The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. Tune In - What do you think? (Spoilers alert!) | Page 12 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

It took me over two years to read this book.  I’m not much of a reader, biographies and nonfiction really, very few books I’ve read have kept me captive.  Being a huge Beatles fan from all the way back has compelled me to read a few books about this amazing story.  Mark Lewisohn has written the Beatles biography to end all Beatles biographies (except volume 2 and 3) because the amount of detail and research shouldn’t ever be exceeded.  I wish volume two was out, because I can’t imagine going through volume one again.  

trcanberra said

mja6758 said

It does disappoint me when, with all this work, all the checking that must have gone on with this, I find my first typo on page 20! Hope it’s not a sign of things to come!

I was thinking the same about the editing; and that from page xiii – the sentence which begins “Unless quoting documents that had it differently …” is repeated twice within three paragraphs with only a minor variation and exactly the same meaning.  And I haven’t even started reading it yet.

I was a newspaper sub-editor in a former life and am just horrified by the typos and errors which manifest themselves in books and newspapers these days since we moved from manual to electronic typesetting; which has reduced the number of people involved – many of those people used to spot errors that made it past the formal checking.

 

  

I would disagree with this (and the rule) a bit. 

It’s true that by the rules of grammar, one should have “a” and not “an” in front of a word or acronym that starts with a consonant. 

But, think about the purpose of this rule, and how some consonants are pronounced. 

The purpose of the rule (I believe) was to make things easier to say and pronounce. 

So, you would say “he had an alacrity of spirit.” The “an” is used because you need a consonant in front of “alacrity,” to make it pronounceable. “a” is of course a vowel. 

But think about these types of consonants: “m” “f” and yes even “r”. Think about what your mouth and tongue does when you pronounce those letters. 

“m” is like “em” ; “r” is like “arrrr”; “f” is like “eff”. So you are in fact placing a vowel in front of those letters, and words that start with those letters. 

Thus, I have no problem at all with “an RC church.” I don’t view it as an error. At least, it’s debatable. (Unlike, for example, if I said “Those shoes compliment that coat”–that would clearly be a grammatical error.)

That said, you see a lot of news anchors and reporters say and write “an historic event” — and that drives me batty. Admittedly, this is a tough one. “H” is a consonant; but you say “h” like “aich” or “ache.” But you use “h” in still a different way if you say “historic” “honorific” “horrible” etc.

Anyway, I have read 90% of the book at this point, and rank it very highly. I did not see an *obvious* typo or grammatical error in it; and the level of detail is astonishing and the quality of the writing is superb. 

Of course, you have to be something of Beatles fanatic to read it — but, then, we are fanatics, aren’t we? 🙂 

Apologies for my grammatical pedantry. 🙂 Love the site!