3/15/22

3.5 stars. I liked the material a lot, but there were these niggling annoyances.
The book was published in 1996. So some of the entries are kind of dated. Like quotes from the 1992 presidential campaigns. I know a bit about publishing deadlines. There was no way they could have included quotes from the 1996 campaigns. Current events just don't age well, even the 1996 ones would not be particularly interesting today.
The editorial glosses for some of the entries contained misspellings. Egregious example - following a quote that mentioned a person named Darrow, from a story by Edith Wharton, the editorial note called the person George Dallow.
There was some repetition in those notes as well. A comment would be repeated, with possibly some variant wording, in a couple of quotes in the same category. Or, in one case, the comment was that Shakespeare had used the same metaphor in another play. And sure enough, a subsequent entry would be the metaphor from that same play.
And, frankly, I sometimes thought the editors were on the wrong track with their comments.


In general, I am appalled at how so many books seem not to have been subjected to the kind of editorial review that ought to clean up this kind of sloppiness.

Now, why did I actually READ the book? It is obviously intended as a reference work. It changes subject about as frequently as a thesaurus - although the cast of characters isn't quite as extensive as a telephone book.
But I knew my own writing habits - that I would never bother to look anything up while in creative writing mode. So I decided to read it to see if there was anything I might find inspiring. I marked an occasional item because I liked the poetic image, or because it tickled my funny bone. Overall, I probably flagged about 1% that way.

By the way, the page count for this book is 612, plus about xl pages in the front. Those Roman numerals comprised a table of contents, an introduction, information on how to use the book, and a Table of Thematic Categories. Those thematic categories are then expanded with quotes, citation of the source for the quote, and sometimes those comments from the editors. The metaphor section makes up the next 471 pages. Then there are various cross references, a bibliography, and for some reason another list of metaphors, all from Shakespeare. This seems redundant, since the main list of metaphors includes Shakespearian ones. Since the items within each category are organized alphabetically by author, I would think you don't need a separate list.

At the moment, I own the book, but I haven't yet decided whether to keep it. Before I discard it, I need to transcribe those 1% items, and I may not get around to doing that for quite a while. As it happens, I bought the book in the thrift-priced section at Half Priced books, so it's not exactly a high value item.
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