Storyteller's World

I've started reading The Seven Basic Plots and it's actually very compelling: you keep wanting to read on and it's no effort at all. Christopher Booker has read widely and seems to know a lot about what he's read. Which makes it all the more uncomfortable to find myself moaning about some of the examples I do know something about, viz. the biblical stories. (Not least because I start to ask myself: If he's wrong about these, what else might he be wrong about?)

Thus, there were ten plagues of Egypt, not seven, as he informs us. (In a book about stories, in which numbers play an important part, this is pretty major. We're not talking seven dwarves here, you know.)

Then there are the spelling mistakes: Niniveh instead of Nineveh, Phaoroah instead of Pharaoh. Which I can't help noticing because both occur two or three times. I can just see this happening. Author types in a strange word. Spell-checker queries it, but has no correct version in its data-base. Author fails to check whether s/he has spelled it right, and instructs spell-checker to 'learn' a wrong spelling. I guess we've all done it. But when you're reading a £25 tome, you do expect that one of the things you've paid for is decent spelling and proof-reading.

I know, I know. I'm living in the past, again.