Title: Some Advice to the People! Be Not Conceited, Beware Of Humbugs, Hate Cant, Restrain Your Tongues, Amend Your Ways, And Hang Together!
Author: Calamus Kurrens
Published: (1847) Pages: 76
Genre: Poetry, Nonfiction
Rating: 0/5
Buy | Borrow | Accept | Avoid
Plot Synopsis
Umm....I'm not really sure as I would have to read the whole book, which I didn't, and I would have to understand it, which I don't have the time to do.
My Thoughts
I found this book through the Take a Chance Challenge when my random word came up as amends. When I read the title, I was too intrigued to pass it up. It was not at all what I was expecting. The first five pages are a dedication and an apology which I only partially understood due to language and historical context. I only enjoyed one paragraph which I will share with you:
"He desired to express himself as briefly as possible; and to an unnecessary extension of phrase, his feeble hand was often fretfully averse; while the circumlocution of affected modesty, or the appearance of it, was most distasteful to him."
I very much enjoyed the language of the paragraph, but five pages of it in small print is a bit overwhelming. Then, after the prosaic prose comes - huh? - poetry under the title My Dog Brace and using words such as speechifyers and fid-faddling and referring to people and groups like Babbage and Pusey-ites. This goes on for 26 pages. As a rule, I don't read much poetry and with the unclear allusions and archaic word usage, this reading was even more painful. Then, to top it off, each of those 26 pages was at least half full of footnotes with even more unknown allusions and word usages. What does regicidal mean?
Notes in Illustration are the next 34 pages followed by a 7 page Appendix. Then we have the Notes in Illustration of the Appendix which is 5 pages. And finally the Postscript which is 4 pages. I can't tell you much about these sections as I did a very quick skim.
I really don't think anyone else has reviewed this book so no Other Reviews section this time. If you've read this book and have a review though, please let me know. Heck, if you've heard of this book, let me know!
Well this sounds like it is really out there! Just reading the title gave me a headache -- though I can see why it intrigued you. I wonder if you'll ever find anyone else who read this book -- maybe you are the only one! Hopefully the rest of the books in the challenge will work out a bit better!
ReplyDeleteJenners - I actually have someone requesting it on BookMooch! I logged it on there and thought "yeah right, this one'll be on my shelves for years" and not two days later I had a request. Weird, huh?
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