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
36. Inner Speech: new Voices Peter Langland-Hassan & Agustín Vicente (Eds.)
37. The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
38. Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction – Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Margaret Selting
39. The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation – Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, Jakob Steensig (Eds.)
40. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind - Gary Marcus
224. pp
An interesting, snappy read. The title word (pronounced /klooj/) is a term denoting a quick, inelegant solution to a design problem, and this is applied to the construction of the human mind. In the same way that some of our physical aspects are often sub-optimal, (aching spines, choking hazards, back to front retina installation) Marcus argues that our minds are similarly cobbled together contraptions that do the jobs they have to do- kind of- but are certainly not the way you would choose to design it if you were staring from scratch. And that is the crux of the matter: the one thing evolution can't do is go back to the drawing board and start with a clean sheet. No- evolution has to build on what is already there and make the best of the resources at had.
(Sorry for using the shorthand of ascribing agency to evolution. Of course no such agency exists. Our minds are kluging the issue when we ascribe agency in such a way. It is one of the design flaws that Marcus highlights.)
Some good stuff from psychology here, dealing with memory, confirmation bias, pleasure seeking, short-termism and all of the other goofy stuff that besets us. I found the chapter on language a little superficial and I think the author's focus on 'Linguistics' with a capital 'L' caused him to miss a chance to describe our klugey way of conducting spoken interactions, with all of the machinery we deploy to get around misunderstandings, mishearings, turn taking perturbations, overlaps, interruptions and whatnot which are the hallmarks of spoken interaction. (Any attempt to accurately transcribe spoken language quickly reveals what a kluge the whole system is.)
A nice short read...my bag was a bit lighter on my commute than it has been for some time!
I decided to read the original Snow Country, which has the added attraction of being only 100 or so pages long...
