Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Norton's compilation of O'Brian's masterly Aubrey/Maturin novels is an affront to every O'Brian fan, every reader or writer of good English, and every publisher of integrity and worth. This set of volumes is a sad example of publishing for profit with no thought to quality. What passed for galleys were obviously scanned and digitized by a pack of non-caring, barely English-speaking pinchpennies. It is obvious that little or no effort was made to proof pages once the scanners had done their worst, turning words like "home" into "horne" and phrases like "not sail or spar" into "not sailor spar." Almost every page is sprinkled with nonsensical punctuation, the obvious and predictable result of detritus that any self-respecting digitizer would have cleaned from equipment or copy before beginning each scan. Worse, paragraphs are wrongly divided, so that O'Brian's lively dialogue becomes difficult -- at times impossible -- to follow. In their original form, O'Brian's finely crafted phrases read as if one were hearing a tale spoken aloud by a master storyteller. In Norton's compilation, O'Brian's magic is turned to clunkery at best and gibberish at worst. O'Brian is a genius. Read his work. But not in this edition. If you know people who work at Norton, teach your dog to lift his leg on their shoes.