LIES. My profile page indicates that I have submitted 45 corrections since last June, and not a single one has had its status move beyond “submitted.” I’m guessing “report content error” is just one of those feel-good buttons. I did find a funny mistake, though, and thought I would share it with you since Amazon is ignoring my calls. From the Kindle edition of Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

“all [Zarathustra] taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God. And three simples rules to live by: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Also a belief in the purifying nature of ire, which was central to the faith and a symbol of the Almighty.”

FIRE, you heathens.

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I spent most of yesterday at home, flat on my back in a Dayquil doze, where you’re not sleepy enough to sleep but not awake enough to do anything useful. I was idly playing BrickShooter while listening to the audiobook of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, a book I had read and enjoyed while visiting Australia many moons ago. It was pleasant if a little boring, but I told myself to keep on as my favorite Bridget Jones Moment was coming up, right after her Brokedown Palace escapade in Thailand. Bridget went into prison, did Madonna karaoke with the inmates, got out of prison and came home to a phalanx of reporters at the airport. Then she eagerly gets up the next day to read about herself in the papers and discovers . . . . huh. Wait. What? Am I listening to an abridged version? Nope. Is the Dayquil giving me False Memory Syndrome? Where is this book’s masterstroke, when Bridget discovers that the death of Princess Diana has snuffed her own chance at tabloid notoriety? When she goes to the vigil at the Palace, leaving Diana some cigarettes and chocolates in tribute? I was hoping the Dayquil would have me bawling like a baby but IT NEVER HAPPENED.

After checking around the web, adrenaline having chased off the cold medicine, I discovered that what I had thought the emotional climax of the novel was taken out of the U.S. edition, its publisher thinking it dated the book. MORONS. I knew that this subplot wasn’t in the (terrible) movie, but I thought it had been eliminated because both Bridget Jones films had been moved forward in time. Is such drastic transatlantic editing frequent? Forget the sickbed, I may find myself in hospital.

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I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

 Pass the popcorn.

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Except–spoiler alert–that it doesn’t. Dogar’s book, which I’ll be reviewing in the September issue of the Magazine, is a daring and intense version of the Anne Frank story told from Peter’s point of view. It’s quite a tightrope act–while Dogar freely speculates on what Peter may have said and felt and done, she does so while keeping Anne’s diary alive, well, and uncontradicted. Unlike Sadie, Dogar clearly read before she wrote.

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To hear Rhoda Henry’s daily chatter, her life passed in combat with an incompetent world and a malignant climate. It was only female talk, and not in the least uncommon. But talk, not sex, constitutes most of the intercourse between a man and his wife. Henry detested idle whining. More and more, silence was the response he had come to use. It dampened the noise.

I clicked the underlined portion in horror, and up popped a balloon which read

3 other people highlighted this portion of the book

Popular Highlights can be turned off and on by going to the Info menu in the bottom right corner of the Home screen.

While I’m GRATEFUL, of course, that this feature can be turned off, I still feel like a haberdashery offered me a choice in shorts, dirty or clean. Really, who needs to know that three bozos felt the need to complain about their wives via sticking a digital “how true!” in their Herman Wouk?  As the immortal Mrs. Harry Welsch magnificently snapped, “I don’t even know who you are.” And what do they mean, “other people?” I’m not touching that line or any other.

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Props to SLJ for getting this story out in the first place, but I have to note one thing that skeeved me out about the lede in the original article: “Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored—at least for now—due to its language and homosexual content.” Calling the presence in a children’s book of a couple of lesbian mothers “homosexual content” is gross unless the two of them are totally going at it.

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