Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to PunctuationĮats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, 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. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. Whenever the opportunity to do a different sort of writing comes along, I’ve thought ‘I’d like to do that.In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor 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. “I see writing as an opportunity to try things. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves is probably going to be the only thing I’m known for” “I think it might just be me who finds it all funny. Who does she imagine her typical reader is? “I don’t know if there is one,” she cackles. Next summer will see the publication of a comic crime novel she submitted this year before rattling off a series of short stories that she read herself on Radio 4. Truss’s latest novel, The Lunar Cats, centres on a librarian who opens up her home to an “evil” kitten and ends up doing its bidding. The novelist has since procured a second Norfolk terrier, Django, but it was Bill and Daisy who fired up her imagination, inspiring her to write about the “sadistic” relationship between cats and humans. “I’d get home from work and there would be these two black outlines at the top of the stairs looking down at me.” The situation deteriorated when Truss bought a Norfolk terrier, Hogie, in 2009.
‘I think it might just be me who finds it all funny’ “They were beautiful in their way, but a bit menacing,” she recalls. Then, in the mid-2000s, she adopted two rescue cats, Bill and Daisy.
In the mid-1980s there were Buster and Paddy, who remained a constant in her life for 20 years. Since Eats, Shoots & Leaves, it has been Truss’s policy to write about anything other than punctuation so when she was invited to pen a short horror novel, she jumped at the chance – after confirming that the book could be about cats.
‘People apologise as if I’m this horrible person’
0 kommentar(er)
