Newish books, and oldish peeves
Picked up a couple of books off my TBR bookcase that have been waiting around a fair time, rather than buying more new ones. I'm trying so hard to be good. The first is Atul Gawande's Complications, written during the 7th year of his residency when he'd seen, and committed, plenty of medical blunders. That's what this book is about -- all the things that can go wrong in a hospital, and how and why it's inevitable. As someone who has long thought medicine more an art than a science, I'm finding this litany of errors oddly comforting. It's good to have your notions confirmed.
The other book I've started at long last is Parke Godwin's Sherwood, his take on the Robin Hood legend. I picked this up because I realized I'd been reading nothing but memoirs for months, and because one of my favorite historical novels is Godwin's Fire Lord, his complete re-imagining of the King Arthur story. Great stuff.
And now for my peeve -- lack of proofreading. I was reading some of Florence King's books reviews and enjoyed her review of Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne du Maurier so much that it inspired me to start re-reading du Maurier's Rebecca. That didn't last long -- by page 24 I'd found 3 errors, 1 in punctuation and 2 in word choice ("though" for "thought", for example). Errors so simple and obvious I'm sure they couldn't have been in the original book because these were the sort of errors typically missed by a computer spellchecker. A human proofreader (the only kind that existed back when Rebecca was originally published) would have caught them, and this human reader was so put off by the sloppiness that all I could bear to do was skip to my 2 favorite scenes and then put this edition in the donation box.