At least one regular reader of this blog is a fairy tale scholar. I don't mean, of course, that her glass (or fur) slippers vanish on the stroke of midnight, or that she can sometimes be seen out in the mulga nibbling on houses made of bread and glazed sugar, just that she would probably be astonished at the dimensions of my ignorance on the subject. Given that for years I assessed for publication a steady stream of retellings from the Grimms, Asbjornsen and Moe, even Hans Andersen, I might be expected to know something, and I suppose I do, but Once Upon a Time is the first scholarly book on the subject I've read, and it would have been useful to have it under my belt 20 years ago. I gather that Max Lüthi was one of the earlier writers to encourage literary scholars in the US to take fairy tales seriously, and here he makes his case compellingly. Anyone who decides that a quick path to publication as a children's writer is to retell fairy stories ought to read this. It's not that retelling is a bad thing, but it needs to be done with respect: Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella haven't stayed alive in our collective imaginations by accident. Their stories have been crafted and honed in their many variations over centuries. Their oddities aren't infelicities to be ironed out to make them easier to swallow, and their savage or tragic moments ought not to be expunged lightly ('Hey, let's do a version of Macbeth without all the bloodshed!').

I imagine that more than one of my regular readers know Joseph M Williams's Style very well indeed. I had a one page summary of his ten lessons sticky-taped to my wall for some time, but hadn't read the book until now (I got hold of it through BookMooch). It's a fabulous read, and anyone whose work involves writing, including the less glamorous modes such as university essays or reports, would benefit from it. It's not a reference book: that is, it doesn't offer a series of judgements on what's good or bad, what's in or out etc. Nor does it talk about how to write well. Emphatically it's about rewriting. A summary hardly does it justice but the ten lessons are:

1. Style as choice: general reflections on style, the sources of unclear writing.
2. Style as choice: arguments about correctness, uncomfortable for pedants like me, but very sensible.
3 & 4. Clarity: Actions and Characters: the case against nominalisation, the desirability of having the main character of a sentence also be its grammatical subject, and the main action be its main verb.
5. Clarity: Cohesion and Coherence: excellent advice about having sentences connect to each other in sequence (cohesion) and form patterns (coherence).
6. Clarity: Emphasis: largely about how to end a sentence.
7. Grace: Concision: clearing away the deadwood so you can see a sentence more clearly.
8. Grace: Shape: long sentence, how to structure them and troubleshoot them.
9. Grace: Elegance: Balance and symmetry; nuances of length and rhythm. In this lesson, the advice of earlier lessons is often apparently contradicted, and it's here that I fell in love with the book.
10. Grace: The ethics of prose: in particular the ethics of clarity and obscurity, with a lovely discussion of a speech by Abraham Lincoln that is deliberately obscure for good reason.
Appendix: An excellent chapter on punctuation

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school ... It will be proved to thy face, that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.