Have all the editors been stranded on the tarmac?

Eliott Hes­ter strikes me as the sort of guy who has dumb­ed him­self down for so long that he does­n’t even real­ize it. He clear­ly has a func­tion­ing brain, but his writ­ing is all flash with very lit­tle sub­stance. He uses two-bit vocab­u­lary words as though to pro­vide the impres­sion of great lit­er­a­ture, but I rarely saw good rea­son for either his use of uncom­mon words or his overuse of over­ly clever phras­es. Sure, this book exists only to tit­il­late and enter­tain, but a lit­tle atten­tion paid to pac­ing and flu­id­i­ty of prose would go a long way.

I picked up *Plane Insan­i­ty* because my girl­friend is a flight atten­dant and I’m a bit curi­ous about the cul­ture. I thought I might get some insight into what goes on up in the air, even if just from the more enter­tain­ing stories.

Prob­a­bly the most dis­ap­point­ing aspect of *Plane Insan­i­ty* was how poor­ly the sto­ries and anec­dotes fit togeth­er. I was left with the impres­sion that these could have been arti­cles writ­ten by dif­fer­ent peo­ple and anthol­o­gized. There was no pro­gres­sion, just a series of unfor­tu­nate inci­dents whose amuse­ment val­ue most­ly fit into the cat­e­go­ry of «com­e­dy is what hap­pens to some­one else; tragedy is what hap­pens to me» humor. Peo­ple throw­ing up is sup­posed to be amusing?

It seems to me that a com­pe­tent edi­tor might have done good things with this book. A few revi­sions to tight­en up the pac­ing and tone down the lit­er­ary mug­ging, and get rid of unnec­es­sary words could have turned this into an enter­tain­ing, if light, read. Instead, the read­er is sub­ject­ed to sen­tences like, «He yelled and cursed, berat­ing her with a vol­ley of con­ju­gat­ed verbs that drew ice-cold stares from passengers.»

I find it par­tic­u­lar­ly annoy­ing to read a book so poor­ly edit­ed. The price of books is sky­rock­et­ing, and even an elec­tron­ic edi­tion (for which the ris­ing cost of paper should have no bear­ing) runs upwards of (or over) ten bucks. The main­stream pub­lish­ers make it a point to dis­tin­guish them­selves from «van­i­ty» press­es on the premise that their selec­tiv­i­ty and pro­fes­sion­al edit­ing promise the read­er a qual­i­ty book. And edit­ing *is* impor­tant: a good edi­tor can turn the good ideas of an unskilled writer into a read­able book with good ideas. So imag­ine how dis­ap­point­ed I am that a huge pub­lish­er like [St. Mar­t­in’s Press](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin%27s_Press) should con­sis­tent­ly have such shod­di­ly-edit­ed books. 

I sup­pose that so long as peo­ple keep buy­ing the crap that Dan Brown puts out, there’s no pres­sure from the mar­ket­place to force pub­lish­ers to hire enough edi­tors so that each book they pub­lish can get the atten­tion of an edi­tor. This is busi­ness, I sup­pose. It’s eas­i­er to make mon­ey by cut­ting cor­ners on qual­i­ty and churn­ing out quan­ti­ty than it is to spend a lot of time and atten­tion mak­ing some­thing tru­ly good. Is this the greater good? I’m not con­vinced that the laws of sup­ply and demand result in good books.

I’m stop­ping short of a boy­cott, but I’m going to have to know the author and real­ly want a book if I’m going to make anoth­er pur­chase from St. Mar­t­in’s. I’ve been ripped off by them too often already. For my ten bucks, I damn well expect that some­one at the pub­lish­er knows that an angry per­son is not «about to loose con­trol,» that a per­son who is shout­ing prob­a­bly did­n’t raise his voice «a cou­ple of octaves,» and that a «naval» is not a body part — even if the author doesn’t.