Book Review: Daily Candy A to Z

Title: Daily Candy A to Z

Author: staff of “Daily Candy” column

Publisher: Hyperion

Date: 2006

ISBN: illegible

Length: 314 pages

Illustrations: color drawings by Sujean Rim

Quote: “After introductions, skip the obligatory ‘So what do you do?’ and talk about something fun instead.”

What’s to like about this book? It’s not especially funny and one would hope that it’s not especially informative, consisting as it does of advice most people at least used to pick up in grade nine. It does have cute, clever pictures of fashionable clothes and stuff. If you want a visual style guide to what was considered cool or cute in 2006, here’s one.

What’s not to like? Although this book tries to be fresh and witty, it’s neither. If you received it as a gift at any age after twenty-five, you might want to reconsider whether the person who gave it is a friend. It’s very basic, general advice for college freshmen. There are more complete and useful collections of that. This book showed twenty-year-old girls what the fashionable junkfood to put on the coffee tables at parties looked like, just in case they had never gone to any parties where they might have picked up ideas, but told them nothing about how to change a tire or a printer cartridge, hem new curtains or a ripped-out coat, or be prepared for the emotional problems the shelter experience leaves on p.c. rescued pets.

What’s really to hate? Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny print…in pale ink on glossy paper, yet. It’s not as if the producers of this book needed to squeeze a lot of words onto a page. They didn’t. They chose the tiny type just to discourage readers with any sort of eye problem, especially older readers. I’m no fan of the big clunky print that nonverbally screams “Did not take the time to finish writing a book of this bulk,” either. I like 8-point type myself. Parts of this book appear to be 6-point, which nonverbally screams “Desperate to get adults to look at this by making them wonder what we’re saying to kids,” only eye problems don’t necessarily correlate with age. I can read this book, at 50, though it’s not easy or fun. Quite a few college students cannot. The ability to focus on extremely small print is determined more by hereditary factors than by any kind of merit, so I’m left to wonder what the message was intended to be. “We’ll tell you about charm but we ourselves, other than Sujean Rim, have none of it”?

Meh. I wouldn’t have spent actual money on it but, as the free book added to a bag at a charity sale, I found it (sort of) cute.