As with any collection of essays, some of these are much better than others. Nearly all of the essays in this collection are excellent (even "The History of Punctuation" manages to be not entirely boring). I burst out laughing several times while reading "Leading with the Grumper", which is something of a review of a slang dictionary. However, the two longer essays, "Discards" and "Lumber", are weaker than the rest, and "Lumber" is an excrutiatingly boring, pedantic mess (after 100 pages, I couldn't bear to read the remaining 40 or so). Of course, your mileage may vary.