Reading 📚

I could have used another rainy day.

As is my usual practice, I spent just about every moment of beach vacation I could in the water. I brought along plenty of books for a rainy day, and it kept threatening to rain…but it never quite did until our ride back home!

Still, I got far enough into the books to discuss them here.

Making the Alphabet Dance is a collection of quirky language plays from the pages and editor of Word Ways. You'd think I'd devour it, but because every piece gets me thinking, I end up getting distracted and my mind wanders away from it. So for me, it's more of a browse-and-pick book than a run-straight-through book.

So is Words From Hell, a collection of origin stories for words forbidden in one way or another. Despite a strong start with an amazing passage from Fanny Hill, this one left me a little nonplussed. The book’s more interested in doing capsule etymologies for every shocking word in the language than exploring the story of forbidden language itself. Another book on this list is more promising in that regard.

Cory Doctorow and Colleen McCullough are dependable novelists with styles I can identify at fifty paces. No disrespect meant to Cory's collaborator Charles Strauss, but whatever he did on The Rapture of the Nerds didn't seem to alter Cory's style very much. Caesar I finally finished after starting it on July 4. That's five of McCullough's Roman mega-tomes down, two to go…but it's been a while since the last one!

It had also been a while since I'd written anything by Malcolm Gladwell, and I was interested to get back to his way of looking at the world with Talking to Strangers and David and Goliath. I don't agree with all his conclusions, but I appreciate his approach, jumping through history and across disciplines in pursuit of an idea. He's an independent thinker who doesn't use “independent thinking” as an excuse to be a crackpot. Mom ended up reading D&G before I could finish it, but now I have to, just so I can discuss it with her.

If/Then is a book about Big Data, disinformation, and the underpinnings of social media. Feels important. But I wanted to read it at a certain emotional remove, and as you may have heard, last week was a busy one in terms of national news. I felt like I had to choose two out of three: 1) keep up with the big events, 2) read the book, 3) maintain my vacation mindset. So I went with options 1 and 3. I'll try If/Then again when things quiet down. I'm sure that'll happen sometime, right?

That leaves The Word Detective, a memoir I'm really looking forward to and just ran out of time for. I was saving it for that rainy day that never happened! John Simpson was one of the most productive lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary, and I'm sure his account of his time there is going to make fascinating reading.

Still a bit behind on correspondence, dealing with that today. Tomorrow: some wordplay-based dialects!