My book read on writing this year is Virginia Tufte’s
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. If you don’t remember some of my personal
reading observances, I read one book on writing every year. Tufte’s excellent book takes you through the various syntactic
elements and shows the reader through actual examples their stylistic
implications. I’ll have more to say on
it in the future, I’m sure. But in her
very first chapter she provides this marvelous quote by the novelist and
linguist Anthony Burgess, who by the way is best known for his novel, A Clockwork Orange. This quote is not from that work, but from one of his Enderby novels.
And
the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with
atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.
-Anthony
Burgess
I had to read that Burgess sentence more than once to make sense of it ... and still haven't . Personally, I prefer reading Homer ... Homer Simpson.
ReplyDeleteHe looks very unhappy in that picture. Probably because someone wrote on his sleeve!
God bless.