  I finally finished the book. It only took a month to read the tiny thing. I guess I shouldn't start a book while I'm in the middle of an accelerated class with buttloads of reading. I was a little disappointed in the book. It wasn't as funny as the reviews made it sound. As a stickler, I still liked it, but not as much as I thought I would.
This is my favorite part. When I was about fourteen years old, a friend at school who spent the summer holidays in Michigan set me up with an American pen-pal. This is not an episode I am proud to remember. In fact, one day I hope to be able to forget it: the ensuing correspondence, after all, ran to only three pages, and no one from the Oxford University Press has, as yet, suggested collecting it in book form with scholarly apparatus and footnotes.
But for the time being I need to get it off my chest, so here it is. The trouble was, Kerry-Anne was an everyday teenager with no literary pretentions - and for some reason this made the precocious blue-stocking in me feverishly uncomfortable. When her first letter arrived (she had pluckily set the ball rolling) I was absolutely appalled. It was in huge handwriting, like an infant's. It was on pink paper, with carefree spelling errors - and where the dots over the I's ought to be, there were bubbles . "I am strawberry blonde," she wrote, "with a light dusting of freckles. " In hindsight I see it was unrealistic to expect a pen-pal from the 8th grade in Detroit to write like Samuel Johnson. But on the other hand, what earthly use to me was this vapid mousey moron parading a pigmentational handicap?
To this day I am ashamed of what I did to Kerry-Anne (who unsurprisingly never wrote back). I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen...I know I deliberately dropped the word "desultory," and I think I may even have used some French...The main reason I recall this shameful teenage epiphany, however, is that in my mission to blast little Kerry-Anne out of the water, I pulled out (literally) all the stops: I used a semicolon. "I watch television in a desultory kind of way; I find there is not much on," I wrote. And it felt so good.
It felt fantastic. It was like that bit in Crocodile Dundee when our rugged hero scoffs at the switchblade of his would-be mugger, and produces a foot-long weapon of his own, "Call that a knife? THAT's a KNIFE. " I think I liked this part so much because I did something very similar to my freshman roommate. 
