Customer Reviews

A Book of Nonsense (Everyman's Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Edward Lear's nonsense is of the best. Read it aloud! Your kids will amaze you by how fast they can begin to recite along with you! If you remember "The Owl and the Pussycat" from your childhood, you owe it to yourself and your children to share it and "The Jumblies" with them.

This is a very well presented hardback containing the best of Edward Lear. Perhaps not as complete as Holbrook Jackson's Complete Edward Lear, it nevertheless contains his best work, including A Book Of Nonsense, Limericks, alphabets and his most well-known poems, The Dong With The Luminous Nose, The Quangle Wangle Quee, and The Jumblies. The author's quaint illustrations are well reproduced throughout.

The reason this book is so important to comedy is that the incluence on people like Spike Milligan, Beyond The Fringe, and of course Monty Python's Flying Circus is clear. Lear was obviously the 19th century precursor to those humourists. Lear brings an educated and intelligent angle to his humour just as his successors did, and his talent as a poet and artist make this collection much more than just a collection of 'nonsense'!

Wow. I'm so glad this book still exists! This was a book I must have checked out from the library over a dozen times as a kid. Lots of fun.

I can see why Stacy of California thinks this is a weird "incomprehendable" book. The word is "incomprehensible" Stacy. It takes a person of a proper old-fashioned education to appreciate this fine piece of classic literature. We oldsters don't get weird modern art either, or some of the wacky movies Hollywood gives awards to but no one can imagine why.

I love love loved Edward Lear but unfortunately this free copy doesn't have the marvelous drawings. It would be better to get another edition of this wonderful book, one that is illustrated.

I "bought" this book for Kindle. All I got when I tried to read the book was a list of numbers that didn't correspond to anything. I'm glad the book was free so I can delete this without being out anything.

As soon as I read #1 I couldn't help not reading #2. This is a great book for children and adults and will keep you very entertained. I just got a kindle this Christmas and I really do recommend this. So glad it's free! What are you waiting for?

Once again, the free kindle version is a disappointment. Both the formatting and the illustrations have been lost. In my opinion, the charm of a book like this is often in the accompanying illustrations. It would be better to buy a complete version than download this one.

The Kindle version has no illustrations, and the formatting makes it hard to read and enjoy the verses. The limericks appear without logical line shifts, and where the illustration is supposed to be, it just says [illustration] which is a lot more annoying than not having anything there at all.

It's free, but it's hard to read and that kind of takes the fun out of it, at least for me.

I'm going to review this briefly as a book for children, which is what it is. I read most of this to my 3-year-old (including all the limericks and most of the poems, and a little of the other stuff). As long as I didn't read it too often, my son was usually game for this. He liked it but he didn't love it to pieces. The nonsense and silliness certainly appeals to silly little kids, and why shouldn't it? And as far as I'm concerned, it's excellent, and deservedly considered classic children's lit., but frankly, I didn't think it was five-stars great. The conceits and poetry are not always exactly inspired, and the illustrations are pretty crude, although plenty entertaining.

"The Owl and the Pussycat" (which we've read many times) and some of the limericks are definitely five-star selections in any case.

At $5, this is a nice cheap edition. It would help if the pictures were in color, but I gather you're getting it closer to what was published in the 19th century here.