Do poorly produced books give you the hump? Join CAMEL- the
Campaign for More Editing in Literature. Launched today, CAMEL seeks to rid a
tortured humanity of the phenomenon of the over-hyped, under-edited bestseller
riddled with short-comings.
How often have you had this experience…
You stand in a
bookshop, desperate for something decent to read. Arrayed on a table is a
collection of the bookseller’s latest offerings, the pick, one assumes, of the current
literary crop. No matter which you choose, its blurb describes in golden
phrases the book it adorns. You trust the words on the cover. Clutching your
selection you walk to the checkout, an addict needing a fix. Money is paid: the
book is yours. You take your seat on a crowded train. Ignoring your
sullen fellow- passengers you retreat into your private world of literary
appreciation, turning the pristine pages of your purchase. And then, they hit
you- breaking through your willingly suspended disbelief come the cliché, the
pleonasm, the syntactical gaffe, the gratuitously invented irrelevant detail,
the misplaced exposition, the inapt simile, the indistinguishable
characters, pronoun confusion, pedestrian prose, and every other type of verbal
pestilence. Confused, you turn to the back cover. Yes it did proclaim ‘a
startling literary talent’, ‘hugely accomplished’, and half-a-dozen other accolades,
all of them, as you now realize, entirely misleading.
Why should a betrayed reading public suffer such injustice?
Don’t let the publishers get away with it. Shame them, now. Using the comment
box below, give your nomination for a book deserving the full five humps.
