Curiosities of Literature by John Sutherland

Curiosities of Literature Reviews

• 
  Moira

  
  Two reviewers on Amazon.com: "Sutherland's witty pomposity will either entertain you or drive you mad. Unfortunately, I found myself in the latter category. Consider which camp you belong to before reading this one." "Unlike the other reviewer who pronounced Sutherland pompous and arrogant, I found this book is so witty and enjoyable that I actually read part of it at the beach." I am firmly in the beach-reading camp. To paraphrase Lincoln, if this is the kind of thing you like, you'll love it, and if not, you will think it violently pretentious at best. But anyone who can distract me from a threatening migraine which has been building up like a New Mexico thunderhead since Friday has my attention, and my gratitude, and my laughter.
  
  
  One carp: short as the chapters are, there are some very brief squibs which would obviously be sidebars set off by maybe just white space on the printed page, but in the Kindle version they're inserted right in the middle of the text - with the result that the gory result of Hemingway's suicide is interrupted by a blithe page on the origins of literary detectives. This happens about three or four times. However, the detailed, gleefully grotesque illustrations by
  Martin Rowson are much better-rendered than usual (many of them are quite unnerving, but hilarious). They gain the book a whole star (yes they are that good). And, of course, there is the usual Kindle-ified un-numbered, un-linked useless Index, which is just a list of names. sigh.
• 
  John

  A literary miscellany, heavy on the Victorians. Good light reading for the bookish type.
• 
  Casey

  A fun little jaunt through factoids of literature, though it skews heavily in favor of white European men (as Western literature tends to do).
• 
  Skjam!

  This is a book of trivia, factoids and amusing stories about the world of literature. The author is a professor of English literature, so he knows his stuff. The book is organized by loose themes, beginning with food (both as featured in literature, and as eaten by authors.) There are bits on authors’ pen names, sales figures and famous deaths. After the index, there’s an essay on “the end of the book” where Mr. Sutherland muses whether the codex book as we know it will soon vanish, replaced by electronic media or even telepathic communication.
  
  The illustrations are by Martin Rowson, who is in the old style of detailed editorial cartoons, and give a very British feel to the book. (The words are less obvious about it.)
  
  Being relatively widely-read, I had run across many of the factoids before, but there were some I had no idea of, or had long forgotten (like the true fate of V.C. Andrews.) Mr. Sutherland makes no pretense of being neutral in his opinions–he’s particularly scathing about the Left Behind series. His writing is informative and readable; it might be worthwhile to look his more serious work up.
  
  As with many other trivia and lists books, this is less something one would buy for themselves, and more something to buy as a present for a relative who loves reading. As such, it’s good value for money–but given that “mature themes” are discussed, I would not recommend it for readers below senior high school age.
• 
  verbava

  як підказує назва, це така збірка цікавинок, фактоїдів, міфів і їхніх розвінчань, які так чи інакше (іноді – дуже інакше) стосуються літератури. вони начебто поділені за розділами: про їжу, про знаряддя письма, про секс, про смерть, про читачів тощо – але загалом доволі випадково позбирані докупи. сазерленд травить байки, і часом йому одному зрозуміло, якими асоціаціями одна чіпляється за іншу. зате з цього виходить хороше чтиво для метро.
• 
  James Pumpelly

  Treasures for Trivia Aficionados
  
  John Sutherland's compilation of obscure or false beliefs relating, mostly, to authors, is a treasure trove for Trivia Aficionados. Great bedtime reading. Lulls one to lullabies. Inspires dreams. Reader awakens refreshed and corrected, if in need of same.
• 
  Lucy

  A lot of interesting trivia about literature and authors. Presented with a bit too much snark. (I like a bit of snark, but this was heavy-handed and overbearing at times.) I didn't like the illustrations by Martin Rowson. Mostly I couldn't figure out what they were supposed to be showing. And they were ugly without being funny.
  Chapters are: Literary baked meats (about food); The body of literature: heads, lungs, hearts, and bowels; Tools of the trade (includes the first typewriter-writer); Sex and the Victorians (the Carlyles, Dorothea, George Eliot); Better than sex, some say (cigarettes and other forms of tobacco); Some curious literary records: best, worst, and most (worst novelist, shortest poem, most misquoted); Literary crimewatch: Who? who? who? (who wrote ...); Name games (Brontë and others); Readers distinguished and less so (dumb readers, presidential readers, prime ministerial readers); Mammon and the book trade (product placement, listomania, the Potter effect); Wheels (what would Jesus drive, platform 9 3/4); Morbid curiosity (Anthony Trollope, Werther, Baskerville, George Orwell, Hart Crane, Truman Capote); Curious connections: a terminal quiz with answers.
• 
  Emma Gerts

  I found this book quite enjoyable. It was irreverent and pointless and I rather like that sometimes. However I did find quite a few typos in the text, and in some places I found the sentence structure to be confusing. The author tends to interrupt herself a lot which I find hard to read, especially in a non-fiction book, and sometimes the sentences after the interruption didn't match what went before. I also question a lot of the sources used as there isn't a bibliography and the author cites websites quite frequently. Over all though, I enjoyed the conversational pace and the interesting factoids about novels and their eccentric authors.
• 
  Melody Schwarting

  Evidently, John Sutherland and I have discrete opinions on what piques our curiosity. Too heavy on bathroom humor, sex of the hymen-testing and "did they ever consummate" kind rather than actual sex, which brings up all kinds of misogyny, and old-hat things like "what famous books were almost named." One to skip, unless you really want to know that story about Dante Gabriel Rossetti grave-robbing exhuming his wife's body to reclaim a manuscript, and don't want to read his whole biography.
• 
  Stephen Huntley

  Read the first 16 pages and gave up. Rambling, tedious, suffocated with the author's desire to impress. There may be some interesting things in this book but I don't want to waste any time trying to unearth them. Why would you start a book of literary curiosities with page after page of dull rot on food? As the author hasn't got the common sense to begin with something at least a tiny bit intriguing and engaging he can go on without me.
• 
  Douglas Cosby

  I thought this would make a fine toilet book -- light, small sections, just the perfect read for that function. Unfortunately Sutherland's approach to curiosities left me very uncurious. So much so that I did not finish this book. Sure, it is chock full of interesting trivia tidbits; but it feels exactly that, trivial. To keep this motif going, his insights into the trivia aren't insightful, and his "feast for book lovers" chews more like hard candy. Maybe it gets better at the end; I don't know.
• 
  Robert Morgan Fisher

  I've read many of Sutherland's books and took my time (4 years) with this one. Enjoyed it well enough--but how does one address famous writer suicides and not mention anything about Richard Brautigan?!
• 
  Lorraine

  A collection of small essays of literary miscellany. It felt really ‘bitty’. It was organised into chapters but the chapters didn’t really flow together. There were moments when his humour shone through and parts that were really interesting but a lot of it felt skippable.
• 
  Katherine

  Interesting connections between authors, their works and public perceptions. Bit of a dry read though.
• 
  Michael Brown

  In this, much shorter book than the Short History book, Sutherland delivers oddities and interesting tidbits which (for the most part) did not make it into the other. There is some repetition, but it's not distracting. He's an entertaining writer, so what he has to say keeps your interest. I would recommend this for those who don't want to spend the time reading an 800-page book, although that one is the better book. Actually, it's fairly easy, and fun, getting through both. Treat yourself.
• 
  Salliewt

  Didn’t finish. Just couldn’t get into this one. Sounded appealing, but ended up dry and boring. Writing style dragged on and on.
• 
  Brigitte

  Ugh. This was a struggle. Not a fan of the writing or of the author’s egotistical, idiotic, insensitive opinions. Not worth the effort. Finished it out of spite.
• 
  Kay Hudson

  I gobbled this down in one Sunday. Loved it. Impossible to summarize, just a wonderful mix of literary trivia about books, writers, even readers. Funny, gossipy, and entertaining.
• 
  Dan Martin

  Some fun trivia, but the author is a bit of a pompous ass.
• 
  Mark Wilson

  I quite enjoyed this! Delightfully humorous and packed full of interesting little bits of literary trivia.
• 
  Lisa Houlihan

  Oxford University Press published his earlier books but I guess Sutherland has come down in the world. Teaching at Cal Tech doesn't strike me as slumming but maybe to OUP it is. This book is from Skyhorse Publishing, and I'll go out on a limb here and posit that Skyhorse doesn't hew to the same standards OUP does.
  
  This is even worse in its proofreading and typesetting errors than How to Read a Novel. It is rife with stray commas ("Baird's Trilby is, significantly like... (86); "downstream, exploitation" (197)) and even commas instead of words ("Is the Potter effect, good thing?" p. 215*). AIDS is rendered as Aids. Most egregiously, toward the end of the book, a glyph began to supplant single quotation marks.** The house font where I once worked was incomplete. When you viewed nonprinting characters in Microsoft Word, you'd see a rectangular glyph instead of the usual dot that indicates a space. I have never seen, even in faux Austen sequels from vanity presses, such a glyph in a printed book.
  
  Aggravated, I checked the book's front matter, registering the change of house and seeing that it was printed in China. That didn't strike me as unusual or problematic, since just about everything is made in China. So I just now pulled two recent hardcovers ('Tis and Order of the Phoenix, since they were in immediate, non-cockatiel-disturbing reach), and both were printed in the United States (the McCourt says "manufactured"). So maybe printing in China is another proof that Skyhorse is a cut-rate house.
  
  Sutherland says it's interesting to teach reading to non-literary folk like Cal Tech students. He told of one student who dismissed an entire novel because the welding or soldering the protagonist used to smuggle his weapon on the undercarriage of his car wouldn't work. For that reader, because of that minor metallurgical detail, the book was broken, didn't cohere, didn't work. I empathize.
  
  * The Potter effect is a bad thing in this book since its "manufacturer" didn't know how to typeset a fraction. It's not 93 quarters ($23.25!) but 9 and three quarters, 9.75.
  
  ** Which are stupid anyway. 'Tis might be a contraction for "it is" or it might be the start of dialogue. A line of speech might read
  
  'We should be careful of the others' but you don't know whether that others is possessive or the end of the speech. It's craziness!
• 
  Chuck

  Not his best production.
• 
  Rob

  A grab bag - sometimes funny, sometimes sly. If you didn't know that Brontë is a 'patriotic' re-rendering of Irish surname Prunty, or why we say Shavian, Bellovian etc. but we have no adjective for Jane Austen, and these things interest you, then this is a place to spend a little while. Sutherland is a witty enough MC, with a broad literary church that even goes as far as to include a synopsis of the neo-Nazi fantasy opus Kingdom Come.
  
  The structure is loose, ranging around names of authors, money talk, size, titbits of info, misconceptions and conceits, dates of lesser known milestones. Well worth reading if you're a reader, and less so if you're not, but then the title took care of any doubts on that front, didn't it?
  
  The Carlyles and Tony Blair and Norman Mailer get a right shafting, but then Mailer's The Naked and the Dead gets given its due late in the piece. Blair telling non-painter Ian McEwan that he was a fan of his paintings is probably worth the price of admission by itself, as is McEwan's citing of a non-existent article in Enduring Love that most of the Stateside critics took at face value.
  
  And the Guinness-endorsed guy (Howard S. Berg) who reads 25,000 words a minute - what's he reading at the moment?
• 
  Betsy

  A Perfect Gift for the Book Lover in your Life!
  
  I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I wasn't quite sure that I would, as sometimes I find books about books to be rather dry. However, Sutherland has really done his research and the result is an enjoyable collection of interesting tidbits about some of our most famous authors and books. I found the author's writing style to be both engaging and witty. He doesn't spend too much time on any one item, which makes for both an easy read and a book that you can pick up when you've only got a few minutes, but want something worthwhile to read. I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I would definitely read something else by this author in the future.
  
  
• 
  Adrienne Teague

  This is a book of trivia about books and authors, basically. Normally, I'm a huge sucker for that kind of book. My problem with it was the vast quantity of typos! If you're going to spend that much money to have a book produced in hardcover, wouldn't you take the time to check that sort of thing? I'm just saying.
  
  Also, there were some fact checking problems. For example, he mentions that the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice has made about $121M. Then he says something about women wanting to look at Colin Firth's nipples through a wet shirt. Oops! Colin Firth was in the 1995 made for TV movie. Things like that made me not entirely trust his other assertions.
• 
  Carol Littlejohn

  Attention, all book lovers! If you're looking for a book on which to feast, you should try this book. You'll learn all kinds of curious things about your favorite authors. What does the ending of the "Grapes of Wrath" really mean? (Rose of Sharon, an impoverished character, offers her breast to an impoverished man, symbolically meaning that only the poor can give sustenance to the poor) Who is the worst novelist ever? (Amanda McKittrick Ros) Who is the best novelist? (Jane Austen) Who is the quickest writer? (Mickey Spillane) These observations, along with many more, will keep you reading, a real feast for book lovers.