Welcome to Leafy's Bad Book Review, where I will be reviewing all of my books from AP English class throughout the year. For our first segment, we will examine and understand everything there is to know about The Elizabethan World Picture, by E.M.W. Tillyard.
This book is a very special type of book: summer reading. Summer reading books are known to be especially terrible as the teachers choose them with hopes that these kinds of books ruin a child's summer vacation. Teachers find these books fun to read, while the child is induced to weeks of misery and tears at every page turn. Vacation after vacation passes and the books get worse and worse, until finally you reach senior year and you are forced to read this piece of bullshit.
The book itself is small- only 109 pages, however the author successfully turns this into the literature version of orange concentrate: more in less. Obviously, at first glance, the first aspect of this book that you notice is the title: The Elizabethan World Picture, as well as the cover art. The first impression that I get would rank this book somewhere between 0 and 0.02 on a 1-100 point scale. Now, they always tell you to not judge a book by its cover, but in this case, judge away, because the cover is the best part of the book.
We open the book and a warning bell goes off in our heads. Why? Because THE WORDS AREN'T VERTICAL ON EVERY PAGE! That means that not only is this book complete shit, it's old shit. Which is even worse than one first imagines. And old books tend to be very stuffy and proper and as dry as the Kalahari- and this book is not one to break stereotypes is it?
The very first page begins with something that vacuums whatever is left of your hope, joy, and good mood away. Something along the lines of: This book was originally intended to be an essay about.... Nobody gives a damn! Nobody even cares about what you think, who you are, or what you want to write about! If you're that boring that you devote your life to the Elizabethan World Picture than you must have 0 facebook friends!
The rest of the book one can only describe as as beautiful as monkey-shit-covered-horse-shit, as attractive as a dog licking himself in that special place, and as memorable as the dirt on my bathroom floor tile. Never before have I been able to flip a page and not remember anything I just read. If you made me read said page and then quizzed me, I wouldn't get anything right. I would rather read the complete 1,000 pages of Obamacare cover to cover than this thing that is called a book. And the LANGUAGE... oh... Einstein would need a dictionary to decipher what this man wrote. I challenge someone to find a four-letter word on any of the 100 pages. And someone expects ME to read this for a high school literature course? If someone were to write a book based on the movie The Hangover, I would learn more academics than from this novel. I cry for the poor soul that was forced to edit this book for publishing. I bet you they committed suicide before finishing- I know my heart and brain did before page ten.
Let's move on to the chapters, titled Sin, the Order of Being, and the Links in the Order of Being.
And now that we've covered that, let's move on to the back page, where the author describes his book as "illuminating". I HAVE A BRILLIANT IDEA: WHY DOESN'T THE AUTHOR (censored_______________censored____________censored) AND THEN, JUST THEN, MAYBE HE'LL FIGURE OUT THE DEFINITION OF "ILLUMINATING".
This book is why babies cry all the time.
And that, my friends, concludes the first edition of Leafy's Bad Book Review.
