Saturday, July 21, 2012

I and me and chord sequences

Oh bother. I'm feeling a grump coming on. Having spent longer than is sensible reading old green Penguins - see past entries - I buy a couple of books at the church coffee morning. One, the first Simon Serrailler thriller by Susan Hill, I enjoy immensely and am glad to discover there are many more - though a chance conversation with a pal who has most of them leads me to guess at the dénouement earlier than I would have liked (deduction based, if you're old enough to recall it, on memories of the TV series The Virginian).

There is, however, one fly in that particular ointment - a solitary grammatical howler that stabs me to the heart in the middle of such a well-written book. As it's about two-thirds of the way through, I find I'm slightly on edge for the rest of it. Will it happen again? But it doesn't, and I'm glad.

And now I'm onto an American murder story - just started it. The Faces of Angels by Lucretia Grindle. Follow the link and read the reviews - sounds good, eh? Set in Florence, interesting perspective on a murderous attack near the beginning - all very promising. And then the glaring errors slip in, one after another. "I" instead of "me" - that sort of thing. I don't know if I can go on reading it, for I suddenly find myself becoming critical of descriptions, names (Kirk. I ask you...), vocabulary. I develop a sudden loathing for the word "gotten".

I used to get irritated when Mr B didn't like some piece of music because of some poor chord progression or somesuch (many a modern hymn suffers from this). But I shall not be irritated again. Not by that, anyway. Because I am just as bad, and right now I'm sufficiently irritated at myself, let alone at writers who should know better or composers who didn't do enough harmony at school.

As I said: bother.

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