The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels [Mass Market Paperback]

Lynne Truss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 2005

Lynne Truss debuted in America as a guffaw-inducing grammarian, but her British audience has known her for years as a critically acclaimed novelist and columnist. Her previous works are now available stateside in one volume, complete with a new preface.

With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, a raucous comedy of errors, follows the exploits of Osborne Lonsdale, who writes a weekly column called "Me and My Shed" for a floundering gardening magazine. When the publication is taken over by a gung-ho management team, Lonsdale must learn to cope with his new coworkers.

In Tennyson's Gift and Going Loco, Truss turns a fiendishly clever eye to the literary world. Tennyson's Gift is an imaginative cocktail of Victorian seriousness and farce that re-imagines the world of the nineteenth-century English poet laureate, placing him in the midst of eccentric company that includes dodgy Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). Going Loco features a critic trying to write a definitive account of the doppelgänger in gothic fiction, amidst the chaos of her domestic life, including paranoia that her cleaning lady is taking over her life.

Making the Cat Laugh is a riotous collection of columns about single life. Truss comments on dating, secondhand smoking, shopping, holidays, and people who ask, "How's the novel going?" All the while, she continues an eighteen-year quest to make her cat laugh. Reportedly, the feline remains unimpressed.

A feast of wit, The Lynne Truss Treasury will delight fans of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lynne Truss is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, which has sold nearly one million copies and won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. A novelist and journalist, she is also the author of numerous radio comedy dramas and for many years served as a television critic and sports columnist for The Times (London).

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; First Paperback Printing edition (June 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592401368
• ISBN-13: 978-1592401369
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,196,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times of London, followed by four (rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women's Journal. Lynne Truss also hosted Cutting a Dash, a popular BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation. She now reviews books for the Sunday Times of London and is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton, England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed bag, but not all that funny, January 9, 2006

By 

Debbie the Book Devourer "dletour7" (Waltham, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels (Mass Market Paperback)

As a word nerd, I bought Ms. Truss's book Eats Shoots & Leaves, her satirical take on punctuation, but admit I have not read it yet. I saw her Treasury on the display shelf of the library and checked it out, expecting some very clever writing.

Maybe it's just that I'm not British, but I didn't find her fiction all that funny or even well-written. In the first story, she seems to try too hard. In all of the fiction, she seems almost self-conscious of the literary devices she's using. Her writing seems to scream, "Look at me -- I'm a writer writing about writers who write! And look at all the clever devices I use!"

The columns were a little less over-the-top, but by then I had wearied of her and just wanted to get through the (very hefty) book.

Oh, and finally, I don't think the differences between British and American punctuation are so great that comma splices and such are acceptable in Britain. The book wasn't even that well punctuated!

Maybe I should have given her only two stars, but the poor dear seemed to be trying so hard I didn't have the heart. If you still think you'd like to read this book, check it out of the library.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny!, February 26, 2006

By 

M. E. Graf (Seattle WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels (Paperback)

Lynne Truss is a very intelligent, hysterically funny writer. Expect loads of amusing sarcasm and many many laughs reading the columns and short novels in this book.

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag, December 6, 2007

By 

R. Chaffey "beckahi" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels (Mass Market Paperback)

Lynne Truss made her name in the United States with the grammar bestseller "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", a laugh-out-loud romp through the grammar mistakes that plague the English language. Yet she was well-known in her native England before that for her domestic columns about single life (and cats. Her columns and three short comic novels are collected together in "The Lynne Truss Treasury", which when all is said and done, is a mixed bag of humor, incredulity, and possibly discomfort.

The collection begins with 'With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed', the story of a gardening magazine that is about to meet its maker and its staff who doesn't know that the end is coming. When the wide cast of zany characters slowly learn that the magazine is in jeopardy, they do everything they can to stop the buyer from destroying their livelihood, with increasingly bizarre coincidences and events. The novel begins alright and is often times exceedingly funny, but as it progresses and everyone seems to become more deluded by the minute, the ending arrives too quickly and is too much of a summary for all the buildup Truss had mounted.

The second novel, 'Tennyson's Gift', involves a wide array of characters both fictional and actual. Truss centers her story around the eccentric poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and his time lived in relative obscurity on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson is fearful that his wife and sons will become mad and is forever oblivious to the attempts of those nearest to him to protect him from disruptions. Throw into the mix the author who would become Lewis Carrol, an American phrenologist and his young daughter, and a poor painter forever looking for a sponsor while ignoring his young virginal stage actress wife, and the plot has several storylines to follow. Yet Truss manages to wrap them all up in clever and humorous ways, making 'Tennyson's Gift' the highlight of the collection.

The last novel in the collection is 'Going Loco', an appropriately named book for a story that seems to be going nowhere and everywhere at once. Belinda Johansson is a writer of young adult "horsey" books who longs for a life of academic quiet so that she can pursue and write her master work on literary doubles a la "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". When she acquires Linda, a new cleaning lady from a close friend, she seems heaven sent, quickly managing the parts of Belinda's life that Belinda has no time or temperment for, leaving Belinda to research and write to her heart's content. But Belinda is oblivious to the fact that her husband is living a lie, and can't see the similarities between her research and the life she has all but stopped living. 'Going Loco' is an almost ludicrous concoction of fluff disguised as a comic novel. While it does have its moments, overall it is bizarre and even a little disturbing.

The collection is finished out by a variety of columns on different topics, ranging from Christmas, to cats, to movies, to single life, a little bit of everything that Truss can wrap her thoughts around. For fans of Lynne Truss and that strange, idiosyncratic British humor, this collection will be enjoyable, if at times baffling and weird. Lynne Truss is a talented writer and shows promise as a comic writer, but needs to work on sustaining that promise throughout entire works longer than newspaper columns.