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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GirlAfraidWillNeverLearn" data-source="post: 1987342936" data-attributes="member: 29320">I received my copy of this book last week and due to "popular" demand (Hi[USER=29227]@Mozmar[/USER] <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="👋" title="Waving hand    :wave:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.0/png/unicode/64/1f44b.png" data-shortname=":wave:" />)  I wrote a little review.The main reason for me to buy this book  was that it’s the first one to deal with material that was released after Years Of Refusal. The concept of exclusively covering non-album tracks seemed a bit strange and random to me, but I was hoping that it might still work as a book of reference.Although it seems to be a print on demand release, the quality is decent, but the layout leaves a lot to be desired. The cover is a matter of taste of course, and while it’s understandable that the author chose a picture of himself and Moz, it’s a bit unfortunate that you can’t really see either of them properly in the snapshot.One thing I like about the layout are all the little public domain pictures and graphics that were used and give the book a type of scrapbook appeal. The actual text looks like a badly formatted Word document though. There’s tons of spelling and grammar errors and lots of missing or superfluous words, which disturbs the flow of reading a lot, especially when some sentences appear to be taken out of context, are missing the subject or verb etc. Random facts like the number of times a song has been played live are often just listed in the text without any indication as to why this is relevant and it often reads more like a copy/paste collage than a coherent, running text. It’s a shame really, because the author obviously put a lot of effort and work into this and a simple proofreading would have eliminated most of these mistakes.In the introduction the author explains his reasons for writing this book (he’s been a fan since he was 13 and has a lot of nostalgic feelings for hunting down and collecting records, hence the non-album track concept). He’s not a fan of interpreting lyrics (although he also does that in this book) and for copyright reasons hasn’t quoted any, which seems a bit pointless to me, since Morrissey is and always has been first and foremost a lyricist. You can of course write about his vocal melodies, but it doesn’t make for terribly interesting reading material.The author also states that he hasn’t read any of the well-known biographies, and while I wouldn’t say that anything the likes of Rogan or Bret have put out includes essential background knowledge, Goddard’s work, especially Songs To Save Your Life, certainly does. There is a list of sources provided at the end, all of them are online sources. Instead of quoting primary sources we get many articles (mis)quoting  from primary sources as well as opinion pieces and reviews.So it’s not really surprising that there are quite a lot of inaccuracies to be found while some “essential” information is missing or incomplete. The biggest slip I’ve noticed is unfortunately right at the beginning of the first chapter. This quote, attributed to Morrissey, allegedly taken from Autobiography:[ATTACH=full]66002[/ATTACH]It doesn’t sound like something Morrissey would write (“jangly”? “morbidly hilarious indie-pop gems”? That’s exactly the type of buzzwords the press loves and he despises) because he didn’t. It was taken from an openculture.com article and it seems the author overlooked the quotation mark at the end of the actual quote.[ATTACH=full]66003[/ATTACH]I think this is also the first book on Morrissey or The Smiths I’ve read that was written by an American author, which was… interesting. It definitely shows with regards to linguistic remarks, cultural references and also attempts at humour.So to summarise my rambling:What I liked about the book is the chronological structure (opposed to the alphabetical order in Mozipedia for example) and the personal touch that can be felt throughout.I’m aware that I’m terribly pedantic but for me all the mistakes (big and small) really tainted the reading experience, which is frustrating because many of them could have been avoided.I also have to admit that I merely skimmed over the first part that deals with The Smiths' body of work because I feel that Songs To Save Your Life is the ultimate work of reference when it comes to that era and I didn’t feel like going over 130 pages of Smiths non-album tracks (but not all of them) and also some unreleased material (but not all of it).It’s clearly a book for fans because it often doesn't provide enough context for casual readers. As mentioned above it doesn’t cite lyrics, so you’re expected to know what the author is alluding to. Hardcore fans, predictably, won't find any new information in here.Does this work as a book of reference? For the material released by Morrissey since 2009 it will probably do, for everything else there’s better places to look. But to be fair, it was never intended as a complete guide to The Smiths' and Morrissey’s non-album tracks and should be treated as a diverting, anecdotal read rather than detailed discourse.</blockquote>

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