It takes a lot for me to stop reading a book mid-read, effectively declaring that I've wasted my time reading the first part of a book and am damned if I'm going to waste any more. This is the first one I've run into along those lines this year, and holy damn, it's bad.
The book in question is Slayer Slang: A Buffy The Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams. Looking at the back cover flap, I am dismayed to discover that Mr. Adams is, or was at the time, a professor of English, the chair of the English department at his college, and a published author of other books on the English language.
What, were they really hard-up for professors over at Albright College? Do English professors who enter Reading, PA spontaneously combust 87% of the time? If the quality of his teaching is anything like the quality of his writing, and the quality of his syllabi approaches the organizational quality of his chapters, I can't imagine anybody matriculating from the English department at Albright College with better than a high-school reading equivalency.
I myself matriculated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in English, and apart from the occasional substitute professor, I have no complaints about any of the many fine faculty who oversaw my education there. I came away with extremely high standards for essay-grade writing (and let me be quick to point out that these reviews do not qualify as essay-grade or above), a tendency to outline my exam answers (the back pages of my college blue books are full of game plans for my writing), and a desire to see nonfiction writing actually advance a theory or narrative rather than simply vomiting up whatever random factoids occur to the author in whatever random order they may occur.
This book? Fails miserably on that last point, and perhaps even more importantly, rather than presenting an in-context view of Buffy's language and syntax based both on Joss Whedon's unique writing and speaking style and on the pop-culture references that surround and shape Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only points out pop-culture references that are too obvious to miss, or which the author clearly has some knowledge of. There's no hint that the author did even a half-second's research into other popular science fiction and fantasy literature, for instance, and apparently he somehow lived under a rock, completely missing out on such formative girl groups as the Marvelettes or the Ronettes (only able to come up with "majorette" as a reference Willow might have been drawing on when she attempted, unsuccessfully, to coin the term "Slayerette"). Adams is happy to point at Rush references or quote Lisa Loeb, but if the man's ever so much as heard of Motown, there's no evidence in this book.
I was willing to deal with the tunnel vision Adams brings to the pop culture of Buffy--it was a bit of a surprise to hear that J.K. Rowling had co-revived the term "bezoar" along with Buffy when a bezoar and its illustration featured prominently in an issue of the immensely popular comic/graphic novel collection Sandman, by Neil Gaiman, just a few years previous, for instance--but the crappy organization really started to wear then by page 30 or so. There's no sense that Adams is building to any kind of point, no suggestion that all his observations on Buffyspeak are in any kind of order. Quite frankly, most of the first 30 pages read like filler (there's even a page that's taken up almost entirely by a footnote comprised of, I am not kidding, the table of contents for not just one but two other books about Buffy), as if he'd written a Buffy dictionary but could only sell it if he included 120 pages of so-called linguistic analysis of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Personally, I think he should have stuck with the dictionary. The 125 pages that precede the Buffy lexicon are meandering, random pieces of meaningless noise, with no insight toward what makes Buffyspeak interesting or important, and frequent failures, misses, and mistakes when it comes to pop culture references.
Don't waste your time on this. You're not going to learn anything from it. My only regret is that stabbing a stake into this book wouldn't dust it (and let's face it: if it did, I'd owe the library some change, which the book certainly isn't worth). I hope that if this book turned up in early-seasons Giles's library, he'd recognize it for the piece of crap it is and toss it in with the recycling.
Tags: buffyverse, reading, rejected