The Book Thread 2022

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Hope of Heaven - John O'Hara
2. Pal Joey - John O'Hara
3. Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov
4. Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever - Bill O'Reilly
5. Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
8. The Innocence of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
9. The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle
10 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
11. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
12. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
13. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
15. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (a re-read, this time listened)
16. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Vernes (I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed this!)
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (another re-read, this time listened)
18. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (another one I previously read and have now listened)
19. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
20. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
21. The Forward Collection: The Last Conversation (Paul Tremblay); Emergency Skin (N.K. Jemisin); Summer Frost (Blake Crouch); Ark (Veronica Roth); Randomize (Andy Weir); You Have Arrived at Your Destination (Amor Towles)
22. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
23. Sarah - J.T. LeRoy
24. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
25. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
26. The Arabian Nights - Andrew Lang
27. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
28. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
29. The Europeans - Henry James
30. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
31. Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories - Shirley Jackson
32. Hush Collection: Snowflakes (Ruth Ware); Treasure (Oyinkan Braithwaite); Slow Burner (Laura Lippman); Buried (Jeffrey Deaver); The Gift (Alison Gaylin); Let Her Be (Lisa Unger)
33. Rachel Ray - Anthony Trollope
34. Battlefield Earth - L. Ron Hubbard
35. Summer - Edith Wharton
36. Disorder Collection: The Best Girls (Min Jin Lee); Loam (Scott Heim); Ungirls (Lauren Beukes); Anonymous (Uzodinma Iweala); The Beckoning Fair One (Dan Chaon); Will Williams (Namwali Serpell)
37. All the Lies They Did Not Tell: The True Story of Satanic Panic in an Italian Community - Pablo Trincia
38. Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
39. A Rogue's Life - Wilkie Collins
40. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
41. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
42. A Head Full of Ghosts - Paul Tremblay
43 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
44. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
45. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
46. The Secret of Chimneys - Agatha Christie
47. A Cold Dark Place - Gregg Olsen

[don't get me started]

1. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An introduction - Thora Tenbrink
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender And Identity- And Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
3. A History of the World in 12 Maps – Jerry Brotton
4. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language – Patricia T. O’Connor & Stewart Kellerman
5. Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning - Jenefer Philip, Rebecca Adams & Noriko Iwashita
6. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
7. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World - Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzche
8. English Words: A Linguistic Introduction - Heidi Harley
9. Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives Jan P. de Ruiter (Ed.)
10. Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
11. English Prepositions: Their meanings and uses - R.M.W. Dixon
12. Draußen vor der Tür - Wolfgang Borchert
13. Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication - Jeannette Liitlemore
14. Tiamat's Wrath - James S.A. Corey
15. Leviathan Falls - James S.A. Corey
16. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World - David W. Anthony
17. The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works - Thomas Nashe
18. A Qualitative Approach to the Validation of Oral Language Tests (Studies in Language Testing, Series Number 14) - Anne Lazarton
19. Are Some Languages Better than Others? - R.M.W. Dixon.
20. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollet
21. Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage - Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Ed.)
22.Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die - Steven Nadler
23. Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain - Tim Moore
24. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction - David Lee
25. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson
26. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West - Konstantin Kisin
27. Explorations of Language Transfer - Terrence Odlin
28: A war on Two Fronts: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line- Tibe Patrick Jordan
29. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins (Eds.) (Partial re-read)
30. Rethinking linguistic relativity - John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (Eds.) Partial re-read.
31. A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage
32. Cross-linguistic Study of the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Cross-linguistic Research to Examine the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Evidence from English, Mandarin and Russian - Ronan Grace
33. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology - Viveka Vellupillai
34. Mysteries of English Grammar: A guide to the complexities of the English Language - Andreea S. Calude & Laurie Bauer
35. Against a Dark Background - Iain M. Banks (Reread)
36. The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
37. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition - Peter Robinson & Nick C. Ellis
38. Where have all the adjectives gone? - R.M.W Dixon
39. Copulas: Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon - Regina Pustet
40. Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain - Pen Vogler
41. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson
42. Conceptualizations of time - Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Ed.)
42. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich - Harald Jähner

43. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice - Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright

190 pp.

This is a book that aligns very closely with my professional interests. The authors are at pains to stress that although fluency is a fairly straightforward word and not really considered technical or specialist by most speakers, the actual definition of the word is quite slippery and resists clear and unambiguous description. Of course, speaking speed is a factor, as is good control over the lexical and grammatical resources of the language, but fluency is so much more that this.

The authors make some good observations and (such as speed measurements being largely uninformative at the top end of the spectrum. Speaking speed maxes out at about CEFR B2 and there is little to differentiate C1 and C2 speakers in terms of speaking speed. Also fluency can be highly influenced by context. My social talk in Japanese can be said to approach fluency, but institutional talk, or other formal situations see me bumble and stumble along... ) I do a lot of work on fluency in my classes and I was not in full agreement with some of the points made - especially when it comes to things like task-based learning and assessment design. But overall a fairly good treatment of this important (and often neglected) aspect of language acquisition.

[UncertainSloth]

1. the long take - robin robertson - 8/10
2. the gatekeeper - russ kane - 5/10
3. dr potter's medicine show - eric scott fischl - 8/10
4. just one damn thing after another - jodi taylor - 8/10 -
5. trinity - louisa hall - 8/10
6. the night ocean - paul la farge - 9/10
7. washington black - esi edugyan - 8/10
8. the monsters of templeton - lauren groff - 8/10
9. hystopia - david means - 6/10
10. the bones of avalon ( dr dee #1) - phil rickman - 9/10
11. in a cottage in the woods - cass green - 7/10
12. the devil's larder - jim crace - 7/10 -
13. where the crawdads sing - delia owen - 9/10
14. the book of m - peng shepherd - 8/10
15 - woman in the window - aj finn - 6/10
16 - cunning folk - adam nevill - 10/10
17. the english monster - lloyd shepherd - 7/10
18. winterset hollow - jonathan durham - 8/10
19.the vessel - adam nevill - 9/10
20. the watchers - a m shine - 8/10
21. keeper of enchanted rooms - charlie holmburgh
22. the creeper - a m shine - 9/10
23. echoes of home - m l rayner - 6/10
24. house at phantom park - graham masterton - 7/10
25. don't leave - pru heathcote - 7/10 - perfectly adequate lttle chiller of a book with a fairly predictable twist, nothing more...

[don't get me started]

1. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An introduction - Thora Tenbrink
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender And Identity- And Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
3. A History of the World in 12 Maps – Jerry Brotton
4. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language – Patricia T. O’Connor & Stewart Kellerman
5. Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning - Jenefer Philip, Rebecca Adams & Noriko Iwashita
6. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
7. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World - Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzche
8. English Words: A Linguistic Introduction - Heidi Harley
9. Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives Jan P. de Ruiter (Ed.)
10. Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
11. English Prepositions: Their meanings and uses - R.M.W. Dixon
12. Draußen vor der Tür - Wolfgang Borchert
13. Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication - Jeannette Liitlemore
14. Tiamat's Wrath - James S.A. Corey
15. Leviathan Falls - James S.A. Corey
16. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World - David W. Anthony
17. The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works - Thomas Nashe
18. A Qualitative Approach to the Validation of Oral Language Tests (Studies in Language Testing, Series Number 14) - Anne Lazarton
19. Are Some Languages Better than Others? - R.M.W. Dixon.
20. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollet
21. Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage - Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Ed.)
22.Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die - Steven Nadler
23. Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain - Tim Moore
24. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction - David Lee
25. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson
26. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West - Konstantin Kisin
27. Explorations of Language Transfer - Terrence Odlin
28: A war on Two Fronts: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line- Tibe Patrick Jordan
29. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins (Eds.) (Partial re-read)
30. Rethinking linguistic relativity - John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (Eds.) Partial re-read.
31. A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage
32. Cross-linguistic Study of the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Cross-linguistic Research to Examine the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Evidence from English, Mandarin and Russian - Ronan Grace
33. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology - Viveka Vellupillai
34. Mysteries of English Grammar: A guide to the complexities of the English Language - Andreea S. Calude & Laurie Bauer
35. Against a Dark Background - Iain M. Banks (Reread)
36. The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
37. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition - Peter Robinson & Nick C. Ellis
38. Where have all the adjectives gone? - R.M.W Dixon
39. Copulas: Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon - Regina Pustet
40. Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain - Pen Vogler
41. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson
42. Conceptualizations of time - Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Ed.)
42. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich - Harald Jähner
43. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice - Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright

44. Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction - Jim Schenkein (Ed).

275. pp

A collection of chapters that takes the methodology of Conversation Analysis to examine how participants in spoken interaction go about the business of co-creating meaning and joint understanding with each other. The first chapter is a reprint of one of the key texts in conversation analysis; "A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation." by the founders of the discipline Harvet Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Although first published in 1974 it is one of the most frequently quoted papers in pragmatics, socio-linguistcis and conversation analysis. Even though I have read it numerous times and quoted it ad nauseam, it is always a worthwhile read.

There was also an interesting chapter on compliment responses. For English speakers, there is a fine line to be trodden when in receipt of a compliment. On the one hand there is the general dis-preference for self-praise that operates in society. (Although this prohibition is flouted by narcissists like Trump). This means that people are generally unwilling to baldly agree with compliments. But there is also a pattern of speaking in which disagreement with assessment are also problematical. English speakers often employ a variety of strategies to avoid both self-praise and disagreement as a response to a compliment. Usually some kind of thanks followed by some kind of backgrounding and possibly a reciprocal compliment or a downgrading of the terms of the original complement.

(In Japan, the taboo against self-praise is very deeply ingrained and the preference for modesty in expression is very prominent. Compliments are quite often flat out refuted or at least ascribed to the beneficial influence and support of some other (usually superior) person or group, rather than anything stemming from the self.) This is the kind of stuff I regularly address in my pragmatics classes.)

Lots of interesting stuff here. Some familiar, some less so, but even as a seasoned CA researcher, it's always good to occasionally go back to basics and look with fresh eyes at foundational texts.

[Blip]

First 50 here.

51. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
52. The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
53. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
54. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
55. Lessons by Ian McEwan
56. Middlemarch by George Eliot
57. A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín
58. Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year by Laurie Lee
59. Scar Tissue by Clare Morgan
60. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

Reliably good reinterpretation of Homer from an(other) excellent storyteller, narrated by one of the female victims; sequel to The Silence of the Girls.

[UncertainSloth]

1. the long take - robin robertson - 8/10
2. the gatekeeper - russ kane - 5/10
3. dr potter's medicine show - eric scott fischl - 8/10
4. just one damn thing after another - jodi taylor - 8/10 -
5. trinity - louisa hall - 8/10
6. the night ocean - paul la farge - 9/10
7. washington black - esi edugyan - 8/10
8. the monsters of templeton - lauren groff - 8/10
9. hystopia - david means - 6/10
10. the bones of avalon ( dr dee #1) - phil rickman - 9/10
11. in a cottage in the woods - cass green - 7/10
12. the devil's larder - jim crace - 7/10 -
13. where the crawdads sing - delia owen - 9/10
14. the book of m - peng shepherd - 8/10
15 - woman in the window - aj finn - 6/10
16 - cunning folk - adam nevill - 10/10
17. the english monster - lloyd shepherd - 7/10
18. winterset hollow - jonathan durham - 8/10
19.the vessel - adam nevill - 9/10
20. the watchers - a m shine - 8/10
21. keeper of enchanted rooms - charlie holmburgh
22. the creeper - a m shine - 9/10
23. echoes of home - m l rayner - 6/10
24. house at phantom park - graham masterton - 7/10
25. don't leave - pru heathcote - 7/10
26. sing me to sleep - c r simms - 7/10 - another atmospheric little chiller...kindle unlimited is going to be the death of my bookshelf at this rate....XD

[don't get me started]

1. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An introduction - Thora Tenbrink
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender And Identity- And Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
3. A History of the World in 12 Maps – Jerry Brotton
4. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language – Patricia T. O’Connor & Stewart Kellerman
5. Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning - Jenefer Philip, Rebecca Adams & Noriko Iwashita
6. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
7. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World - Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzche
8. English Words: A Linguistic Introduction - Heidi Harley
9. Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives Jan P. de Ruiter (Ed.)
10. Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
11. English Prepositions: Their meanings and uses - R.M.W. Dixon
12. Draußen vor der Tür - Wolfgang Borchert
13. Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication - Jeannette Liitlemore
14. Tiamat's Wrath - James S.A. Corey
15. Leviathan Falls - James S.A. Corey
16. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World - David W. Anthony
17. The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works - Thomas Nashe
18. A Qualitative Approach to the Validation of Oral Language Tests (Studies in Language Testing, Series Number 14) - Anne Lazarton
19. Are Some Languages Better than Others? - R.M.W. Dixon.
20. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollet
21. Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage - Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Ed.)
22.Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die - Steven Nadler
23. Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain - Tim Moore
24. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction - David Lee
25. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson
26. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West - Konstantin Kisin
27. Explorations of Language Transfer - Terrence Odlin
28: A war on Two Fronts: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line- Tibe Patrick Jordan
29. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins (Eds.) (Partial re-read)
30. Rethinking linguistic relativity - John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (Eds.) Partial re-read.
31. A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage
32. Cross-linguistic Study of the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Cross-linguistic Research to Examine the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Evidence from English, Mandarin and Russian - Ronan Grace
33. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology - Viveka Vellupillai
34. Mysteries of English Grammar: A guide to the complexities of the English Language - Andreea S. Calude & Laurie Bauer
35. Against a Dark Background - Iain M. Banks (Reread)
36. The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
37. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition - Peter Robinson & Nick C. Ellis
38. Where have all the adjectives gone? - R.M.W Dixon
39. Copulas: Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon - Regina Pustet
40. Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain - Pen Vogler
41. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson
42. Conceptualizations of time - Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Ed.)
42. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich - Harald Jähner
43. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice - Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright
44. Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction - Jim Schenkein (Ed).

45. The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet - Amalia E. Gnanadesikan

310. pp

An excellent description of the evolution of writing. There is a deep scholarship on display here, but the author writes in an easy and accessible style. Gnanadesikan details the emergence of writing in several areas of the world in great detail. From the Cuneiform of the near east, to the emergence of Chinese ideograms to the intricacies of the Maya script - the independent arising of ways to record information in visual form took may different forms and involved all kinds of missteps and complex workarounds.

Now we know what writing can be used for and we understand writing has to balance comprehensiveness (cover all that can be expressed with language) with learnability (the number of Chinese ideograms that exist is far in excess of what the daily writer of Chinese or Japanese knows.) Such understanding was often missing in the earlier script systems and the author makes the important point that the earliest attempts at writing were never intended to make a full writing system. Rather writing was to be utilized in very narrow contexts.

Near east writing was mostly concerned with list making and inventories. Chinese was largely preoccupied with divination and the Maya were really really interested in calendars. The use of writing for such things as literature, private correspondence and the like was never part of the initial reason to invent a script.

In addition to describing the underlying principles of the various writing systems, there are also detailed accounts of the valiant efforts to decipher lost scripts like linear A&B, Cuneiform, Egyptian Heiroglyphs and the Mayan scripts. Some serious mental work went into these tasks by some fairly driven individuals.

Personal note: I've always been interested in writing systems. I taught myself Cyrillic when I was a teenager and even though my Russian is rudimentary at best, I can at least read out the words. (The war in Ukraine has improved my Cyrillic reading speed a good deal...)
I can read the two syllabaries of Japanese ひらがな　and カタカナ with relative ease but my Kanji (漢字) reading is spotty...I really have to focus. Is it 干(Hang) or 千 (thousand)? 土 (earth) or 士 (warrior)? Gotta really pay attention when I read Japanese. It's exhausting.

I have a basic ability to read some parts of Korean and Thai. I understand the principles and recognize a large chunk of the inventory but can't really read smoothly. I have a theoretical understanding of the principles of Arabic but can't read it at all. My favorite scripts are Khmer and Georgian, even though I can't read them in the slightest. This book was a nice aid to my understanding of writing and writing systems.

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Hope of Heaven - John O'Hara
2. Pal Joey - John O'Hara
3. Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov
4. Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever - Bill O'Reilly
5. Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
8. The Innocence of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
9. The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle
10 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
11. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
12. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
13. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
15. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (a re-read, this time listened)
16. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Vernes (I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed this!)
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (another re-read, this time listened)
18. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (another one I previously read and have now listened)
19. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
20. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
21. The Forward Collection: The Last Conversation (Paul Tremblay); Emergency Skin (N.K. Jemisin); Summer Frost (Blake Crouch); Ark (Veronica Roth); Randomize (Andy Weir); You Have Arrived at Your Destination (Amor Towles)
22. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
23. Sarah - J.T. LeRoy
24. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
25. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
26. The Arabian Nights - Andrew Lang
27. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
28. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
29. The Europeans - Henry James
30. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
31. Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories - Shirley Jackson
32. Hush Collection: Snowflakes (Ruth Ware); Treasure (Oyinkan Braithwaite); Slow Burner (Laura Lippman); Buried (Jeffrey Deaver); The Gift (Alison Gaylin); Let Her Be (Lisa Unger)
33. Rachel Ray - Anthony Trollope
34. Battlefield Earth - L. Ron Hubbard
35. Summer - Edith Wharton
36. Disorder Collection: The Best Girls (Min Jin Lee); Loam (Scott Heim); Ungirls (Lauren Beukes); Anonymous (Uzodinma Iweala); The Beckoning Fair One (Dan Chaon); Will Williams (Namwali Serpell)
37. All the Lies They Did Not Tell: The True Story of Satanic Panic in an Italian Community - Pablo Trincia
38. Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
39. A Rogue's Life - Wilkie Collins
40. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
41. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
42. A Head Full of Ghosts - Paul Tremblay
43 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
44. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
45. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
46. The Secret of Chimneys - Agatha Christie
47. A Cold Dark Place - Gregg Olsen
48. Daisy Miller - Henry James
49.Washington Square - Henry James

[Blip]

First 50 here.

51. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
52. The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
53. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
54. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
55. Lessons by Ian McEwan
56. Middlemarch by George Eliot
57. A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín
58. Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year by Laurie Lee
59. Scar Tissue by Clare Morgan
60. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
61. Becoming by Michelle Obama

I was expecting more insights into the author's husband, I suppose, in the circumstances.

[UncertainSloth]

1. the long take - robin robertson - 8/10
2. the gatekeeper - russ kane - 5/10
3. dr potter's medicine show - eric scott fischl - 8/10
4. just one damn thing after another - jodi taylor - 8/10 -
5. trinity - louisa hall - 8/10
6. the night ocean - paul la farge - 9/10
7. washington black - esi edugyan - 8/10
8. the monsters of templeton - lauren groff - 8/10
9. hystopia - david means - 6/10
10. the bones of avalon ( dr dee #1) - phil rickman - 9/10
11. in a cottage in the woods - cass green - 7/10
12. the devil's larder - jim crace - 7/10 -
13. where the crawdads sing - delia owen - 9/10
14. the book of m - peng shepherd - 8/10
15 - woman in the window - aj finn - 6/10
16 - cunning folk - adam nevill - 10/10
17. the english monster - lloyd shepherd - 7/10
18. winterset hollow - jonathan durham - 8/10
19.the vessel - adam nevill - 9/10
20. the watchers - a m shine - 8/10
21. keeper of enchanted rooms - charlie holmburgh
22. the creeper - a m shine - 9/10
23. echoes of home - m l rayner - 6/10
24. house at phantom park - graham masterton - 7/10
25. don't leave - pru heathcote - 7/10
26. sing me to sleep - c r simms - 7/10
27. the house on rectory lane- some bloke - 5/10- some good elements, but a whole lot of bad editing and clumsy writing

[don't get me started]

1. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An introduction - Thora Tenbrink
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender And Identity- And Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
3. A History of the World in 12 Maps – Jerry Brotton
4. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language – Patricia T. O’Connor & Stewart Kellerman
5. Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning - Jenefer Philip, Rebecca Adams & Noriko Iwashita
6. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
7. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World - Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzche
8. English Words: A Linguistic Introduction - Heidi Harley
9. Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives Jan P. de Ruiter (Ed.)
10. Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
11. English Prepositions: Their meanings and uses - R.M.W. Dixon
12. Draußen vor der Tür - Wolfgang Borchert
13. Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication - Jeannette Liitlemore
14. Tiamat's Wrath - James S.A. Corey
15. Leviathan Falls - James S.A. Corey
16. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World - David W. Anthony
17. The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works - Thomas Nashe
18. A Qualitative Approach to the Validation of Oral Language Tests (Studies in Language Testing, Series Number 14) - Anne Lazarton
19. Are Some Languages Better than Others? - R.M.W. Dixon.
20. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollet
21. Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage - Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Ed.)
22.Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die - Steven Nadler
23. Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain - Tim Moore
24. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction - David Lee
25. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson
26. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West - Konstantin Kisin
27. Explorations of Language Transfer - Terrence Odlin
28: A war on Two Fronts: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line- Tibe Patrick Jordan
29. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins (Eds.) (Partial re-read)
30. Rethinking linguistic relativity - John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (Eds.) Partial re-read.
31. A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage
32. Cross-linguistic Study of the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Cross-linguistic Research to Examine the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Evidence from English, Mandarin and Russian - Ronan Grace
33. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology - Viveka Vellupillai
34. Mysteries of English Grammar: A guide to the complexities of the English Language - Andreea S. Calude & Laurie Bauer
35. Against a Dark Background - Iain M. Banks (Reread)
36. The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
37. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition - Peter Robinson & Nick C. Ellis
38. Where have all the adjectives gone? - R.M.W Dixon
39. Copulas: Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon - Regina Pustet
40. Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain - Pen Vogler
41. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson
42. Conceptualizations of time - Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Ed.)
42. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich - Harald Jähner
43. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice - Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright
44. Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction - Jim Schenkein (Ed).
45. The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet - Amalia E. Gnanadesikan

46. Flashman on the March - George MacDonald Fraser (reread)

The last installment of the Flashman papers before the author passed away in 2008. This episode deals with our hero's reluctant participation in the British expedition to Abyssinia in 1868. All of the familiar elements are here as flash Harry - coward, liar, amorist and all around self-serving cad-is forced into a series of unlikely adventures. Great stuff, with Fraser's perfect ear for the speech patterns and attitudes of the Victorian upper classes. Deeply politcally incorrect (as a 19th century British aristocrat would be) the humor and overall tenor serves as a subtle critique of the folly and arrogance of empire.

[NamelessFaceless]

Audiobooks in Italics

1. Hope of Heaven - John O'Hara
2. Pal Joey - John O'Hara
3. Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov
4. Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever - Bill O'Reilly
5. Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
8. The Innocence of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
9. The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle
10 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
11. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
12. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
13. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
15. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (a re-read, this time listened)
16. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Vernes (I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed this!)
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (another re-read, this time listened)
18. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (another one I previously read and have now listened)
19. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
20. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
21. The Forward Collection: The Last Conversation (Paul Tremblay); Emergency Skin (N.K. Jemisin); Summer Frost (Blake Crouch); Ark (Veronica Roth); Randomize (Andy Weir); You Have Arrived at Your Destination (Amor Towles)
22. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
23. Sarah - J.T. LeRoy
24. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
25. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
26. The Arabian Nights - Andrew Lang
27. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
28. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
29. The Europeans - Henry James
30. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
31. Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories - Shirley Jackson
32. Hush Collection: Snowflakes (Ruth Ware); Treasure (Oyinkan Braithwaite); Slow Burner (Laura Lippman); Buried (Jeffrey Deaver); The Gift (Alison Gaylin); Let Her Be (Lisa Unger)
33. Rachel Ray - Anthony Trollope
34. Battlefield Earth - L. Ron Hubbard
35. Summer - Edith Wharton
36. Disorder Collection: The Best Girls (Min Jin Lee); Loam (Scott Heim); Ungirls (Lauren Beukes); Anonymous (Uzodinma Iweala); The Beckoning Fair One (Dan Chaon); Will Williams (Namwali Serpell)
37. All the Lies They Did Not Tell: The True Story of Satanic Panic in an Italian Community - Pablo Trincia
38. Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
39. A Rogue's Life - Wilkie Collins
40. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
41. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
42. A Head Full of Ghosts - Paul Tremblay
43 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
44. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
45. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
46. The Secret of Chimneys - Agatha Christie
47. A Cold Dark Place - Gregg Olsen
48. Daisy Miller - Henry James
49.Washington Square - Henry James
50. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

I did it!!!

[don't get me started]

Congratulations Nameless....

I'm getting close but it is gonna be a near thing...

[UncertainSloth]

1. the long take - robin robertson - 8/10
2. the gatekeeper - russ kane - 5/10
3. dr potter's medicine show - eric scott fischl - 8/10
4. just one damn thing after another - jodi taylor - 8/10 -
5. trinity - louisa hall - 8/10
6. the night ocean - paul la farge - 9/10
7. washington black - esi edugyan - 8/10
8. the monsters of templeton - lauren groff - 8/10
9. hystopia - david means - 6/10
10. the bones of avalon ( dr dee #1) - phil rickman - 9/10
11. in a cottage in the woods - cass green - 7/10
12. the devil's larder - jim crace - 7/10 -
13. where the crawdads sing - delia owen - 9/10
14. the book of m - peng shepherd - 8/10
15 - woman in the window - aj finn - 6/10
16 - cunning folk - adam nevill - 10/10
17. the english monster - lloyd shepherd - 7/10
18. winterset hollow - jonathan durham - 8/10
19.the vessel - adam nevill - 9/10
20. the watchers - a m shine - 8/10
21. keeper of enchanted rooms - charlie holmburgh
22. the creeper - a m shine - 9/10
23. echoes of home - m l rayner - 6/10
24. house at phantom park - graham masterton - 7/10
25. don't leave - pru heathcote - 7/10
26. sing me to sleep - c r simms - 7/10
27. the house on rectory lane- some bloke - 5/10
28. wildacre - shani struthers - 5/10 - so much potential in some of this but it then shits the bed comletely by throwing exposition at you to explain everything in one go...i don't mind flashbacks in books but i like them to work contextually rather than feel like a completely different book...shame

[Blip]

[...]
50. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

I did it!!!

Congratulations! Also, A Handful of Dust is an unsettling work of genius, IMHO.

[Blip]

First 50 here.

51. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
52. The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
53. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
54. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
55. Lessons by Ian McEwan
56. Middlemarch by George Eliot
57. A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín
58. Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year by Laurie Lee
59. Scar Tissue by Clare Morgan
60. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
61. Becoming by Michelle Obama
62. Cunning Folk by Adam L.G. Nevill

There I was thinking 'Oi, Sloth, no!' (I suspect only Brits above a certain age will get that reference) and then this got all interesting. Loved the spooky ending. Cheers, US

[UncertainSloth]

awesome! glad you liked it...he;s trodden a slightly different path in his last few books which set him apart from the crowd...if you liked that, the reddening & the vessel are in the same mould...

[don't get me started]

1. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An introduction - Thora Tenbrink
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender And Identity- And Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
3. A History of the World in 12 Maps – Jerry Brotton
4. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language – Patricia T. O’Connor & Stewart Kellerman
5. Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning - Jenefer Philip, Rebecca Adams & Noriko Iwashita
6. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
7. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World - Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzche
8. English Words: A Linguistic Introduction - Heidi Harley
9. Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives Jan P. de Ruiter (Ed.)
10. Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
11. English Prepositions: Their meanings and uses - R.M.W. Dixon
12. Draußen vor der Tür - Wolfgang Borchert
13. Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication - Jeannette Liitlemore
14. Tiamat's Wrath - James S.A. Corey
15. Leviathan Falls - James S.A. Corey
16. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World - David W. Anthony
17. The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works - Thomas Nashe
18. A Qualitative Approach to the Validation of Oral Language Tests (Studies in Language Testing, Series Number 14) - Anne Lazarton
19. Are Some Languages Better than Others? - R.M.W. Dixon.
20. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollet
21. Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage - Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Ed.)
22.Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die - Steven Nadler
23. Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain - Tim Moore
24. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction - David Lee
25. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson
26. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West - Konstantin Kisin
27. Explorations of Language Transfer - Terrence Odlin
28: A war on Two Fronts: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line- Tibe Patrick Jordan
29. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity - Stephen C. Levinson and David Wilkins (Eds.) (Partial re-read)
30. Rethinking linguistic relativity - John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (Eds.) Partial re-read.
31. A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage
32. Cross-linguistic Study of the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Cross-linguistic Research to Examine the Principle of Linguistic Relativity: Evidence from English, Mandarin and Russian - Ronan Grace
33. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology - Viveka Vellupillai
34. Mysteries of English Grammar: A guide to the complexities of the English Language - Andreea S. Calude & Laurie Bauer
35. Against a Dark Background - Iain M. Banks (Reread)
36. The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
37. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition - Peter Robinson & Nick C. Ellis
38. Where have all the adjectives gone? - R.M.W Dixon
39. Copulas: Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon - Regina Pustet
40. Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain - Pen Vogler
41. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson
42. Conceptualizations of time - Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Ed.)
42. Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich - Harald Jähner
43. Second Language Speech Fluency: From Research to Practice - Parvaneh Tavakoli & Clare Wright
44. Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction - Jim Schenkein (Ed).
45. The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet - Amalia E. Gnanadesikan
46. Flashman on the March - George MacDonald Fraser (reread)

47. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology Alexandra Y Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon (Eds.)

1000. pp

Well this is a huge doorstep of a book that I have been picking away at since last year. A chapter here and a chapter there. I can't claim to have read every chapter, but then again I have read and reread several chapters. The chapter on negation was a treasure trove of information on how different languages deal with negators. Similarly, the chapter on noun categorization devices was informative. The chapters on the Iroquoian, Athabascan and Aleut language families were a challenge, to be honest.

[UncertainSloth]

congrats to nameless, btw

was worried i wouldn't make 20 a while back but looks like 30 may be a possibility now...

[Arjan Dirkse]

I'm not a big reader anymore, but I did manage to read some stuff in 2022. Best was a Dutch translation of the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert. Amazing stuff. I can't do a review, but it's great fun to read him ranting about the politics and social life of his time.

Other books I read or reread are the Bhagavad Gita, Basho's Narrow Road to the Far North, Confucius's Analects, Zhuangzi, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness.