The New Well-Tempered Sentence

Karen Elizabeth Gordon

I'm still not quite sure how much I enjoyed The New Well-Tempered Sentence. A lot of it is dead-on and well worth reading, but there were a few places where I wondered what on earth Gordon was thinking (when did it become grammatically correct to end a question with any punctuation but a question mark?). The structural aspects, though, are not the reason this book (and its companion volume, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire) has been through two editions and a number of printings that's rapidly approaching the "countless" level; the book is still read (and re-read and re-read and...) for the examples Gordon uses to illustrate the structural points, which gradually unfold into, almost, a novel of their own, an odd little comedy of manners that makes very little sense, but is intriguing enough to keep people wondering.

Interesting, and certainly enough so to send me on to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire.