Books read 2024
36 books read this year. They're all labelled 1. when I paste the list into this blog post. No idea why.
- Aliette de Bodard, The House of Shattered Wings
Fantasy set in a ruined Paris ruled by fallen angels, centred around a mystery. The general vibe was enjoyable, but it didn’t wow me: the prose was strangely undescriptive (especially as regards characters), the protagonist Philippe too mopey, and the logic behind the book’s magic system wasn’t clear enough for the denouement to make all that much sense. Also, too many big plot points were left unresolved (presumably for books 2 and 3 of the trilogy). Still fun, though.
- Naomi Novik, Uprooted
I loved the first part of this book - a creepy, pastoral fantasy. I didn't enjoy the second half so much. It becomes very diffuse, veering into wish-fulfilment territory, and one gets the sense that it was written with a potential movie adaptation in mind. Entertaining throughout, nevertheless.
- Jeremy J. Smith, Older Scots: a linguistic reader
Until Millar (2023), this was probably the closest thing to a history of Scots that was out there. It's more of a collection of texts, but it does contain an introduction to the language (and to linguistics as a whole). I'd have liked to see more discussion of things other than lexis and phonology-orthography in the commentaries, but that's just me.
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom
A thought-provoking set of essays on pedagogy. Definitely caused me to reevaluate the use and relevance of personal experience in the classroom. I don't think I can fully subscribe to the notion that the end goal of education is societal transformation, but I now have more understanding of where this perspective comes from and probably more sympathy for it. My favourite parts of the book are where the author is frank about the tensions involved, for instance in discussing the importance of theory when engaging with a public who are sceptical of it.
- Noam Chomsky, T. Daniel Seely, Robert C. Berwick, Sandiway Fong, M. A. C. Huybregts, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Andrew McInnerney and Yushi Sugimoto, Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis
One arguably doesn't need eight authors to write a book whose content runs to only sixty-six pages, and like most recent Chomsky works this book dwells too long for my taste on the intellectual history of the field. But the main ideas around Form Set and Form Copy are actually pretty cool, and I might see myself doing something with it in my own work.
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Exquisite prose, if narratively somewhat bewildering. Thought-provoking and well observed too.
- Devyani Sharma, From deficit to dialect: the evolution of English in India and Singapore
An impressively nuanced account of the development of these two varieties, focusing mainly on linguistic properties but with some discussion of attitudes too. Sharma makes a compelling case that conventionalized, redeployed features of interlanguage have made their way into these varieties (much as they have always done in English in Britain throughout its history) while dismissing the ignorant bogeyman that these varieties consist simply of errors. The contrast between English and Singapore, which occupies the second half of the book, is fascinating: Singapore English seems to have focused substantially faster.
- Yilin Wang (trans.), The lantern and the night moths
A moving little book of poetry in translation by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese poets, accompanied by thoughtful musings about the Sino diaspora and the translation process.
- Mary Robinson & Daniel Duncan (eds.), Sociosyntax
Nine chapters exploring the interplay of generative syntactic theory and sociolinguistics, in one way or another. I was privileged to be a reviewer for this one, and it's full of good stuff!
- Elias Lönnrot (compiler), John M. Crawford (trans.), The Kalevala
A great epic. At its best, bardic duels and massive iron eagle-monster-ships. At its worst, lots of rather dull man-and-wife stuff. The translation is a bit clunky, but has its moments.
- Paul Saenger, Space between words: the origins of silent reading
This book is astonishingly erudite and wide-ranging in making the case for how word spacing in manuscripts spread during the medieval period, drawing on all sorts of literature, including present-day research on the psychology of reading. Unless the details of the spread are interesting to you then only the first hundred pages or so are likely to be relevant, though.
- Betty Birner, Introduction to Pragmatics
I had to read half of this for state oral exams, so I thought I might as well educate myself and read the other half too. It's a great textbook: clear and well written without sacrificing theoretical depth, and cohesive while maintaining intellectual breadth.
- Thomas Mann, Der Erwählte
An odd medieval-style pastiche featuring lots of incest. Not sure what to take away from this book, especially as a non-Christian in a world where Christianity is increasingly irrelevant. If I'd wanted to read a medieval epic I'd just have done that.
- Curse of Strahd
D&D sourcebook and adventure. Like some other adventures I've read, this one has the frustrating (to me) property of containing lots of maps and tables of random encounters, but little to structure a satisfying narrative (beyond the endgame). There is also some heavy and unpleasant stereotyping (wait, the people who are based on the Romani work for the bad guy?). The setting as a whole is evocative, though.
- S. L. Huang, The Water Outlaws
A fantasy retelling of the Chinese classic Water Margin for the social justice generation. It’s not the most dramatically creative of choices, but it’s deftly and breezily written. The ending is rather unsatisfying; perhaps just leaving room for a potential sequel.
- Lonely Planet Guide to Train Travel in Europe
This isn't a traditional Lonely Planet guide, but a collection of axial routes across Western and Central Europe, beautifully produced in coffee-table format. I have already travelled many of the routes discussed, but by no means all – in particular Spain, Portugal and Poland have a lot more to offer than I've explored. The book is inspirational, but shows some of the signs of being team-written: two different cities are described as "France's fourth city" within pages of each other, for instance.
- Lydia White, Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar
An interesting, challenging and valuable book, arguing vehemently for a Full Transfer Full Access perspective on second language acquisition. The book is generally more scrupulous than many works I've come across in teasing out the logic behind studies, but one gets the impression that this logic is applied somewhat selectively, to studies whose results White doesn't agree with. The book is also now twenty years old and, as White anticipates, much of the debate (including on what UG actually consists of) has moved on. But for a semi-outsider like me the book is still very informative.
- Martina Wiltschko, The grammar of interactional language
A sequel to her book on the universal spine, this time taking on response markers. I liked the clearly stated theorizing and the engagement with existing work in conversation analysis, etc. I didn't like the ropey empirical basis (half the time it is 't even clear what variety she's talking about) or the disdain for actually doing syntax (there is very little recognizably syntactic, as opposed to semantic, argumentation, and on one of the few instances where a question of syntax does arise – relating to linear order – she basically says she doesn't care). It's also still not clear to me what makes the USH/ISH different from run-of-the-mill cartography; she claims it's a middle ground between anything-goes typology and generative universalism, but it seems to me to be just a version of the latter with somewhat more abstract (and abstruse) functional categories than one usually sees.
- Max Egremont, The Glass Wall: lives on the Baltic frontier
Like the previous book I read by him, this has a strong sense of place. It consists of a series of vignettes of individuals and their pasts, interwoven at points, in Estonia and Latvia. I wonder sometimes whether Egremont may be a little too sympathetic to the Baltic German overlords of the region, though he does make an effort to show multiple perspectives in an even-handed way. Good to read about this fascinating region, anyhow.
- Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
A brilliant, lively musing on age, showbusiness and time. Fine contemporary fiction.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Old Vlad is what kids these days call a "nepo baby", growing up as he did as part of the landed gentry in Tsarist Russia, with a series of servants and personal tutors for various languages. But the lad can write beautifully. I was disappointed that so much focus was put on his childhood and very little (only one chapter) on his Cambridge years, but in that part I enjoyed reading about how British leftists would Westsplain Bolshevism to him; some things never change.
- George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
Re-read. For all that Shaw criticizes Mark Twain and Andrew Lang for hero-worshipping Joan, his own version of the story is not all that much better in that regard: for Shaw, Joan is a sort of working class proto-Protestant. Interestingly, unlike all the other characters in the play, she uses "thou" most of the time, as if channelling Yorkshire. Also, this is another play where I wonder what it'd be like on stage, since it's mostly men standing around talking to each other (and Joan). It'd need the right director to make it visually interesting. There is some lovely dialogue and characterization, though.
- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
All anyone seems to say about this book is that it was scandalous when it came out – but it's far more interesting than that. I've never seen Derbyshire dialect depicted in fiction like this, I don't think. And Mellor's patterns of switching in and out of dialect, and the other characters' reactions to it, would be an interesting topic of research. Also, for a book that's ostensibly about sex, there is no allonormativity: Lawrence is acutely aware of the vast diversity to be found in humans' approaches to sexual and romantic relationships, and represents all sorts, largely without judgement. If you can read this (and Anna Karenina, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles) and still defend the nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century institution of marriage, which persists in many of its essentials today, then you're a monster. My only quibble is with the prose, which sometimes strikes me as a bit overblown (not even talking about the purple parts).
- John Wyndham, Trouble with Lichen
I wouldn't call a book this, but that aside, this isn't one of Wyndham's best. It focuses on the discovery of an anti-aging drug and its social consequences, particularly for women. But it manages to do so via quite a reductive, functionalist take on what women do and want, and that dates it quite severely (it is very obvious that it was written in the 1950s).
- Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook 2024
The move away from "race"-based stats to background-based stats is a nice one, and it looks like sorcerers are much better in this edition. Otherwise, it seems like not much has changed vis-a-vis the 2014 version.
- Tim William Machan, English Begins at Jamestown
I have to admit I'm slightly disappointed that this book isn't a full-throated defence of the idea that there was no English before the foundation of the Jamestown colony in 1607. The idea does pop up near the end, but it's more of a thought experiment to show that any such delimitation criterion is ultimately a matter of perspective. Rather, the book's an extended meditation on the historiography of the English language. There aren't really any radical new insights here, but it's a thought-provoking read nevertheless, since it takes the constitutive role of historians seriously throughout – especially fun for someone who's recently written a history of English.
- Roger Lass, Old English: a linguistic companion
Written with the author's usual acerbic, incisive style, this is a book I should have looked at earlier. It's much stronger on phonology and morphology than it is on syntax, but it provides more to chew on in all of these areas than the standard textbooks. In some places it even loses itself somewhat in the detail, but it's a great overall treatment of the structure of Old English.
- Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders & Ai Taniguchi, Essentials of linguistics, 2nd edition
An Open Access introductory textbook in linguistics! I am currently using this book (or a good chunk of it) to teach our introductory lecture in English linguistics. Like all textbooks, it has its strengths and weaknesses. The focus on signed languages is great for a general linguistics intro, but not so ideal for a course devoted specifically to English; the same goes for the phonology chapter, which goes heavily into cross-linguistic phonemics but has barely anything to say about intonation. The syntax chapter is decent, but more than twice as long as most of the others, and focuses almost exclusively on English. And there are many smaller things I'd do differently (and am doing differently) – but on the whole I'm impressed, and very glad that it's Open Access.
- David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
I’m not a huge fan of books about everything; I’m very sceptical about people like Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond, Jordan Peterson, and Peter Frankopan and their output. In part this is because I’m an academic and know how difficult it is to say anything about anything, let alone everything. Here I was pleasantly surprised to find that the title is misleading: the book, written from the perspective of an archaeologist and an anthropologist, is more of an anti-everything book, warning against naive evolutionary (or technological, or even social) determinism in the emergence of different types of human society. That’s not to say that it has no positive contributions to make: the notion of “schismogenesis” is usefully developed, and the book is rammed full of case studies that don’t fit into the usual progress narrative, as well as exploring potential indigenous American intellectual currents that played into the Enlightenment. I don’t love reading about archaeology, in general, but the payoff here was worth it. It’s interesting to look at historical linguistics as a historical science through the lens of some of the ideas they explore.
- Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train
It's been a long time since I've taken on anything that's easy reading, as the list above can vouch. This one, it turns out, wasn't enough to last the train journey from Konstanz to Edinburgh. Good fun, and I figured out one of the perps.
- Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
A simpler structure and a sillier dénouement, but very well constructed.
- Ivan Tamaredo, Complexity, efficiency, and language contact: pronoun omission in World Englishes
A typological and corpus-based study of null subjects. Quantitatively well informed; perhaps somewhat too quick to rule out "substrate" influence in favour of a hypothesis of simplification, but I appreciated the breakdown of different types of complexity.
- Ivan Landau, Control
A short book, essentially an update of his 2013 overview book to cover the last 11 years of research. Particular focus is accorded to his own work and emphasizing the assimilation of control to theorizing about embedded speech acts more broadly. I should think more about how his two-tiered theory relates to the diachronic facts I'm interested in explaining.
- Wolfgang Borchert, Draußen vor der Tür
Borchert returned from the Eastern Front, wrote these works in 1946, and died of hepatitis in 1947. As Heinrich Böll puts it in the afterword, he was a casualty of war, but unlike most such casualties he was granted two years to communicate his experiences, a dead man writing. It's about as cheery as you'd expect it to be given the topic and time, but contains reflections on the horrors of war – beyond its banality and brutality to its industrial embedding – that are certainly still relevant today.
- Jane Harrison, Reminiscences of a student's life
More than a mere student, Jane Harrison was a very influential researcher who spent her career at Newnham College, Cambridge. These reminiscences paint a sympathetic picture of a Yorkshirewoman who loved languages and ritual and who never stopped learning.
- Ivo Andrić, trans. Lovett F. Edwards, The Bridge on the Drina
A novel centring on a bridge and focusing on shared experiences. Moving and not a little mysterious, but an apt read given my recent travels around the Balkans.
