarantee you they know who Snoopy is.

Look, you’re making money off of a temporary fixation. Great. You will include some short historical facts in order to position it as educational. Fine. But leave the hyperbole to professionals, okay?