A review by sophiahammond24
Have You Eaten Grandma?: Or, the Life-Saving Importance of Correct Punctuation, Grammar, and Good English by Gyles Brandreth

5.0

Listening to this book felt like listening to a 7-hour-long English lecture. Even though that's true, I must admit that I enjoyed every second of it. The information this book holds is very important and Brandreth's writing makes this a simple and humorous read. I hope to own this book someday. However, I would much rather own the version of this book that was published in England because as I listened to this book on Libby, I realized the American version (which I borrowed from my school's library) is missing a good number of interesting pages. In conclusion, this was a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone willing to learn more about the complexities of the English language or to really anyone who loves English.

A few of my favorite lines from this book are:

-Famously, Phillip Larkin (born in 1922) began his poem "This Be the Verse" like this:
They fuck you up your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.

-It is terrible like the way "like" has become the go-to linguistic filler of our times. It's not the only one, of course. There's "um" and "er" and "I mean" as well: sounds, words, and phrases that serve no useful purpose, get in the way of what you want to say, and can be very, very irritating.