David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

In a hundred years the history of French literature will only mention [this work] as a curio.

The suggestion that something larger is being said about the human predicament… won’t hold water, any more than Beckett’s incontinent heroes can.

…the merest trash, not worth a second look.

One can say of this book — with sufficient truth to make it worth saying: ‘This isn’t writing. It’s research.’

In one place Deerslayer , and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of possible 115. It breaks the record.

His style, if style it may be called, is offensively colloquial, commonplace and vulgar.

The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.

What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only…

Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.

The Recognitions is an evil book, a scurrilous book, a profane, a scatalogical book and an exasperating book… what this squalling overwritten book needs above all is to have its mouth washed out with lye soap.

Heller wallows in his own laughter… and the sort of antic behaviour the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.

His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions…

This book offers not pleasure but mounting pain…

A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda.

Johnson wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets.

As one tortures one’s way through Finnegans Wake an impression grows that Joyce has lost his hold on human life.

As a humorist, Mr Lewis makes valiant attempts to be funny; he merely succeeds in being silly.

…Any bookseller should be very sure that he knows in advance that he is selling very literate pornography.

Mr Percy’s prose needs oil and a good checkup.

The most stupid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.

One would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage.

…evidence of a diseased mind and lacerated heart.

Sentimental rubbish… Show me one page that contains an idea.

From time to time it’s nice to have a book you can hate — it clears the pipes — and I hate this book.

Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.

The book is dull.

…the confidence now reposed in its accuracy is the greatest injury to philology that now exists.

A form of verbal gymnastics, lipograms are written works that deliberately omit a certain letter of the alphabet by avoiding all words that include that letter. ‘Lipo’ actually means ‘lacking’ — in this case lacking a letter. An example of a contemporary lipogram is the nursery rhyme, ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, rewritten without the letter s:

The French author’s book Voyage Autour du Monde Sans la Lettre A debuted in Paris in 1853. However, 30 years later in another edition, he admitted letting one letter a sneak by him in the book — he had overlooked the word serait .

A contemporary British lipogrammarian, Brandreth specialises in dropping a different letter from each of Shakespeare’s plays. All I’s were excluded from Hamlet , rendering the famous soliloquy: ‘To be or not to be; that’s the query’. He proceeded to rewrite Twelfth Night without the letters l and o , Othello without any o ’s, and Macbeth without any a ’s or e ’s.

Bearing an obsessive dislike for the letter r , Burmann not only wrote 130 poems without using that letter, but he also omitted the letter r from his daily conversation for 17 years. This practice meant the eccentric 18th-century German poet never said his own last name.

Eckler’s speciality is rewriting well-known nursery rhymes such as ‘Little Jack Horner’, excluding certain letters. His masterpiece was ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, which he re-created in several versions, omitting in turn the letters s, a, h, e and t (as in the t-less ‘Mary Had A Pygmy Lamb’).