English-lion wrote:sockii wrote:I've now finished reading the book. Overall I enjoyed it.
I just, my good gong, I wish it had been proofread and edited. I don't know if the rampant technical (and otherwise) errors were because of the translation more than anything else, but for a grammar and punctuation stickler it was kind of seriously painful to get through, at times...
I can understand that! Some chapters were like that for me too
But it has some gem stories thou!!!
Definitely some gem stories. I just wish Henry had had the aide of a good editor to put them in better shape.
It wasn't so much a chapter-by-chapter issue to me (although there were a few chapters that seemed to be completely out of place or out of order, or did not flow at all well from where the last chapter had ended...far more so than some of the ADD aspects of SC's book as has been discussed here before!)
Perhaps it is just the language snob in me, but the poor job in getting grammar correct in the translation really made it a struggle at times for me to get through. Especially when it came to dialog and dialog punctuation--it wasn't even consistently wrong in the book, it just followed no rules at all and varied from one line of dialog to the next. That is, sometimes the lines of dialog had punctuation inside the quotes, but in the next line it was outside the quotes. The line after that the punctuation would be both inside AND outside, and then occasionally there'd be no punctuation at all...! This is one of my biggest personal pet grammar peeves from years of editing work for friends and others, so it really made me gnash my teeth seeing it in a published book.
Plus there was a lot of misspellings, abuse of ellipses... and repeat???? punctuation!!!!, problems with paragraph indentation, problems with the translator obviously being confused at times about which gender pronouns to use to refer to Wayne/Jayne Country...enough small problems that unfortunately all added up to made the book feel far less than professionally produced, a bit of a shame considering the price tag.
I dunno. I feel bad speaking negatively of it because as mentioned, Henry does have some interesting stories to tell here and those interested in the early days of the Police and his involvement in the punk scene after that should find good stuff contained within. I just sorely hope that someday, someone decides to give the book a professional workover and make it a little more coherent and easy-to-read.