Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Kaunas

The Neris flows into the Nemunas at sunset.

More than twenty years ago, as an eighteen-year-old in 2003, I followed a lush carpet of green grass through the trees and into a clearing. Birds were singing, and the early autumn sun shone upon the scene with barely a cloud in the sky. In the centre of that clearing was a squat, red-brick cuboid that nature was doing its best to reclaim.

That building was a gas chamber where hundreds had been murdered, and I was a visitor at what remained of Dachau concentration camp.

It seems to be my luck that I get to visit the most nightmarish places on earth on the most achingly beautiful days imaginable. Today, after a winding bus journey to an unremarkable suburb of Kaunas, I make my way through a narrow concrete underpass to the city's Ninth Fort.

The fort.

Built as part of a system of fortifications in the early twentieth century, the site proved utterly useless for this purpose, and was taken by the Soviets within a couple of days. Today it is best known for being a prison and site of mass extermination of Jews during the Nazi occupation, the most horrifying of all such sites within Lithuania, its centripetal death-pull drawing in the doomed from as far away as France and Austria.

The fort sits atop a gentle rise. Though it's a low, ugly building, the site is monumental: the visitor centre, car parks, memorials, and the fort itself are laid out on a swathe of grassland punctuated by old, silent trees. The sky is a limpid blue, though there is a little mist on the grass. The focal point is not the fort itself but the dreadful, breathtaking memorial sculpture by Ambraziūnas, evoking something between a ruined power station and the clawed, desperate hands of a titanic buried humanoid, reaching a hundred feet up into that sky as if trying to grasp the winter sun. Perhaps an avatar of empathy or suchlike, whose time has passed.

Memorial.

The horror of the place can't really be put into words. Tens of thousands died here, this we know; but numbers also seem unable to capture what the place connotes (“Ninth Fort”, just one fort among many). When they burned the bodies, the heat was so fierce that glass began to melt. In one of the cells there's an exhibition where several people who narrowly escaped genocides across the world are quoted as saying the same thing: when you emerge from such a place, it's not always clear whether you really survived or are instead experiencing a different form of death.

The Japanese vice-consul at the time, Chiune Sugihara, helped thousands of Jews flee Lithuania in 1940 by writing exit visas for them, in defiance of protocol. Reportedly, he was still writing them until the moment his train departed (the consulate having been closed down). Even a bureaucrat can be a hero. Would I have the backbone to do something like this, if in a position to? More likely I'd take to Twitter to register my displeasure in a dry QT – if that. I hope that's not the case, obviously, but the atmosphere of this place isn't conducive to positivity.

After a while I head back into town. Kaunas is Lithuania's second city, but the small, quiet Old Town doesn't make it feel like a settlement with a population of three hundred thousand. I realize later that the heart of the modern city is elsewhere. Can't blame its inhabitants for wanting a clean break from the past. Unlike Vilnius, Kaunas is fairly geographically central in Lithuania. It lies at the confluence of the rivers Neris and Nemunas. These two rivers have quite different characters: the Neris brings hundreds of ice floes from Belarus via Vilnius, depositing them in the more sluggish Nemunas for transport to the Baltic. I walk to the end of the long spit of land that separates them and take in the view.

Troutworthy's Trakai Travel Blog

On my second day in Vilnius, I head out to Trakai, a small town at the end of a branch line through the woods. The path to my destination leads around the edge of a lake, which, it being -9 degrees C, is completely frozen over. I'm thankful for the thick layer of blubber that I, like a polar bear, very deliberately and intentionally accumulated over the winter.

Trakai castle.

Trakai is most notable for its two castles. The more impressive of these was built by Vytautas on an island, and completed in 1409, the year before the battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg. Vytautas himself has as much claim as anyone to be the legendary founder of Lithuania, though he never ruled it independently, but rather as a vassal, at least nominally, of the Polish king Jagiełło. The twist in the tale is that the two were cousins: Jagiełło, born Jogaila, was the son of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas, and Vytautas the son of his brother Kęstutis. Although not always on good terms, the two managed to put their differences aside long enough to stick it to the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald. The Teutonic connections don't end there: in 1377 the Order besieged an early incarnation of the castle, and in the years before Grunwald – during a period of peace – one of the Order's master masons, Radike, was supposedly involved in supervising the final construction works. Right now, with the lake frozen over, the situation puts me in mind of Alexander Nevsky's 1242 Battle on the Ice, which also didn't end well for the Teutonic Knights.

The castle is approached over a long bridge, which reminds me of the island of Mainau on Lake Constance. Surprisingly, Konstanz, too, features in the history of Lithuania and the Knights: the Council of Konstanz took place shortly after Grunwald, and the Order, trying desperately to rebuild, were active in petitioning Emperor Sigismund for various concessions against Poland-Lithuania. But Sigismund was more interested in resolving the crisis in the papacy, and Jagiełło's kingdom ended up with the better deal. The long overland journey of the Order's delegation from Lithuania to Konstanz must have been similar to mine, though perhaps slower and without quite as much free wifi.

Inner courtyard of the main tower.

The castle fell into disrepair in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was reconstructed in the twentieth. Its collections range from the random-but-elegant (an early glassware collection) to the purely random (a room full of nineteenth-century tobacco pipes), but there are also exhibitions about the castle's history, and two imposing new stained-glass windows depicting Vytautas and his father Kęstutis.

Vytautas.

As ever, it's tricky to distinguish between original and reconstruction, between “true facts” and Romantic imaginings, especially on an empty stomach. There's no cafe at the castle, and by the end of my visit I'm undercaffeinated and a little hungry. The latter problem is solvable by virtue of a food van sitting at the town end of the wooden bridge from the castle, selling what I perceive to be Cornish pasties. These, though, are a traditional thing for Karaim/Karaites to eat, one of Lithuania's nationally-recognized ethnic minorities, who've been dwelling in Trakai since before Grunwald. There were Tatars here, too, apparently much-feared mercenaries fighting on the Polish-Lithuanian side, though in the battle itself they ended up not playing much of a role.

My neighbour Totorių.

After a little exploration of Trakai town, it's time to head back to Vilnius. I make my way to the Museum of Occupations, housed in the grand, intimidating former KGB building. Not a cheery place, and I'll spare you the details. During World War 2, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again in the space of a few years, with neither side behaving generously towards the locals. And thinking back to the days of Trakai Island Castle and Grunwald, ultimately, the same dynamics are at work: for Lithuania and places like it, independence and prosperity – often even survival – was only to be achieved by playing off distant, powerful entities against each other, whether that be the Teutonic Order and Poland (at the turn of the fifteenth century), the Emperor and the church (at the Council of Konstanz), the Nazis and the Soviets (during the war), and now Brussels (or Washington?) and Moscow.

This last weekend, the three Baltic states ceremonially severed their power grid from that of Russia. After 24 hours of being allowed to stand unaided, like precocious, tottering toddlers, the network was connected to that of the EU: time to hold Daddy's hand again. The official line is that this arrangement drastically reduces the likelihood of malign foreign interference, certainly a concern, again, since February 2022. A. is cautious, though: Russian energy was cheap, and the Baltic governments have been tight-lipped about the costs of this transition and who will bear them.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Vilnius

Vilnius impresses me almost from the start. The grand entrance hall of the station draws your eyes upwards. When I arrive, a string quartet is playing in this space, and people have stopped to listen. It's dark by now, but buildings are well lit, and I'm able to see a lot of the city from the car. We drive down narrow cobbled streets and under arches. This part of town was transformed into a ghetto by the Germans during the war, simply by erecting gates across the mouths of some of these streets. Lithuanian Jews suffered horrifically during the war.

The architecture is a beautiful mixture, with quite a lot of baroque and also nineteenth-century eclecticism. The centre is dominated by three buildings: the neoclassical archcathedral, the recently reconstructed Palace of the Grand Dukes, and, rising above both of them, the Gediminas Tower.

Tower.

This tower sits on a hill that was constructed hundreds of years ago, and is all that remains of a larger fortification. In times past the hill was covered in trees, but more recently these have all been removed, and at the same time parts of the hill have started to collapse, needing to be patched up with concrete or metal struts. The sight puts me in mind of the hapless partygoer who wakes up on the sofa after a party to find that his erstwhile friends have shaved his head. But the tower itself is cute, and from the top of it there's a magnificent view over the city, speckled with snow.

View over Vilnius, looking towards the university.

The university, established in 1579, dominates its quarter of the old town, and its elderly buildings have been kept in fine condition: A. had taken me to see the frescoes and ceiling paintings the previous evening. In the afternoon, after a lunch of “zeppelins”, we visit the Palace of the Grand Dukes, a museum that, like the castle in Warsaw, is almost completely reconstructed, with the exception of the extensive foundations visible in the basement. Today it's mostly a museum, with parts of it serving for state functions. I can read here about Gediminas himself, along with Mindaugas, Algirdas, Kęstutis, Vytautas, Jogaila and others who play a role in the book I'm reading about the last years of the Teutonic Knights. A sense of history is clearly important to people, and even more so if it's accompanied by the appropriate pomp and circumstance.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Into Lithuania

A representative view from the train.

A bright and early start: there's only one connection from Warsaw to Vilnius each day, and it leaves at 7:55am. My conveyance is a comfortable, spacious loco-hauled beast, the brontosaurus of trains. Though stopping regularly, it powers along to Białystok in a couple of hours, but then stops there for over half an hour (“for technical reasons”, as the website has it). After that, its progress northward is notably slower, and it repeats its lengthy stop at Suwałki. But nothing can stop it as it lumbers towards and across the border. The scenery is much like what I remember from the Riga-Valga train: plains, mostly forests (alternating evergreen and birch), some farmland, occasional marshes, and even a few hills near Suwałki. I've been reading about the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg, a significant defeat for the Teutonic Knights against the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania in 1410, and it occurs to me that it must be around here somewhere, but when I check my maps it turns out that we're far too far east for that (close to Belarus).

I've been to Lithuania before, but only on a technicality: when I was travelling back by coach from Riga to Warsaw in 2019, I stepped off at Šiauliai bus station to stretch my legs for about twenty seconds. My quest to visit all the countries of Europe before my fortieth birthday will end in respectable failure: all the remaining countries – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Cyprus – are currently out of reach for various reasons. So this trip to Lithuania is intended to set the record straight by doing (more) justice to the country.

It feels absurd to be winding my watch forward an hour while trundling through the woods. It strikes me that flying is the ultimate form of transport for the nation-state, allowing one to imagine a clear discontinuity between point of origin and point of arrival. Borders, paradoxically, are a lot more concrete and well-defined when you don't have to actually cross them on the ground.

Mockava.

A through train is not possible due to the switch to broad gauge, and so we have to stop at Mockava, whose station is a nowhere place in the forest. The change is easy – from one side of the island platform to the other – though it's a bit chilly. After a while the Lithuanian train comes in, a DMU, more of an allosaurus.

Lithuanian train.

Both trains are warm and welcoming inside, with power sockets, and catering. This one even has wifi, and is in more of a hurry. After Kaunas, it runs non-stop for over an hour before reaching Vilnius. Here I'm met by the kind and indefatigable A., who takes me in his car for a quick tour of the capital of Lithuania – but that's the topic of another blog post.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Warsaw

Warsaw is bitterly cold when I reach it; not surprising for February, I guess. Emerging groggily from a nice warm sleeper train on which I had had only a small amount of sleep, it takes me a while to orient myself enough to escape the catacombs of the city's central station. Eventually I find myself in the basement of some sort of corporate tower. Having played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 recently (itself developed in Poland), I wonder if this is the point at which I get attacked by killer robots.

I've only been to Warsaw once before, in passing, when I was returning from Estonia. I'd only seen this area of the city, and only in darkness. It didn't strike me then as a lovely place, and, upon seeing it in sunlight, my first impression is confirmed: rectangles of Communist concrete between which a newer growth of capitalist steel-and-glass towers has taken root. Still, the area around stations is often depressing, so I hop on a tram and head to the old town.

Warsaw old town square.

It's still very quiet at 10am. Everyone's probably still in bed, or at church, or both (after all, many services can be streamed nowadays). That gives me the chance to observe the old town uninterrupted. Some of it is more toytown than old town: buildings of different heights, but still apparently built from the same blocks. The comparison to Krakow, where I was last year, is never far from my mind, but that's an unfair one: Warsaw suffered far worse in World War 2, especially after the Uprising in 1944, and almost everything here is reconstructed.

After getting some coffee and eggs, I roam the streets for a while, through the palace gardens, past churches and an unfathomably large theatre. Eventually I buy a ticket to visit the castle, and, grabbing an audioguide, am led through a series of opulent rooms decorated as they were in the time of King Stanisław August, the eighteenth century.

Throne.

Some of the furnishings are later gifts that date to the period, and some of the paintings were saved early in the war, but the reconstruction is still topmost on my mind: the whole building dates to the 1970s, when the Communist government (with understandable reluctance) agreed to rebuild it brick by brick, the original castle having been “blown up” by the Nazis in 1944.

It's interesting to evaluate the Warsaw Uprising from a present-day standpoint. Most today (especially since February 2022) would probably agree that violence in self-defence is justified, the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding. Justified violence in the interest of liberation from tyranny is a popular position too, and the Nazi occupation was as straightforwardly tyrannical as it's possible for any actually existing force to be. Yet the outcome was catastrophic: the uprising failed (a fact for which many blame Stalin, apparently) and the Nazi military retaliation led to civilian casualties numbering in the five figures, as well as the wholesale destruction of the city centre. Nor were the resistance fighters angels: some Jewish fighters were murdered by antisemites who were nominally on the same side. The fact that Stalin's forces drove off the Nazis less than a year later makes the whole thing seem particularly futile – though of course that's the magic of hindsight. Was it worth it? Not my place to judge.

There was more I wanted to see, but sleepiness means that I have to retire early. Today I'm on the rails again, heading north.

Where do the rectors of German universities come from?

Where do the rectors of German universities come from? From Germany, largely, at least according to what I can make out. Of a total of 83 current rectors, 76 (85%) are German in origin. This is largely in proportion to the number of professors who are German, which according to this article is above 90%.

The idea to do this came from a Facebook post by Roberta D'Alessandro doing a similar thing for the Netherlands. This percentage is perhaps not hugely surprising in itself, but the overall low proportion of non-German professors did surprise me. I work in a department which currently has 11 professors, 5 of whom were not born in Germany.

Looking at the seven exceptions is interesting, too. Four of them are from Switzerland or Austria, where they would in all likelihood have spoken German from a very young age. The same may be true of Elizabeth Prommer, rector of the University of Rostock, who, although California-born, went to school in Bavaria. That leaves the president of the small private Constructor University in Bremen, Stanislav Protasov, who was born in Tashkent (then USSR), and the president of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Jan S. Hesthaven, who is Danish. Neither of these are hugely prototypical German universities, and in the former case it's been suggested that being mates with the man who owns the university may have played a significant role.

My feeling is that there's little antipathy to foreigners in the German academic system per se, but at the same time it's structurally quite difficult to penetrate due to its various idiosyncratic properties that the locals treat as self-evident natural truths about the universe. Actually running the show without German as one's native language would be a real challenge.

A quick note on methodology: I started with this list of universities, looked up who the rector or president is on Google, and tried to find their Wikipedia article. If this existed and stated where they were born or what their nationality was, I used that. Otherwise I tried to find another source, and this ultimately ended up being successful in all cases, so I didn't have to make inferences based on names. Unmarked entries in the list below are German.

Baden-Württemberg:

Kerstin Krieglstein

Frauke Melchior

Stephan Dabbert

(Danish) Jan S. Hesthaven

Thomas Fetzer

Peter Middendorf

Karla Pollmann

Michael Weber

Bayern:

Sabine Doering-Manteuffel

Kai Fischbach

Stefan Leible

Gabriele Gien

Joachim Hornegger

Thomas F. Hofmann

Bernd Huber

(Austrian) Eva-Maria Kern

Ulrich Bartosch

Udo Hebel

Paul Pauli

Berlin:

Günter M. Ziegler

Julia von Blumenthal

Geraldine Rauch

Brandenburg:

Gesine Grande

Eduard Mühle

Oliver Günther

Bremen:

Jutta Günther

(USSR) Stanislav Protasov

Hamburg:

Jörg Müller-Lietzkow

Andreas Timm-Giel

Hauke Heekeren

Klaus B. Beckmann

Hessen:

Tanja Brühl

Enrico Schleiff

Katharina Lorenz

Ute Clement

Thomas Nauss

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern:

Katharina Riedel

(American) Elizabeth Prommer

Niedersachsen:

Angela Ittel

Sylvia Schattauer

Metin Tolan

Volker Epping

(Swiss) Denise Hilfiker-Kleiner

Klaus Osterrieder

May-Britt Kallenrode

(German-Swiss) Sascha Spoun

Ralph Bruder

Susanne Menzel-Riedl

Verena Pietzner

Nordrhein-Westfalen:

Ulrich Rüdiger

Angelika Epple

Martin Paul

Michael Hoch

Manfred Bayer

Barbara Albert

Anja Steinbeck

Stefan Stürmer

Joybrato Mukherjee

Ansgar Thiel

Johannes Wessels

Birgitt Riegraf

Stefanie Reese

Martin Butzlaff

Birgitta Wolff

Rheinland-Pfalz:

Malte Drescher

Stefan Wehner

Georg Krausch

Holger Mühlenkamp

(Austrian) Eva Martha Eckkrammer

Saarland:

Ludger Santen

Sachsen:

Gerd Strohmeier

Ursula Staudinger

Klaus-Dieter Barbknecht

Eva Inés Obergfell

Sachsen-Anhalt:

Claudia Becker

Jens Strackeljan

Schleswig-Holstein:

Christiane Hipp

Insa Theesfeld

Enno Hartmann

Thüringen:

Walter Bauer-Wabnegg

Kai-Uwe Sattler

Andreas Marx

(Austrian) Peter Benz

Books read 2024

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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Exquisite prose, if narratively somewhat bewildering. Thought-provoking and well observed too.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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!

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

A brilliant, lively musing on age, showbusiness and time. Fine contemporary fiction.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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).

1. 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).

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

A simpler structure and a sillier dénouement, but very well constructed.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.