Thursday 10 March 2016

Canada Reads- book one


   Canada Reads has chosen their 5 panelists and each panelist has chosen a book that represents the difficulties of 'starting over'.
This is the book that I decided to read first.
"Minister Without Portfolio" by Michael Winter.
   What a disappointment!  The sentence structure was so poor that I felt that I was reading an elementary school student's writing.  I kept feeling that I needed to correct it- "No, that sentence is not complete, that punctuation is not correct", etc. etc. 
   Of course, punctuation is not an issue for a lot of authors these days. This book has a complete lack of quotation marks, which seems to be fairly common in novels today.
   But the sentence structure was so terrible, that I could not focus on the narrative.
   I had to look up 'syntax' to see if it is still in the dictionary.  Did I come from another planet, where they were conscious of syntax and punctuation?
   I would love to know who decided that grammar (including punctuation and syntax) no longer matters.  


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