Books read 2023

36 books read this year – which works out at three a month, though they were in fact very unevenly distributed through the year.

Aminatta Forna, Happiness

A beautiful, down-to-earth and unpretentious story about the consequences of a chance meeting. I’m uneasy about the antipsychiatry-adjacent message towards the end, but it’s a charming and thought-provoking book.

Misha Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-2012: nationalism, war and the great powers

A veteran journalist’s take on the most politically complex area of Europe. It’s both a big, dense book and at times one that cuts corners, taking a few things for granted. I probably need to read around and then return to this one. Glenny’s take seems very balanced to me; his harshest criticism is reserved for the “great power” interventions, none of which have ever ended well, even up to the present day.

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: the basics

I’ve always thought of semiotics as standing in the same relation to linguistics as astrology does to astronomy, but never knew enough about it to be sure, because most texts I tried to read on the subject descended quickly into obscurantism. Chandler’s text is a welcome exception. As I now understand it, semiotics is the project of Ferdinand de Saussure exegesis (but only the Cours – texts actually written by Saussure should be studiously ignored). And Charles Saunders Peirce exegesis, to be fair, though Peirce’s model of the sign is both more complex and less coherent than the one in the Cours. I had my quibbles with the author’s conclusions: in particular I don’t think it follows from the fact that Saussure (in the Cours) excludes reference from his model of the sign that Saussure is a Whorfian for whom language determines reality. But overall I liked the book, and can see the value of applying ideas from linguistics beyond linguistics. Though I will feel justified in continuing to mostly disregard semiotics in future.

Peter Dragicevic, Mark Baker, Stuart Butler, Vesna Maric, Brana Vladisavljevic, Anthony Ham, Jessica Lee & Kevin Raub, Lonely Planet: Western Balkans

Okay, I didn’t read this one cover-to-cover. Reading about nightlife in cities I’m not visiting is a bit much. But I’ve spent so much time with this book in the first half of March that I feel justified in making an exception to my normal rule and adding this one to the list. It’s bee helpful – especially for sights and food options – even when I haven’t ultimately agreed with its assessment of a place, which did happen occasionally.

Stephen Wechsler & Larisa Zlatić, The many faces of agreement

A thoughtful and thought-provoking book about the syntax of agreement, with an empirical focus mainly on Serbian/Croatian, that covers a lot of ground, some of it more convincingly than other bits. There are some ideas and thoughts in here that are likely to be be useful for my future work.

Edgar Allen Poe, Classic Stories

This collection of Poe’s works is a mixed bag. The nadir is probably The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, a detective story in which our protagonist spends pages explaining why the newspapers are wrong, only for the actual dénouement to not even be properly narrated. This one also sorely tests Poe’s principle that short stories should be read in a single sitting. Others, like Fall of the House of Usher and Masque of the Red Death, are sublime, though.

R. F. Kuang, Babel

A much richer, more thoughtful novel than the Poppy War. This one is historical fantasy set in Oxford and centred on magic derived from what gets lost in translation. It’s well written and moving, though the apparatus of footnotes doesn’t help matters, and there are some (I think unintended) almost farcical moments in what is otherwise a dark and serious book.

Anthony Warner, Complementation in Middle English and the methodology of historical syntax

A revised version of the author’s PhD dissertation, this book deals with all sorts of issues in the complementation system of Middle English, based on a corpus study of the Wyclifite sermons (c. 1400). It’s a rich and rewarding read, though the late 70s terminology/theory is not always easy for me to follow now. A big deal in this book is using intuitions and semantic judgements as a source of data for dead languages. Apparently Lakoff (1968) made the case for Latin, and Lightfoot says something similar! This seems bonkers to me, and I strongly agree with Warner that it isn’t a sensible thing to do.

Rym Kechacha, Dark River

Two parallel narratives of young mothers. A fine, moving piece of speculative fiction, though not one with a hopeful vision for the future.

Stephen Pax Leonard, Language, society and identity in early Iceland

Been meaning to read this for a while. This slim book, a revised version of the author’s PhD thesis, is erudite and draws on a wide range of sources and approaches, but ultimately (in my view) fails to make the case for any strong thesis about early Icelandic identity. That’s perhaps not surprising, as the task Leonard has set himself is an almost impossibly ambitious one given the nature of the evidence. His conclusion perhaps sums it up best: “the relationship between language and identity in early Iceland remains of course nebulous and ill-defined”. One thing that’s missing is reference to historical (as opposed to sociological or sociolinguistic) scholarship on ethnicity and ethnogenesis, which seems very relevant to the question. The discussion of terms for and perception of languages - dönsk tunga vs. norrœna - in chapter 5 is to my mind the most interesting part of the book.

Ian Roberts, Diachronic Syntax, second edition

I quite vividly remember reading this in 2007-8, as a final-year undergraduate, when it had just come out. It’s thus deeply weird (though also ego-boosting) to see that this new 2021 edition, very extensively revised, contains multiple references to me and my work: in particular there’s a whole section on null subjects in the history of Germanic. The first time I read this book I wasn’t very au fait with philosophy of science, and regarded the rather “brittle” predictions of the theory as a major weakness. Present-day me views this as a strength. It’s marketed as a sort of textbook, but one would have to be quite daring to teach a course based entirely on it, since it is fast-moving, wide-ranging and highly erudite, and students who haven’t had at least one course on generative syntax will probably struggle. I prefer to think about it more as a combination of detailed review of the “DiGS” literature and manifesto for a particular vision of syntactic change as parametric change. Either way it remains a thought-provoking read.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

A re-read. First time round I was a bit blindsided by this book and where it ends up. It seems at one point like it’s going to be a grand sci-fi narrative, but it’s more of a series of vignettes exploring what it is to be human (and sapient more generally), lovingly crafted – a bit like the Mass Effect universe, but without the militaristic bluster, combat sequences and universe-ending plots. A genre-changer of a book.

Georges Simenon, The Venice Train, trans. Ros Schwartz

A man’s life begins to fall apart after a chance meeting on the Venice train. The key events that kickstart the plot are not new, but the way their consequences are narrated is masterful. Perhaps I get bonus points for reading it on the train from Zurich to Venice, though my route was via the Gotthard base tunnel, not via the Simplon tunnel as in the book.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

I read this on the train back from Venice to Paris. It doesn’t strike me as one of Shakespeare’s best works. Quite apart from the rather undeniable antisemitism, there’s an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist in Act IV and then a rather tedious Act V about feigned marital strife. And, to top it off, the Monty Hall plotline with Portia and her marriage is both absurd and barely connected to the main plot. Several classic quotables can be found within, though.

Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: how the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West

A helpful read for my understanding, if a depressing one. In Belton’s telling, after a wobbly and inequitable transition to free-market capitalism in the 1990s, Russia once again ended up under the rule of a faction of the KGB. Freed from any ideological link to communism, these men’s only guiding lights were authoritarian nationalism and personal control. Belton allows herself plenty of interpretations where the facts are not known, and is pretty clear about when she’s doing this. (Abramovich sued over the claim that he bought Chelsea on Putin’s orders, but I thought it was transparently Belton’s inference, and a denial by Abramovich’s spokesperson was included.) Even without the more speculative parts, though, this book – written before the Ukraine hostilities initiated in 2022 – paints a grim picture of today’s Russia.

Victoria Mackenzie, For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain

A short fictionalized account of the meeting between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, two of the most interesting women in the history of the English language (in fact most interesting people, full stop). Despite the subject matter I felt that this novel fell somewhat flat in terms of its emotional impact, and the interleaving of two storylines did not work well for me.

D. Gary Miller, Nonfinite structures in theory and change

A salutary reminder that great intellect and erudition do not automatically make for a great book. This one ranges widely over theoretical and historical aspects of all sorts of nonfinite structures, mostly in English but with detours into West Greenlandic, Latin, and more. Sections were extremely useful for my research but overall the argument jumps around so much that it was difficult to follow what point was being made.

Adam Smith, A dissertation on the origin of languages

A short work about the evolution of language. It starts out very speculative on the origin of word classes, but gets more interesting when it takes on a typological dimension, prefiguring to some extent Bopp-Schlegel morphological typologies, and even Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology.

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

Reading a bit of Scotland’s most famous author while in Edinburgh. This is a ludicrous pastiche that has probably done more for the popular understanding of the British Middle Ages than any history book. Centring on an attractive young Jew, Rebecca, who all the men in the story seem to have the hots for, it canters along briskly. Still not sure why Scott is so fêted when Edinburgh’s authors also count Stevenson among their ranks.

Kenneth H. Jackson, Language and history in early Britain

Good to read this in Edinburgh, where Jackson worked; I’d been trying to get hold of this book for a while. It’s a masterwork not just for the fact that it weaves history, archaeology and linguistics together well, but because it does so in ways that are ahead of its time. Against the “triple-X” theory of the fate of Celtic speakers in the face of Germanic speakers, Jackson is excoriating (and this well before the emergence of processual archaeology). I focused on the first 260 pages – a deep sociolinguistic examination of the interrelationships between Latin (varieties), “Anglo-Saxon”, and Celtic (varieties) – and only skimmed the 400 or so pages on the details of specific sound changes.

Nina Puri, Queenig und spleenig? Wie die Engländer ticken

A book about the English from a German perspective. The author spent some of her childhood in the UK before moving to Germany. It’s always interesting to see how one’s tribe is perceived by another tribe. Some bits I knew, some bits I didn’t. Our cringeworthy mating rituals I was aware of, but I didn’t know that the Germans tend to think we drive too slowly. And the author offers a remarkably nuanced view on the tricky topic of English cuisine. Not sure about some pieces of information: no one says “how do you do” any more, and I’m pretty sure a “swot” is a type of nerd, not a black-marketeer. Fun book, though, and amusingly written!

Donald Campbell, Edinburgh: a cultural and literary history

Though it’s geographically structured, the heart of this book is the culture and the characters of Edinburgh over the years. A useful companion to this “mad god’s dream” of a city.

Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

In two minds about this one. On one hand, some of the most original and evocaitve fantasy I’ve read in years. On the other hand, the pacing is terrible: half the book (400 pages) is basically worldbuilding, and the other half feels rushed. For that reason it took me a tremendously long time to finish. Still, it leaves me with a good taste in my mouth, and (unusually for a fantasy novel!) has a good ending as a standalone book.

William Labov with Gillian Sankoff, Conversations with strangers

This short book is structured around ten sociolinguistic interviews. It was interesting to read about these people and their lives (and language), and beautifully put together. But if there was any broader meaning to it, it passed me by.

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, this book is very… concrete. It’s a specific, situated future for North America, not some allegory. It raises intriguing questions about complicity and what it means to be a good person in an extreme situation. Atwood also handles the question of female physicality brilliantly, neither dismissing it not putting it on an essentializing pedestal.

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

If Gormenghast and Warhammer 40,000 had a baby, this is what it would look like (but with extra skeletons). A creative, well-constructed fantasy novel without the epic-style bloat so often found in the genre. The writing style sometimes jars with me due to all the yoofspeak blending with baroque Peake-type prose, but that’s probably just me getting old. Great book.

Friedrich Schiller, Wallensteins Tod

I do like a bit of Schiller, and this one almost makes me feel sorry for Wallenstein, who was an absolute monster, one of the inventors of modern professional warfare. But as a play I wonder how much fun it would be to watch, since it mostly involves men standing round talking to each other.

Susi Wurmbrand, Infinitives: restructuring and clause structure

After reading some rather… messy books about non-finite clauses, it’s a pleasure to read something that is not only insightful and clearly argued but also genuinely well written. The key idea is that a WYSIWYG approach to clause structure works as regards clause size, but that infinitives - even individual verbs - may take different sizes of complement: monoclausal (functional restructuring), VP (lexical restructuring), vP, TP or CP. I found it persuasive and not a little demystifying.

Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

This gothic novel, telling of a charismatic monk’s descent into darkness, is frankly absurd.

Seanan McGuire, Every Heart A Doorway

A novella about the consequences of normal children travelling netween planes of existence. For all its feels and thoughtful world-building, it reads like a novel that hasn’t been filled out enough with character development - just over too quickly. That’s not to say that it wasn’t good, but it is unusually terse for fantasy.

Angela Chen, Ace: what asexuality reveals about desire, society, and the meaning of sex

An eye-opening, thoughtful and thought-provoking read that nevertheless came across as somewhat rambling and unstructured. Perhaps a book that can’t quite decide what it wants to be or do - but still an invaluable exercise in awareness-raising.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

An amazing book about the danger of privileging beauty over more important things, a modern Gothic novel that still rather ironically manages to be beautiful in its way. Also intriguingly difficult to date beyond the mid-20th century.

Richard V. Reeves, Of boys and men: why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it

I went into this book sceptical, but Reeves takes a sensible tack, on the whole, in arguing that men (particularly Black and working class men) are suffering as a side effect of the patriarchy. This part of the book is well supported with a variety of evidence, only some of which seems cherry-picked. Where Reeves is on shakier ground is his critique of progressive approaches to the question: while he’s right that there’s an unwillingness to admit that men’s problems are worth worrying about, and he’s right (to a lesser extent) that progressives can be dismissive of biological effects in some domains, his attack on the notion of “toxic masculinity” misses its mark completely, and more generally – despite many caveats – he seems not to have grasped the implications of sexual dimorphism as a more faithful reflection of reality than binarity; talking about “the exception that proves the rule” means nothing in this context, and is equivalent to sticking one’s head in the sand. His prescriptions are interesting, especially the idea of encouraging men to enter what he calls HEAL (humanities, education, administration and literacy) jobs, and the less narrow view of fatherhood he advocates – but I’ll need more convincing on his proposal for a later school starting age for boys.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

A tiny book, basically an essay that’s had a hard cover slapped on it. I’m not generally any more impressed when someone calls something “bullshit, in the Harry Frankfurt philosophical sense” than when someone calls something “bullshit” tout court. But this is an interesting attempt to define bullshit as part of philosophy of language – as lack of concern for any connection with the truth. There are obvious links to speech act theory and formal semantics and pragmatics that could be exploited here.

Private Eye Annual 2023

Amusing and on point, as always. The “Could AI bore us all to death?” article was a highlight.

Andrew Robinson, The last man who knew everything: Thomas Young

The title is obviously false, but this biography is concise and engagingly written. Young was a fascinating figure who made significant contributions to several fields in the first half of the nineteenth century, most notably physics (a theory of light) and Egyptology (clearing the way for Champollion to fully decipher the hieroglyphic script). Significantly for linguists, he also came up with the term “Indo-European” (in an Encyclopedia Britannica article), and his Göttingen dissertation was on phonetics. The book also contains some interesting reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of polymathy.