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Michael Adams Slayer Slang
So, I started reading this ages ago. Because, you know, I'm a Buffy geek and a language geek. It's a very academic look at the influence of BtVS on the English language, and how the show writers were deliberately creating slang, which became far more widespread than might have been imagined, given the show's comparatively small audience. There's some interesting stuff here, but after reading The Power of Babel, and seeing how something can be well-researched, informative, *and* deeply engaging, I think the author was trying too hard to prove that this wasn't just another pop culture book. Too bad.
Susanna Gregory A Deadly Brew
The more I of these medieval Cambridge University mysteries I read, the more I enjoy them. The author has definitely got the hang of framing the story with historical details, while still focusing on the people involved.
Zoe Heller What Was She Thinking
The plot of this book centres around an art teacher in Britain who has an affair with one of her 15-year-old students, but what makes it so interesting is that it's written from the point of view of another teacher at that same school, who has a strangely obsessive friendship with the art teacher. Great book.
Andrew Kaufman All My Friends Are Superheroes
This tiny little book, barely the length of a short story, introduces us to Tom, whose superhero wife, The Perfectionist, was hypnotized at their wedding and can no longer see him. A very fun and quirky book, full of introductions to all Tom's superhero friends, such as The Businessman, who can determine people's financial worth just by looking at them.
John McWhorter The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
I have a total crush on this book.
It's about how languages change and mutate, forming new languages. It's about how all languages are really dialects, except that some gain official status because of politics. It's about (and this was hard to take for a grammar freak like myself) how what seems like bad grammar is really just the natural shift and change in language, and that formalized language is relatively recent and highly arbitrary in many cases. And occasionally, it's about mocking Andrew Lloyd Webber and Frank Wildhorn, which I always love. I'm totally not doing this book justice, but honestly, it's fabulous, and everyone with an interest in languages or grammar should read it. Go!
Nancy Pearl Book Lust
I was hoping that I would finish reading this with a list of new books to read, and I did, but it was a little frustrating. Pearl has created some entertaining and random categories, from the broad (Canadian Literature) to the narrow (Bird Brains), but sometimes there wasn't really any information about the books she was suggesting. So if you already knew you were interested in a certain topic you could get ideas of other authors/books to read, but if you'd never tried anything in one of her categories there was nothing to grab the attention. Still, I liked her breezy and partisan writing style, and her enthusiasm for books and reading really came through.
Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I know this book is a classic, and one of those books that people say changed their lives, but it really didn't have that kind of impact on me. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, and it even made me cry a couple of times (much harder now than it used to be a few years ago, when I cried during every book I read). I loved the story of Francie, growing up in Brooklyn in the early 20th century. I just sometimes found the writing style jarring. Sometimes it was simplistic, as befits a story told from the point of view of a young child, and then sometimes the author would start writing historical/sociological passages that didn't fit in (although they were very interesting).
Richard B Wright Clara Callan
Why was I so unenthusiastic about reading this book? It's fantastic - a story, told in letters and diary entries, of two 30-something sisters during the 1930's, one of whom goes off to New York to become a radio star, and one of whom stays in her small Ontario town, and finds her life changing just when she expected it to stand still. Wonderful.
So, I started reading this ages ago. Because, you know, I'm a Buffy geek and a language geek. It's a very academic look at the influence of BtVS on the English language, and how the show writers were deliberately creating slang, which became far more widespread than might have been imagined, given the show's comparatively small audience. There's some interesting stuff here, but after reading The Power of Babel, and seeing how something can be well-researched, informative, *and* deeply engaging, I think the author was trying too hard to prove that this wasn't just another pop culture book. Too bad.
Susanna Gregory A Deadly Brew
The more I of these medieval Cambridge University mysteries I read, the more I enjoy them. The author has definitely got the hang of framing the story with historical details, while still focusing on the people involved.
Zoe Heller What Was She Thinking
The plot of this book centres around an art teacher in Britain who has an affair with one of her 15-year-old students, but what makes it so interesting is that it's written from the point of view of another teacher at that same school, who has a strangely obsessive friendship with the art teacher. Great book.
Andrew Kaufman All My Friends Are Superheroes
This tiny little book, barely the length of a short story, introduces us to Tom, whose superhero wife, The Perfectionist, was hypnotized at their wedding and can no longer see him. A very fun and quirky book, full of introductions to all Tom's superhero friends, such as The Businessman, who can determine people's financial worth just by looking at them.
John McWhorter The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
I have a total crush on this book.
It's about how languages change and mutate, forming new languages. It's about how all languages are really dialects, except that some gain official status because of politics. It's about (and this was hard to take for a grammar freak like myself) how what seems like bad grammar is really just the natural shift and change in language, and that formalized language is relatively recent and highly arbitrary in many cases. And occasionally, it's about mocking Andrew Lloyd Webber and Frank Wildhorn, which I always love. I'm totally not doing this book justice, but honestly, it's fabulous, and everyone with an interest in languages or grammar should read it. Go!
Nancy Pearl Book Lust
I was hoping that I would finish reading this with a list of new books to read, and I did, but it was a little frustrating. Pearl has created some entertaining and random categories, from the broad (Canadian Literature) to the narrow (Bird Brains), but sometimes there wasn't really any information about the books she was suggesting. So if you already knew you were interested in a certain topic you could get ideas of other authors/books to read, but if you'd never tried anything in one of her categories there was nothing to grab the attention. Still, I liked her breezy and partisan writing style, and her enthusiasm for books and reading really came through.
Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I know this book is a classic, and one of those books that people say changed their lives, but it really didn't have that kind of impact on me. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, and it even made me cry a couple of times (much harder now than it used to be a few years ago, when I cried during every book I read). I loved the story of Francie, growing up in Brooklyn in the early 20th century. I just sometimes found the writing style jarring. Sometimes it was simplistic, as befits a story told from the point of view of a young child, and then sometimes the author would start writing historical/sociological passages that didn't fit in (although they were very interesting).
Richard B Wright Clara Callan
Why was I so unenthusiastic about reading this book? It's fantastic - a story, told in letters and diary entries, of two 30-something sisters during the 1930's, one of whom goes off to New York to become a radio star, and one of whom stays in her small Ontario town, and finds her life changing just when she expected it to stand still. Wonderful.