If you are an editor, a grammarian, or just someone who enjoys the quirks of the English language, you’re sure to like Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. I was happily surprised by the great good humour and the tidy fusion of editing memoir and language instruction. Kudos, Ms Norris!
There is no way a single sentence could sum up the many delights of this book, yet one lovely clause keeps ringing through my memory:
This excerpt comes from an urban fantasy series about libriomancers, people who are able to use books to produce magic. It expresses, in a tidy rhetorical figure, a feeling I’ve always had about books and reading but never been able to articulate.
I had said before that all stories were magic. It had never occurred to me that all magic was stories.
Jim C. Hines, Unbound (New York: Daw Books, 2014), p.
