Have you ever wanted to read a book where the author decides to "rip out" one of the chapters, or leaves a blank page for you to 'draw' one of the characters? Would you enjoy an 18th-Century story which takes many chapters before the hero is born? The tale is touchingly told. The characters are real, and constantly fascinating. It's not their fault that their story is frequently interrupted by outlandish "digressions" on the part of an author so creative that his modern descendants are considered to be Joyce and Beckett as well as many others. Would you enjoy a chapter about Chapters? About buttonholes? About whether parents and their children are kin to each other? A chapter on curses? Laurence Sterne has so much trouble getting Walter and Toby Shandy downstairs that he calls in the "critics" to do it. Advice on reading such an unusual, even unique book: read the first several chapters, then stop and reread them. Continue that process and soon the book will feel quite familiar, and that's when the fun starts! Walter loves arguments about anything. Uncle Toby enjoys building military models. Tristram is quite busy just trying to get born and baptized with the correct name. His mother Elizabeth argues with her husband Walter about midwives and their methods. (Their wedding contract is here for you to peruse...it causes some problems itself.) This volume "3" consists of the Notes on the text (which is found in volumes "1" and "2".) Amazon also lists several less expensive paperback editions of the novel, the preferred one being the Oxford World Classics Edition.

This "Dictionary" might be useful to someone who already knows written Tibetan but it is almost useless for those who do not. For example: If you wish to look up a certain Tibetan word, say, "Trungpa" to discover it's English meaning you will find that everything is ordered according to the Tibetan alphabet in the Tibetan alphabet. I still have not found Trungpa or any other word I was looking for, for that matter.

The authors have committed a serious error in my opinion and have created what might be called an archetypal example of scholarly myopia. Most of us do not wish to become Lotsawas (Translators). Most of us wish to be able to look up an Englsh tranliteration of a Tibetan word and discover it's meaning.

The creators of this book should look up the word Bodhisattva in a Sanskrit Dictionary. Then they should create an English-Tibetan counterpart for this work which would demonstrate compassion towards those of us who have no intent of becoming Lotsawas.

If you already have a handle on written Tibetan then this "Dictionary" is probably just great, but for the rest of us it is just a huge waste of time.

This dictionary is undoubtedly the best out there for modern literary and colloquial Tibetan. It is excellent for political, literary, and colloquial terminology. Of course, the depth of these genres comes at the expense of (non-basic) religious/philosophical terminology. But anyone who is in the market to buy this book would have known this about the dictionary and Goldstein's expertise already.

Since the majority of Tibetan-English dictionaries are "Dharma" oriented anyway, this dictionary is a welcomed and needed departure from the norm. Moreover, whereas virtually every widely available "Dharma" dictionary is put together by a pseudo-scholar, and is full of laughably incorrect glosses/definitions for a high percentage of terms, this dictionary -- compiled by a genuine scholar of Tibetan -- rarely has off the mark definitions.

I have used Goldstein's new dictionary every day since I bought it from the Amazon. It is undoubtedly the most up-to-date Tibetan dictionary ever published that covers well both the written language as well as the spoken language of the central dialect. However, the publishers seem to have been too much in a hurry, if they had taken a few more months, the result would have been perfect. Some of the cross-references tell you to look the word up under another listing, and if you do it, they tell you to get back to the first one. Sometimes the referred listing is missing altogether! It would have been useful if they had given more Sanskrit equivalents for Buddhist terms as the English translations vary. Regardless of these annoying trivia, the dictionary is indispensable for reading Tibetan newspapers and other materials published after 1950. Numerous illustrative sentences make it easier to understand the meanings. In short, its main strength lies in the modern everyday language (for Buddhist texts you will need a more specialised dictionary). Its coverage is so impressive that the Chinese Minorities Publishing House put indefenetely off the publication of its own dictionary which was due later this year. For any serious student of modern Tibetan: get it, you are going to need it.

This book was such a pleasure to read with the most endearing characters ever. People on the subway must have thought I was strange when I was snickering to myself over this book. I just fell in love with Trim! Don't read this with the idea that everything will make perfect sense, let it take control of you and you will fall in love with the nonsensical writing in about 50 pages or so. As I was reading along, I just couldn't wait for Shandy to change the subject again, make more phallic references or tell another funny story.
I docked one star off because starting in volume seven some of the chapters really get off track (to the point where I didn't know what he was talking about at all) as if Sterne wasn't sure where he wanted to take the book at that point and the reader has to read his thoughts as he tries to sort it out. It soon gets back on track again and moves along nicely until the end (or was it?).

As an undergraduate English major, I was recently dragged through this book kicking and screaming. "There's nothing happening!" I kept arguing in vain. How wrong I was. Fortunately, my Professor saw the value in making me continue. This book continues the work that Shakespeare began in the English language and that Joyce would later undertake. All explore the human condition excellently, but none do it in as funny a way as Sterne. Within marbled and black pages, instructions to re-read chapters and descriptions of courtships as battles, we see not only Sterne going through the growing pains of being a novelist, but the novel itslef going through its own growing pains. Sterne helped to define the genre and created a scathing farce in the process.

Tristram Shandy has a cult following -- although few people have actually read it, most of us have read something directly influenced by it. Sterne was a creative genius, and pulled no punches when telling the story of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Not only is this a shaggy-dog story, and a prototype for "experimental" writers like James Joyce and William Burroughs, but it is also a (remarkably early) meditation on the self-referentiality of literature, and the fine (nonexistent?) separation between a book's abstract textual form and its physical, material, paper-and-ink form. Like a good postmodernist, Sterne realizes you can't very well separate the two.

You didn't like this book? Well maybe Sterne didn't want you to like it. Maybe likeability should not be the primary project of a text. One of the meta-statements Sterne seems to be making is he has no respect for your time, nor your desire for narrative cohesion -- and why should he? Defiant, Sterne is. Very defiant. Cool.