Willing
By Scott Spencer
Ecco (Imprint of Harper Collins)
244 Pages
Book begins on Page 1
Here is an odd construction. Below is how it appears in the book. Also, take note of the staccato/laundry list style of his writing. This can get annoying and FAST. I’m on page two and I’m praying it changes. I hope it’s just for a few pages and for whatever reason.
Be careful what you wish for,
But before that, before I got what I wished for, and more, which is as most people know, another way of saying Before I got what I wished for, and less, I was, to be perfectly blunt about it, still absorbed with the Sisyphean task of getting over my childhood, which was not at all how I wanted to be spending my brief flicker of existence, but was, to my perpetual chagrin, what I seemed to be stuck with.
Why does this style of writing suck? Let me count the ways. What’s with the beginning to that paragraph? What the hell is that? Why is that second “but” capitalized? Why is the “before” I made bold capitalized? It doesn’t start a sentence. Why write like this?
Ok, it’s time to play, count the commas. 12 commas. That’s a dozen when I went to school. If fact, when I learned that 12 was a dozen, when I was about 4, I wrote like Scott does here. I didn’t use, long sentences, and also, had no clue, how to use a comma properly.
In case you were interested, “Sisyphean” means unending or repetitive. Why not just say that? Who the fook knows?
At the end of the paragraph, doesn’t a comma cut the verb off from the following prepositional phrase? Prepositional phrases do not get set off by commas. But ok.
Page 3
I’m so sorry folks but I HAD to bail. This is an insult. Truly. I can’t, read a book, that is punctuated, and written, like this, because, I’d never be able, to respect myself, in the morning.
I’m all for poetic licence but you cannot just change the rules of punctuation and grammar because you think you’re cool. There are commas where they shouldn’t be and worse off, not where they should be. I have NO clue how such absolute trash gets published. This books SUCKS. The only thing I can equate it to is a sociopathic 3rd grader all hopped up on ritalin, crack, and heroin who decided to try writing. In fact, if you were this aforementioned 3rd grader and you wrote what’s in this book, your parents and teachers would tell you that you’re going to have to try a little harder if you want to catch up to the other kids in your class and get on their level.