What I'm reading ...

I have started Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren. Despite being, for all intents and purposes, a monoglot, I have always been interested in languages and human communication. So, this looked potentially interesting. Here’s the blurb:

If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues?

Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview.

Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart.

Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.

By Any Other Name - by Jodi Picoult

Once again, this author has delivered. The use of two parallel stories is ingenious and very well executed. The thread taking place more or less contemporaneously has a tone that sounds modern and American; the thread in the Middle Ages in England has its appropriate tone without being written in 17th Century English, which would have been a very hard read. All in all, the argument that Shakespeare was not actually the author of his plays was, IMHO, very convincing.

What I'm reading ...

I have started By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult. After reading a heavy non-fiction book, I needed something a bit easier going. This is an author upon whom I can rely for a worthwhile read. Here’s the blurb:

Student playwright Melina Green finds that even in New York, her words will struggle to make the stage, when the power is held by men. Inspired by the life of her ancestor Emilia Bassano, a gifted and witty storyteller herself, Melina takes a lesson from history, and submits a play under a male pseudonym . . .

As Melina discovers more of Emilia’s extraordinary life in Elizabethan England, she is determined to right the wrongs of the past – and finally tell her story.

Two women – centuries apart – are both forced to hide behind another name.

But can either make their voices heard?

The Elegant Universe - by Brian Greene

Reading this book was quite a long haul. It is well written in a very clear style, but the subject is large and complex. I certainly didn’t understand 100% of it, but did gain some insights. I now have many questions! My only criticism is that, although it has been updated, the book isn’t bang up to date, so, for example, there is nothing about the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I will need to read up on this elsewhere …