Who knew grammar could be so much fun? British journalist Lynne Truss did. A self-proclaimed “punctuation stickler,” she wrote the delightful “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” (Gotham Books), a grammar book that takes itself just about as seriously as the joke above. One part instructional manual, one part stand-up routine, the book has been enormously popular in Britain, becoming the No. 1 best seller over Christmas. (It gets its U.S. debut this month.) “It couldn’t be a more uncommercial proposition,” says Truss. “But it just took off. It just went bananas.”
If you can look beyond the fact that, yeah, it’s a grammar book, you’ll find out why. It’s hard not to love a book that calls the apostrophe “our long-suffering friend” and makes such declarative statements as “The big final rule for the comma is… don’t use commas like a stupid person.” And there’s great delight in seeing Truss work her grammatical magic, transforming the statement “A woman, without her man, is nothing” into “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” A sentence, you’ll learn, without correct punctuation, is also nothing.
