The Professor and the Madman
The Professor and the Madman was certainly an interesting story. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about one of the most valuable (prolific and thorough) volunteer contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, who happened to have been an inmate at an insane asylum where he had been committed for murder. While I enjoyed it thoroughly, I thought it was marred a bit by punching up the story with pointless armchair psychoanalysis of poor C.W. Minor. An example was the passage that I quoted in the “Guess the Source” post, which was part of an entirely lame attempt to set a background for Minor’s later sexual obsessions. So while I actually wish the book were dryer, the stuff that irritated me about it may well have been what made it into a national bestseller.