The proof in the pudding

This being my second blog entry in one day, you might describe it as the 'pudding' to a main course of coco pops. And it's about proof-reading.

I bought a new book today (I always do much more impulse-buying when I'm flat broke at the end of a long month), 'Little People' by Tom Holt. It's fun - I've only read one of his before ('Expecting Someone Taller') and had trouble getting into any others, but the sense of humour is quirky enough to appeal to me, and there's some great wordplay and hilarious turns of phrase. The story is good too, although it suffers a bit from an overload of exposition to explain the concept without enough things actually happening once the setting's been established. But then, I'm not half way through it yet, so it's probably a bit early to start criticising.

What really bugs me, though, is the huge volume of typos - 'of' for 'or', 'by' for 'my', that kind of thing. As I said, I'm not half way through, and there have been six times I've picked up on one of these and it's yanked me out of the flow of the writing. Do they still have proofreaders at modern publishers, or do they rely on the computers to pick up the mistakes? Either way, someone needs to be fired or reprogrammed.

Going to the dogs (not in the usual way, to the greyhound races) in Nottingham tomorrow night with work people, so I might not be back in blogging action until Tuesday.