8.09.05: My Eyes! My Eyes! ‹ Blog « Without-Feathers.com

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
W. H. Auden

My Eyes! My Eyes!

August 9, 2005

I am currently reading what has officially become my #1 Most Hated Book Of All Time. Actually, I’ve just barely begun to read it, and just from the dedication page, preface, and index, I know it’s the worst thing I’ve ever read. You know how there are books that are so bad they’re funny but you still read them anyway, and then there are books that are so bad they’re bad but you still read them anyway, and then there are books like the Necronomicon or Hitler’s autobiography that seem to contain actual undiluted evil in them? As if the pages themselves were made of human flesh, and written on with blood? Yeah. That’s this book.

But it’s not the subject that’s particularly evil—the subject is apparently Titanic, which is somewhat wistful but not evil in and of itself. I say “apparently” because this isn’t merely a book on the Titanic, it’s one of those god-awful my-personal-journey-through-the-heart-of-the-Titanic things, where the author keeps drawing desperate parallels between the problems in his life and the problems of a ship that sank almost a century ago. Yes, this man’s boilers are about to explode! His stern may separate from his bow! Thousands of innocent body mites are dying a horrible death as we speak!

Aside from the subject approach and writing style (this author takes himself more seriously than a depressed teenage goth), there is the undeniable fact that this book was copyedited, proofread and indexed by monkeys. No, that’s a slur on monkeys; if you put a drunken monkey in a room with a broken typewriter, it would produce a better index than the crap in the back of this book. I’m speaking whereof I know here—not about the drunken monkeys (well, yes, but that’s another story), but about the utter shite of this index. I’m studying indexing. I’m taking a course on it. I’m on lesson five out of twelve, which means I’m about as good as our drunken monkey typist, and I’m freaking out because I’m worried that the last homework index I sent in wasn’t as good as it could have been, and then I saw this index and thought, “Why am I worried about my index? Obviously I don’t even need to take this class; I can just stay home and drink bourbon and play with magnetic poetry words, and publish my muddled results as an index!”

Actually, I’m overdoing it a bit. Even a regular reader would know the terror of this index. Just try looking something up—if you can handle the misspellings.

There’s another issue: the misspellings. These aren’t just proofreader-realm typos, these are copyeditor-realm typos—I’ve only read ten pages, and I caught three mispellings of “Lightoller” (two on the same page, one in the index). Now I’m confused—was it Charles H. Lightoller, Lightholler, Lightnoller, or Lightroller? (Let’s just call him “Lights,” shall we?) Poor Murdoch (the officer, not my laptop) flips in his grave as every other occurence of his name is spelled “Murdock;” even in the index it’s spelled wrong. Mispelling “Murdoch” is one of the few ways to earn my eternal, flaming, I’ll-come-back-from-the-grave-just-to-cut-you wrath. (The other ways are kicking kittens, incorrect usage of apostrophes, and being Rob Schneider.)

I plan to write a snarky full-blown review of this book later on; meanwhile, you can pull it off the shelf and snicker at it the next time you’re in a bookstore/library. (For the love of god, don’t buy it, unless you’re running low on toilet paper. And I have a feeling this book would be hard on your hemmorhoids.)