The Book Thread 2021

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Lying Next To Me - Gregg Olsen
2. I Can't Make This Up - Kevin Hart
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison
4. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
5. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
6. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski
7. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
8. A Simple Favor - Darcey Bell
9. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
10. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
12. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
13. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
14. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
15. The Wave - Todd Strasser
16. Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
17. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville
19. Unspeakable Things - Jess Lourey
20. The Memoir of Thomas Jefferson - Thomas Jefferson
21. There is Confusion - Jessie Redmon Fauset
22. Mob Rule in New Orleans - Ida B. Wells-Barnett
23. The House Behind the Cedars - Charles W. Chesnutt
24. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
25. Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing - Allison Winn Scotch
26. The Conjure Woman - Charles W. Chesnutt
27. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
28. The Fire in the Flint - Walter Francis White
29. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
30. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
31. Heidi - Johanna Spyri
32. We Have Always Lived In the Castle - Shirley Jackson
33. The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne
34. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow
35. Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
36. Capital Gaines - The Smart Things I've Learned Doing Stupid Stuff - Chip Gaines

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Lying Next To Me - Gregg Olsen
2. I Can't Make This Up - Kevin Hart
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison
4. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
5. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
6. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski
7. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
8. A Simple Favor - Darcey Bell
9. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
10. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
12. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
13. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
14. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
15. The Wave - Todd Strasser
16. Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
17. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville
19. Unspeakable Things - Jess Lourey
20. The Memoir of Thomas Jefferson - Thomas Jefferson
21. There is Confusion - Jessie Redmon Fauset
22. Mob Rule in New Orleans - Ida B. Wells-Barnett
23. The House Behind the Cedars - Charles W. Chesnutt
24. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
25. Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing - Allison Winn Scotch
26. The Conjure Woman - Charles W. Chesnutt
27. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
28. The Fire in the Flint - Walter Francis White
29. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
30. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
31. Heidi - Johanna Spyri
32. We Have Always Lived In the Castle - Shirley Jackson
33. The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne
34. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow
35. Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
36. Capital Gaines - The Smart Things I've Learned Doing Stupid Stuff - Chip Gaines
37. The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran

[Blip]

1. The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh
2. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Thrush Green by Miss Read
4. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Winter in Thrush Green by Miss Read
The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín
6. The Binding by Bridget Collins
7. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu translated by Ken Liu
8. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu translated by Joel Martinsen
9. Death's End by Cixin Liu translated by Ken Liu
10. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
11. The Ebony Tower by John Fowles
12. The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Henri Alain-Fournier translated by Robin Buss
13. Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan
14. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
15. From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
16. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
17. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
18. Front Page News by Sadie Gordon Richmond
19. The Split by Sharon Bolton
20. Outline by Rachel Cusk
21. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
22. The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
23. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
24. The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
25. The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey
26. Battles at Thrush Green by Miss Read
27. China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
28. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
29. Still Life by Sarah Winman
30. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
31. Elmet by Fiona Mozley
32. Bosworth: the birth of the Tudors by Chris Skidmore
33. The Guest List by Lucy Foley
34. A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
35. Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak
36. Second Place by Rachel Cusk
37. An Island by Karen Jennings
38. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

The imagined lives that five south London children would have lived had they not been killed by a wartime bomb, told through snapshots of each of them set fifteen years apart. The novel records the mundane through its characters' achievements, failures and vicissitudes, with a keen eye for social history and above all, awareness of randomness and chance. I thought it very good indeed, and am surprised it hasn't made the shortlist.

[UncertainSloth]

that sounds really good, i'll have to look it up...certainly sounds better than half the shortlist

[UncertainSloth]

1. james brogden - the narrows - 8/10
2. nora roberts - of blood and bone - 8/10
3. nora roberts - the rise of magicks - 8/10
4. karen thompsn walker - the dreamers - 7/10
5. sophie draper - cuckoo - 7/10
6. laura carlin - the wicked cometh - 7/10
7. vikram palakar - the night theatre - 7/10
8. m r carey - the trials of koli - 9/10
9. bridget collins - the binding - 9/10
10. jac jemc - the grip of it - 7/10
11. carolyn jess-cooke - the boy who could see demons - 9/10
12. daisy johnson - everything under - 7/10
13. paraic o'donnell - house on vesper sands - 7/10
14. claire north - the gameshouse - 8/10 -
15. martin edwards - the coffin trail - 6/10
16. laird hunt - neverhome - 8/10
17. jesmyn ward - sing, unburied, sing - 8/10
18. edward parnell - ghostland: in search of a haunted country - 10/10
19. james brogden - the plague stones - 8/10
20. jonathan coe - the dwarves of death - 7/10
21. catherine burns - the visitors - 8/10
22. jonathan coe - the accidental woman - 6/10
23. gemma files - we will all go down together - 10/10
24. christopher ransom - the people next door - 6/10
25. andrew pyper - the killing circle - 9/10
26. alma katsu - the hunger - 9/10 - very good read - a reimagining of the donner party - very reminiscent of the terror by dan simmons, in that it takes a historical journey, researches it well, and adds a layer of the supernatural...

[Blip]

that sounds really good, i'll have to look it up...certainly sounds better than half the shortlist

I've an idea that you might enjoy An Island too.

[don't get me started]

1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
11. Impossible Languages- Andrea Moro
12. Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language – Jukie tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter
13. HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
14. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense – Jonathan Culpeper
15. Ethosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture – N. J. Enfield (Ed.)
16. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice – Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright.
17. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past – A. Roger Ekirch
18. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation – Michael Agar
19. Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - John R. Taylor
20. I saw the Dog: How Language Works – Alexandra Aikhenvald.
21. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939 – 1945 – Nicholas Stargardt
22. Civilizations – Laurent Binet
23. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology - R. M. W. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.)
24. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time – Johanna Nichols
25. How to behave badly in Elizabethan England - Ruth Goodman
26. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness and Genius – Arika Okrent
27. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
28. One Man and his Bike – Mike Carter
29. The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps – Edwards Brooke Hitching
30. Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
31. L2 interactional competence and development - J.K. Hall, J. Hellermann & S.P. Doehler, (Eds.)

32. A Natural History of negation – Laurence R. Horn

637 pp.

Well, one thing is for sure- I won’t be reaching 50 books this year if I keep choosing great doorstop books of linguistic philosophy. This was a about as severe a reading challenge as I’ve had. I’m glad I read it, and I’m glad I’m finished reading it.

So, as you’d imagine, at over 600 pages, I’m not going to be able to give even a slight taste of the complexity and intricacy of the contents. The author starts out by observing that negation is found in every natural language, but despite its fundamental importance to human sense making, what negation is, that is, what we are actually trying to achieve when we utter a negative proposition or command or existential, is a topic riddled with complexity and logical puzzles.

Horn details the treatment of negation across the millennia, starting with Aristotle, and his square of opposition* and moving through the Stoics, St Thomas, Averroes, Spinoza, a detour via the Sanskrit grammarians and Buddhist philosophers, getting into the modern age with Frege, Russell and others.

One of the early issues is the different types of negation. ‘This number is not even’ can only mean that it is odd. ‘This hat is not green’ means that it is something other than green. These two types of negation, contradiction and contrariety, are not differentiated in the grammar, but are meat and drink to philosophers, as the author makes clear at great length. Then there are other logical puzzles. ‘The largest prime number is not even’ is both true and not true at the same time. (Largest prime number is a category error- there is no such number, but it is also at the same time true that every prime number above 2 is not even. The non-existent number must fall within the category of odd numbers.)

The mix of logic and pragmatics causes all kinds of disjuncts. ‘All of the students passed the test’, in logical terms entails that ‘some of the students passed’. But the utterance, ‘some of the students passed the test’, pragmatically means ‘not all’.
Following Gricean maxims of truthfulness, to say ‘some of the students passed’ is to entail ‘not all’.
There was an interesting excursion into the realm of affixal negation, explaining why we can have the pair happy/unhappy but not the pair sad/unsad. (Inherently negative adjectives resist prefixal negation in English.) And so on, via double and triple negation, through understatement and litotes, the Jespersen cycle and others. All in all, a very challenging read - I wouldn’t be able to deny an accusation that I had not understood everything, but I did understand something, which is not nothing, at least.

(Despite the heavy subject matter, Horn has frequent recourse to humorous explications and at time wry phrasing, which lightened the load a little.)



Here is an intro to Aristotle's square of opposition which is seen as the foundation of the logic of negation.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/square/

[UncertainSloth]

that sounds really good, i'll have to look it up...certainly sounds better than half the shortlist

I've an idea that you might enjoy An Island too.

ace! just had a look and i think you're right - yet again the books that most suit me fall at the shortlisting stage...i get much more joy out of the longlist and the international booker than the main one

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Lying Next To Me - Gregg Olsen
2. I Can't Make This Up - Kevin Hart
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison
4. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
5. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
6. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski
7. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
8. A Simple Favor - Darcey Bell
9. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
10. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
12. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
13. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
14. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
15. The Wave - Todd Strasser
16. Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
17. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville
19. Unspeakable Things - Jess Lourey
20. The Memoir of Thomas Jefferson - Thomas Jefferson
21. There is Confusion - Jessie Redmon Fauset
22. Mob Rule in New Orleans - Ida B. Wells-Barnett
23. The House Behind the Cedars - Charles W. Chesnutt
24. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
25. Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing - Allison Winn Scotch
26. The Conjure Woman - Charles W. Chesnutt
27. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
28. The Fire in the Flint - Walter Francis White
29. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
30. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
31. Heidi - Johanna Spyri
32. We Have Always Lived In the Castle - Shirley Jackson
33. The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne
34. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow
35. Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
36. Capital Gaines - The Smart Things I've Learned Doing Stupid Stuff - Chip Gaines
37. The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
38. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

[don't get me started]

1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
11. Impossible Languages- Andrea Moro
12. Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language – Jukie tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter
13. HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
14. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense – Jonathan Culpeper
15. Ethosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture – N. J. Enfield (Ed.)
16. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice – Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright.
17. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past – A. Roger Ekirch
18. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation – Michael Agar
19. Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - John R. Taylor
20. I saw the Dog: How Language Works – Alexandra Aikhenvald.
21. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939 – 1945 – Nicholas Stargardt
22. Civilizations – Laurent Binet
23. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology - R. M. W. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.)
24. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time – Johanna Nichols
25. How to behave badly in Elizabethan England - Ruth Goodman
26. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness and Genius – Arika Okrent
27. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
28. One Man and his Bike – Mike Carter
29. The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps – Edwards Brooke Hitching
30. Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
31. L2 interactional competence and development - J.K. Hall, J. Hellermann & S.P. Doehler, (Eds.)
32. A Natural History of negation – Laurence R. Horn

33. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach

304. pp

After the heavy-duty effort of book number 32, I reckoned it was time for something a bit lighter – if you can call a book about dead bodies light. Fortunately, Mary Roach brings a deft touch to the subject matter, humorous and wry without being disrespectful or flippant.

Roach covers a series of issues connected to dead bodies- from the dissecting rooms of anatomy classes to air crash investigators, from cadaver tests for the automobile industry to efforts to make disposal of bodies more ecological. There is enough detail here to satisfy even the most dedicated fan of grisliness and some quite profound insights into how we deal with death and dead bodies – not just the grieving ‘left behind’ but also the medical students, pathologists, morticians, transplant surgeons and others who have to deal with the physical reality of death on a regular basis. As Roach mentions on page 21, “dissection, and surgical instruction, like meat eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.”

I’ve seen a few dead bodies over the years, from drifted off in their sleep elderly relatives, to accident victims in various states of disarticulation. (I also saw the ‘Bodyworlds’ exhibition and sat in on an autopsy (via video link.) at a medical school - fascinating stuff.) I also took part in Japanese cremation where the relatives gather with really long chopsticks to pick out the larger bone fragments and put them in the urn – that was a fairly strange experience.

My own preference is to donate my body to science (also to be an organ donor), but don’t get her started doesn’t fancy the idea. In the final part of the book Roach discusses some of the issues surrounding cadaver donation and concludes that the wishes of the left behind can take precedence over the wishes of the departed. After all, the dead are dead and don’t know anything anymore. Anatomy students can have at it with my bag of bones when I’m done, but if this is too much to bear for dghs, then she can do with me what she will. (Mind you, Sky Burial appeals to me too…)

[UncertainSloth]

1. james brogden - the narrows - 8/10
2. nora roberts - of blood and bone - 8/10
3. nora roberts - the rise of magicks - 8/10
4. karen thompsn walker - the dreamers - 7/10
5. sophie draper - cuckoo - 7/10
6. laura carlin - the wicked cometh - 7/10
7. vikram palakar - the night theatre - 7/10
8. m r carey - the trials of koli - 9/10
9. bridget collins - the binding - 9/10
10. jac jemc - the grip of it - 7/10
11. carolyn jess-cooke - the boy who could see demons - 9/10
12. daisy johnson - everything under - 7/10
13. paraic o'donnell - house on vesper sands - 7/10
14. claire north - the gameshouse - 8/10 -
15. martin edwards - the coffin trail - 6/10
16. laird hunt - neverhome - 8/10
17. jesmyn ward - sing, unburied, sing - 8/10
18. edward parnell - ghostland: in search of a haunted country - 10/10
19. james brogden - the plague stones - 8/10
20. jonathan coe - the dwarves of death - 7/10
21. catherine burns - the visitors - 8/10
22. jonathan coe - the accidental woman - 6/10
23. gemma files - we will all go down together - 10/10
24. christopher ransom - the people next door - 6/10
25. andrew pyper - the killing circle - 9/10
26. alma katsu - the hunger - 9/10
27. jess kidd - himself - 9/10 - read one of hers last year and she's one i'd return to, good combination of the intracacies of irish village life and the supernatural - reminiscent of ghost wall by sarah moss

[don't get me started]

1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
11. Impossible Languages- Andrea Moro
12. Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language – Jukie tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter
13. HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
14. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense – Jonathan Culpeper
15. Ethosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture – N. J. Enfield (Ed.)
16. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice – Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright.
17. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past – A. Roger Ekirch
18. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation – Michael Agar
19. Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - John R. Taylor
20. I saw the Dog: How Language Works – Alexandra Aikhenvald.
21. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939 – 1945 – Nicholas Stargardt
22. Civilizations – Laurent Binet
23. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology - R. M. W. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.)
24. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time – Johanna Nichols
25. How to behave badly in Elizabethan England - Ruth Goodman
26. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness and Genius – Arika Okrent
27. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
28. One Man and his Bike – Mike Carter
29. The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps – Edwards Brooke Hitching
30. Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
31. L2 interactional competence and development - J.K. Hall, J. Hellermann & S.P. Doehler, (Eds.)
32. A Natural History of negation – Laurence R. Horn
33. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach

34. Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't RhymeAnd Other Oddities of the English Language – Arika Okrent

264 pp.

By the same author as number 26 on the list above, this is a fairly light-hearted overview of some of the strange things about English that often cause headaches for the second language learner. The book is designed for non-specialists and is highly accessible. Even though I was aware of many of the points made and the histories behind some of the oddities of English, there were a few new insights and some fresh takes on old controversies. The main focus was on the vagaries of English spelling and Okrent looks into sum ov thu reesuns that we dohnt rite lyk thiss. Having a mongrel language with a borrowed writing system and a thousand years of admixture, borrowing, snobbery and prescriptivism, combined with the tendency of all languages to be in parts innovative and in parts conservative- well you are definitely going to end up with something of a dog’s dinner (although there is a lot more systematicity than is sometimes granted).

[Evolving]

Obviously a very bad book. How could it miss bough, cough and lough?

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Lying Next To Me - Gregg Olsen
2. I Can't Make This Up - Kevin Hart
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison
4. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
5. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
6. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski
7. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
8. A Simple Favor - Darcey Bell
9. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
10. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
12. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
13. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
14. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
15. The Wave - Todd Strasser
16. Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
17. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville
19. Unspeakable Things - Jess Lourey
20. The Memoir of Thomas Jefferson - Thomas Jefferson
21. There is Confusion - Jessie Redmon Fauset
22. Mob Rule in New Orleans - Ida B. Wells-Barnett
23. The House Behind the Cedars - Charles W. Chesnutt
24. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
25. Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing - Allison Winn Scotch
26. The Conjure Woman - Charles W. Chesnutt
27. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
28. The Fire in the Flint - Walter Francis White
29. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
30. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
31. Heidi - Johanna Spyri
32. We Have Always Lived In the Castle - Shirley Jackson
33. The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne
34. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow
35. Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
36. Capital Gaines - The Smart Things I've Learned Doing Stupid Stuff - Chip Gaines
37. The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
38. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
39. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
40. The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy

[UncertainSloth]

1. james brogden - the narrows - 8/10
2. nora roberts - of blood and bone - 8/10
3. nora roberts - the rise of magicks - 8/10
4. karen thompsn walker - the dreamers - 7/10
5. sophie draper - cuckoo - 7/10
6. laura carlin - the wicked cometh - 7/10
7. vikram palakar - the night theatre - 7/10
8. m r carey - the trials of koli - 9/10
9. bridget collins - the binding - 9/10
10. jac jemc - the grip of it - 7/10
11. carolyn jess-cooke - the boy who could see demons - 9/10
12. daisy johnson - everything under - 7/10
13. paraic o'donnell - house on vesper sands - 7/10
14. claire north - the gameshouse - 8/10 -
15. martin edwards - the coffin trail - 6/10
16. laird hunt - neverhome - 8/10
17. jesmyn ward - sing, unburied, sing - 8/10
18. edward parnell - ghostland: in search of a haunted country - 10/10
19. james brogden - the plague stones - 8/10
20. jonathan coe - the dwarves of death - 7/10
21. catherine burns - the visitors - 8/10
22. jonathan coe - the accidental woman - 6/10
23. gemma files - we will all go down together - 10/10
24. christopher ransom - the people next door - 6/10
25. andrew pyper - the killing circle - 9/10
26. alma katsu - the hunger - 9/10
27. jess kidd - himself - 9/10
28. andrew pyper - the only child - 8/10 - good, solid horror-thriller

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Lying Next To Me - Gregg Olsen
2. I Can't Make This Up - Kevin Hart
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison
4. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
5. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
6. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski
7. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
8. A Simple Favor - Darcey Bell
9. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
10. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
12. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
13. Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
14. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
15. The Wave - Todd Strasser
16. Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
17. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville
19. Unspeakable Things - Jess Lourey
20. The Memoir of Thomas Jefferson - Thomas Jefferson
21. There is Confusion - Jessie Redmon Fauset
22. Mob Rule in New Orleans - Ida B. Wells-Barnett
23. The House Behind the Cedars - Charles W. Chesnutt
24. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
25. Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing - Allison Winn Scotch
26. The Conjure Woman - Charles W. Chesnutt
27. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
28. The Fire in the Flint - Walter Francis White
29. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
30. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
31. Heidi - Johanna Spyri
32. We Have Always Lived In the Castle - Shirley Jackson
33. The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne
34. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow
35. Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
36. Capital Gaines - The Smart Things I've Learned Doing Stupid Stuff - Chip Gaines
37. The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
38. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
39. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
40. The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Emmuska Orczy
41. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin - Erik Larson

[don't get me started]

1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
8. Language Soup: A Taste of How Diverse People Around the World Communicate - Kathryn A. T. Knox
9. A Place for everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical order – Judith Flanders
10. Contrastive Analysis - Carl James
11. Impossible Languages- Andrea Moro
12. Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language – Jukie tetel Andresen and Phillip M. Carter
13. HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
14. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense – Jonathan Culpeper
15. Ethosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture – N. J. Enfield (Ed.)
16. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice – Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright.
17. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past – A. Roger Ekirch
18. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation – Michael Agar
19. Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - John R. Taylor
20. I saw the Dog: How Language Works – Alexandra Aikhenvald.
21. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939 – 1945 – Nicholas Stargardt
22. Civilizations – Laurent Binet
23. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology - R. M. W. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.)
24. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time – Johanna Nichols
25. How to behave badly in Elizabethan England - Ruth Goodman
26. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness and Genius – Arika Okrent
27. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
28. One Man and his Bike – Mike Carter
29. The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps – Edwards Brooke Hitching
30. Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
31. L2 interactional competence and development - J.K. Hall, J. Hellermann & S.P. Doehler, (Eds.)
32. A Natural History of negation – Laurence R. Horn
33. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach
34. Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't RhymeAnd Other Oddities of the English Language – Arika Okrent




35. What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be - John McWhorter

228 pp.

I’ve long been a fan of John McWhorter and have found much of interest in the other books of his that I have read. In this book he outlines some of the facts about language that most people get wrong. In McWhorter’s view, language is not some sleek thing that looks like it was designed by Apple, all smooth edges and easy functionality. Nah, languages are ramshackle contraptions far removed from the elegant tree diagrams of formalism.

Each chapter reveals a different aspect of his underlying thesis. Languages are ingrown discusses how, if left alone long enough, languages take on a bizarre complexity and attend to all kind of nuances that are not strictly necessary for communication. The elaborate gender systems of the Indo-European languages (English being an outlier here) are just so much embuggeration for speakers of languages in East Asia and elsewhere. Similarly, the article system (The/a) of some of these languages (English, German, French etc., but not Russian or Hindi) looks peculiarly redundant from the perspective of Chinese or Japanese.
Next, language is disheveled- if you are looking for logic and overall systematicity, then linguistics is probably not the discipline for you. All kinds of junk litter every language, contributing little and frustrating the adult language learner.

And the main one for me- language is oral. Even though it may seem like a commonsense thing to say, literacy is a fairly recent add on to the human language faculty. Most languages that have ever existed have had no writing system. The desire of various nitpickers, pedants and outraged letter writers to base standards of ‘correctness’ on the written form of the language is just wrongheaded. Yesterday’s cringeworthy neologism is today’s standard, is tomorrow’s venerable basis of the language, is next year's archaic obscurity.

Altogether a very satisfying book with McWhorter’s trademark style combining erudition, accessibility, humor and insight.

[don't get me started]

Obviously a very bad book. How could it miss bough, cough and lough?

Eye no, write?

[Blip]

1. The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh
2. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Thrush Green by Miss Read
4. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Winter in Thrush Green by Miss Read
The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín
6. The Binding by Bridget Collins
7. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu translated by Ken Liu
8. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu translated by Joel Martinsen
9. Death's End by Cixin Liu translated by Ken Liu
10. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
11. The Ebony Tower by John Fowles
12. The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Henri Alain-Fournier translated by Robin Buss
13. Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan
14. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
15. From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
16. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
17. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
18. Front Page News by Sadie Gordon Richmond
19. The Split by Sharon Bolton
20. Outline by Rachel Cusk
21. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
22. The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
23. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
24. The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
25. The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey
26. Battles at Thrush Green by Miss Read
27. China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
28. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
29. Still Life by Sarah Winman
30. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
31. Elmet by Fiona Mozley
32. Bosworth: the birth of the Tudors by Chris Skidmore
33. The Guest List by Lucy Foley
34. A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
35. Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak
36. Second Place by Rachel Cusk
37. An Island by Karen Jennings
38. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
39. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

This one is on the Booker shortlist. I enjoyed it: well-written, well-constructed and with memorable characters. But you may note that it has taken me over a month to read it: I think it could have benefited by being shorter. I am studying again, though, so have non-fiction on the go as well.

[UncertainSloth]

that's one i really want to read from the shortlist...