Sam LeithReseñas

This were a good book whom really helped I lots.I will done better writing now thank you Sam Leith!!!!

8/10

This is a moderately fast paced urban SF thriller. Around the world a series of strange events has been happening, all driven by a device call the Coincidence Engine.

These events come to the attention of the Directorate of the Extremely Improbably, headed by a strange figure called the Red Queen. They, and other organisations are trying to track a guy called Alex who is thought to be carrying the device. As the net closes in on Alex the people tracking him start to bump into each other; and bump each other off. Meanwhile Alex is unaware that he is being tracked, as having delivered his package, he is trying to meet up with his girlfriend to propose to her. As the story reaches its conclusion, more coincidences happen, before the deflated ending drops into place.

Mostly I enjoyed this, it didn’t understand the sub plot with the creator of the Coincidence Engine, didn’t really fit with anything else going on with the story. Whilst the book was well written, it didn’t seem to add up, for example why Alex drove across the states, to meet up with this American girl. I felt that it could have had more complexity and more coincidences to fit with the title. I like the spy / agency part, but Charles Stross has done this better in the Laundry Files series.

****Please note I won this as a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway****

If I had to describe this in one word it would be quirky. I'm not sure quite what to make of this so I'm going to sit on my thoughts for a bit and I'll add a more extended review later.

I have finished "Write to the Point" by Sam Leith and I have given it a five star rating. I would never have thought I would enjoy reading a book about grammar and punctuation so much. He tried to strike an informal conversational style and he succeeded. Well worth a read for English language writers on either side of the Atlantic. Leith deals with usages from both sides without prejudice or malice. :-)

A timely, concise and elegant treatment of perhaps the most undeservedly neglected area of literary criticism of all: the vital interface of form and content, whereof meaning and, more importantly, effect are born.

Read - and have the scales fall from your eyes.

Was searching for Leith's new book on rhetoric [b:You Talkin' To Me?|12652892|You Talkin' To Me?|Sam Leith|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg|17766620] in the Overdrive catalog, and came across this instead. A zippy read, lots of fun, sort of about probability and quantum stuff but really about some strange characters wandering around the US. An Englishman's view of driving in America. Watch out for the Elvis impersonators!

It's true that it suffers a bit from a "hey I bet I can write like [ai:Neil Gaiman|1221698|Neil Gaiman|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1234150163p2/1221698.jpg]" syndrome, but, well, he comes pretty close.

Mostly entertaining for the examples it offers up, plus a catalog of terms at the end. There’s nothing but rhetoric in our speeches—high, low, or in-between—and that can be a good thing, as long as you know what to look for. Some goodies: Julian Barnes, analogy: “And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.” Isocolon, a balancing of clauses of the same length: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Lord Mancroft: “A speech is like a love-affair—any fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill.”½

The book begins by discussing a plane that apparently assembled itself during a hurricane, seemingly from random nearby items, and then crash-landed and disappeared. A secret government agency is looking into the appear- & disappearance of this aircraft that should never have existed. Add in a clueless British dude named Alex, some goons of low intelligence capable of murder, and some members of a top-secret government organization so obscure its' own members aren't even sure of what they're investigating, all on a road trip across the landscape of America -- it sounds fun & zany, right?

Well... not exactly.

This book is not as humorous as I was expecting -- it was, instead, more philosophical. It had a lot of mathematical discussion, and also brought in some physics, some ethical conundrums, etc. It was far, far more serious than I was expecting, yet well written so that I, as someone who mainly avoided math & physics classes when at all humanly possible, could still comprehend it. My brain was not straining to comprehend the subject matter to a degree that took my focus away from the story, either.

Overall, I would say that this story is worth reading, provided that you know what you're getting before delving into its' pages.

This book was extremely interesting. It begins with a fully assembled plan created by a hurricane. It then moves onto the investigators looking for what they call a coincidence engine, an engine or machine created that changes probability, rumored to have been created by a mad mathematician, who may or may not have been building a weapon.
A colleague and professor, Hands, is questioned about this mathematician and his plans. Hands then explains probability and the possibility of a machine. I particular enjoyed his interview because he talked about the universe and what probability and chance really is.
There were many characters, all of which intertwined in the plot to find this machine. The investigators follow Alex, who randomly decides to fly into the US, drive across the country, and meet up with his girlfriend in Vegas to propose to her.
Weird things happen throughout this entire book, coincidences such as an entire highway of cars resembling Alex's rental, making it difficult for the investigators to continue tracking him.
Parts of this book were a bit complicated, though I enjoyed the questions of what if. Such as Alex's musing: "You were almost never more than a strange decision or an accident, or a movement of a few feet, from extinction." Ideas like this have always interested me.
The reason I only gave this book 3 stars is because it was sort of confusing and all over the place. The plot didn't come together as I had hoped and sort of just ended without tying together some pieces I felt should have been tied together and expanded upon.
I think this book is worth a second read. Perhaps more of it will make sense to me.
I will be on the lookout for more novels by Leith, as I think he has real talent and I found this plot refreshing and different. Most of the time, you have to read nonfiction to really get into questions about the universe, like probability and outcomes, so it was wonderful to have these ideas presented in fiction.

http://meganm922.blogspot.com/2012/03/coincidence-engine-review.html

Brilliant introduction to rhetoric - funny, informative, and a great read.

There is a really interesting novel waiting to get out here. Its just a shame that there is so much confusion all over the place. I lost coutn of the amount of times that I had to reread pasages to remember characters of their actions. Mayb this says more about me than the author but to be honest the sci-fi aspect which felt like it could have developed into an interesting climax kind of got lost with the farcical runnin around of the characters.

This review is by the author of this interesting book, published in October's 2017 issue of Literary Review. I've booked it in the Kindle version.

"Only a maniac would want to write a book about language and usage. It is the equivalent of poking your head quite deliberately into a hole in the ground containing a huge wasps’ nest. So quite why I gave in to my publisher and wrote Write to the Point, I can’t exactly say. The problem is, as my old friend Henry Hitchings put it in his own book on the subject, ‘the language wars’ are still going strong.

If you set about saying that it doesn’t matter a toss whether infinitives are split or modifiers dangle, you risk being buried under a mountain of letters denouncing you as barbaric, illiterate and one of those idiots whose trendy views are responsible for the decline of our education system, the coarsening of the language and the loss of the Empire. I once received an angry letter, handwritten on paper and posted with a first-class stamp, because I had used ‘snuck’ as the past tense of ‘to sneak’.
If you thunder in, on the other hand, with old-fashioned views on the use of the subjunctive, the correct meanings of the words ‘decimate’ and ‘enormity’, or the monstrous wrongness of the so-called ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ (‘Tangerine’s 50p Each’), you will earn a drenching from the other side: you’re a reactionary ignoramus whose ideas about language are a series of half-understood misconceptions copied unthinkingly from snobbish 18th- and 19th-century bossy-bootses.
The main reason such books get reviewed, then, is for the pleasure in identifying the mistakes they make and where they contradict their own advice, and in providing counterexamples to the ‘rules’ advanced by the author. I fully expect the usual drubbing.

So why do it? It’s a good question. Actually, questions are one of my beefs in all this – specifically, question marks. I cannot read without wincing an email that begins, ‘Hello, I hope you are well?’ My inner prescriptivist cavils at it. We all have an inner prescriptivist: even Steven Pinker, in his The Sense of Style, spends one or two hundred pages pouring scorn on grammar pedants before admitting that he loathes comma splices. I loathe comma splices, also known as run-on sentences, too. But my particular obsession is the question mark. ‘I hope you are well’ is a statement rather than a question, so it does not take a question mark. Likewise, the question mark with ‘surely’: ‘Surely not?’ If it’s a sure thing, there’s no question about it, right? Surely so. And then there’s the question mark for indirect questions. ‘She wonders if he is going to keep going on about question marks for the whole article?’ The uncertainty is hers, not that of the author of the sentence. Question marks for direct questions and direct questions only, please, people.

Yet even where I choose to plant my flag of resistance, the ground crumbles. In their huge The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Messrs Huddleston and Pullum discuss two instances in which direct questions don’t take question marks. They offer ‘Aren’t they lucky to have got away with it!’ and ‘Who cares what I think about it anyway!’ Here is the exclamation mark, if you like, pulling rank on its curly cousin to express a forceful rhetorical question: both of those are by way of exclamation rather than question; not asking for an answer. Is that grammatical? It’s an open question.

My favourite discovery in researching these matters, incidentally, has been the intervention of the actor Christopher Walken. ‘I’ve heard that the symbol we use to signify a question (?) is, in origin, an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents a cat as seen from behind,’ he writes in his foreword to the KISS Guide to Cat Care (2001). ‘I wonder if the Egyptians were expressing suspicion or an inquiring mind … or something else?’ Read that aloud in your best Christopher Walken voice for maximum effect. As far as I’ve been able to discover, there is no evidence whatever for his assertion.

So, as I say: why do it? The answer is that I wondered, like Tony Blair in the glory days of the late 1990s, whether there might not be a Third Way. Peacemaker that I am, I surveyed the blasted battlefield and wondered if we might be able to organise a linguistic equivalent of the Christmas football game in no-man’s-land. My notion was to take a rhetorical approach: to remember that language is an instrumental art concerned with reaching an audience.

Technically, prescriptivists are wrong about the way that language works and descriptivists, who study language as it is used rather than fulminate about how it should be used, are right. But we can turn the argument of the latter, a little, against them. If the important thing is to recognise the system as it is, rather than as it should be, we should also recognise that whether we like it or not a huge number of language users do hold these prejudices. It might not be a bad idea to pander to them a little if, as a civilian, your main aim is to find a receptive audience for your writing rather than win an academic argument about linguistics. What are called rules may better be called stylistic preferences or sociolinguistic norms. But it does to have a sense of them.

I once watched the great Geoff Pullum – co-author of the aforementioned Cambridge Grammar – giving a talk. In it, he lamented that the authors of The Economist’s style guide had counselled against splitting infinitives. They did so on the grounds not that there was anything wrong with doing so, but that lots of people think there is and it will annoy them if you do. ‘This is the “idiots win” position!’ Pullum exclaimed with real anguish. He is one of my heroes. But I found myself thinking: I’m with The Economist. Suffering fools gladly – given how many of them there are knocking about – is not a bad idea. Let the idiots win. A defining property of language – as descriptivists never tire of telling us – is that if enough people get something wrong often enough, it becomes right.
Jolly good, my publisher said on reading the completed manuscript. Your approach is: ‘There are no rules. Here are the rules.’ That will either please both sides or annoy everyone. I’m sure it’ll be the former. Tony Blair’s pretty popular these days, right?"