Shakespeare again

I've just finished Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare, which I only started Tuesday morning and didn't read at all yesterday. It's been lovely to spend most of the afternoon and evening just reading.

I read Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue last summer, and found it vastly entertaining. Shakespeare is similarly entertaining and full of facts I feel compelled to relate to people. For example, considering this astounding statistic: in the year of William Shakespeare's birth (1564), the infant mortality rate was at nearly two-thirds. We're lucky Shakespeare wasn't one of them.

The main theme of the book is to keep it relentlessly factual. Bryson constantly points out how little evidence there is related to Shakespeare, and uses the length of the book as illustration to this--he is only able to fill 196 pages. And that's with relating the various myths and conjecture about Shakespeare's life, and then showing how unprovable they are. The book also spends time relating circumstances of Shakespeare's England, all of which adds greatly to appreciation of Shakespeare's life and achievements. There is a chapter devoted to discussion of the "real" Shakespeare, and the history behind the odd but persistent assertion that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays.

So if you feel you ought to know more about Shakespeare, this is an excellent book to read, as it is short, interesting, and usefully skeptical.

The loot

This seems to have been the Christmas of books. I got eight books as presents, and bought four others in the days before Christmas. I'd better get reading.I bought three of these at Goodwill, and one in a lovely little bookshop in Pike Place Market. The only other Barbara Pym I've read was Some Tame Gazelle. Civil to Strangers is her last novel and various shorter works. Mary Wesley is the author of The Camomile Lawn, which I read in February. I've never read any Umberto Eco, but I had a feeling he'd have interesting things to say about literature; this book is a collection of his essays. And I've never read Penelope Lively, but thought I ought to.Most of these books came from my father, who dearly loves to buy me books (and he's good at it, too). I read Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue last summer, so I know whatever he says about Shakespeare will be pretty fascinating. Bardisms sounds entertaining, mostly as reference or novelty; it seems to be separated into sections like "Shakespeare on Fathers," "Shakespeare on Parties," and so on. I know there's a story about why my father decided I needed to read Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley, but I can't remember it. My mum got me that copy of Pride and Prejudice (which makes my total copies up to three if you count the collected works) purely because it's so beautiful; it's leather-bound. And The Children's Book, which I'm sure you remember me reading, because it's one of those books that I just want to own. Now I get to go back and replace all the post-its I had to take out of the library copy. The book below it, which you probably can't read the title of, is Authentic Victorian Dressmaking Techniques. I do need to do some more sewing, maybe that will help get me into the mood. Victorian Visitors sounds quite fascinating. It's non-fiction, and I have a feeling it's going to be the kind of non-fiction I find utterly absorbing. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, on the bottom, is apparently about the Salem witch trials, alternating stories between modern day and the 17th century.

So my to-read stack has just about doubled in size, but what the hell. I'm looking forward to it all.

Look! It's not related to Tam Lin!

I finally finished The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson. I'd been putting it off to read other things, but then I started The Worm Ouroboros and so had to read something to put that off, and there you have it. I always have to be procrastinating on something.

The Mother Tongue is hilarious; it's subtitle rather says it all: "English and how it got that way," the story of the English language, its history, its place in the world. It's a funny story to begin with, but Bill Bryson makes it funnier because you know he's always amused. The book outlines the development of language in general and the history of English in particular, including its vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling, has chapters on dialects, proper English usage, dictionaries, American vs. British English, swearing, word games, and the future of the language. The funniest chapters, which were what really got me through to the end and which I couldn't help but read aloud (my mother finally told me to stop so I had to just stop reading), were those on English's effect on other languages and English names. Some of the funniest examples of English words being borrowed into other languages are things like Japanese for a suit, being "sebiro," which comes from "Savile Row," and then of course the French, when they want to get a bit tan, go to the beach for "le bronzing" and a German book that doesn't quite make the best-seller lists is "ein steadyseller." The chapter on names is fascinating; it goes through the odd tendency of British place and family names to be pronounced nothing like they're spelled (and, if there are two places with the same name, for these to be pronounced differently in each place and neither like it's spelled), hilarious place names in general, unusual British pub names, surnames. The British place names, of course, are mostly hilarious just because they sound funny, but imagine living in Fertile, Minnesota; Humptulips, Washington; or Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming.

In short, The Mother Tongue is a very well-written (one always hopes so in a book on language), informative, and concise book, which you can't possibly read without bursting to tell someone some of the things you've learned.

Compulsive reading aloud

Started The Mother Tongue, and though not very far into it I can already tell I'm going to spend the book reading it aloud to whoever's handy. Sorry everybody, there's no way around this. For example, you know the much discussed fifty words the Eskimos have for snow? That's the least of it. Italian has 500 names for different kinds of noodles, in the Trobriand Islands they have a hundred words for yams, and Arabic supposedly has 6,000 words for camels and camel trappings. I can already tell this book is going to be full of fascinating information like this, and it's the kind of thing I can't help but tell people.

So now it's got me thinking about all the books like this, that I can't help but read aloud. I definitely read people bits out of The Mitford Girls and Reading the OED, I know. It's not just nonfiction, though. I read a lot to people out of Hunting Unicorns, by Bella Pollen, which I read quite a while ago and really enjoyed. It comes across a little like it was supposed to be a screenplay for a romantic comedy film but turned out as a book, though this doesn't harm it any. It's about the sons of an aristocratic family which hasn't got the money to keep up its big sprawling house any more, and an American girl who comes to England to do a TV special about the "obsolete aristocracy." All sorts of hilarious things happen, and it was the sort of book that one gets funny looks over on the bus because you're laughing out loud. The trouble, of course, about reading it on the bus, is that you don't really want to quote it at strangers but it's just so tempting.

I suspect I read out bits of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but finally made myself stop because my mother was going to read it and I didn't want to spoil it for her.

Does anyone else feel compelled to read books aloud to people?

Language about language

Somehow or other, I seem to have come by a small collection of books about language. All have been sitting on my shelves unread for quite some time, but I feel it's time for a bit of nonfiction and so I have decided to read one of them.

I love historical linguistics. I would be seriously considering studying linguistics in college, except that I hate the bits of it that sound like science. Mostly language interests me on a historical and societal level. Three of these books are about historical linguistics, though for the most part treated in a less academic-sounding way. Two are about English, one about French.

The Story of French, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, I bought last year on sale in the bookstore of Reed College in Portland. I started reading it, though I didn't get very far and stopped, but it was certainly interesting. The authors are Canadian, one of them French Canadian and the other having learned French in college in Montreal. The book begins with the origins of French in Latin, and will no doubt be fascinating to me when I get around to it.

The next two books in this collection have amusingly similar titles, though from what I can tell, slightly different topics. They are Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling, by David Wolman and The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, by Bill Bryson. The first of these I have in uncorrected proof form, which suggests that my mother brought it home from work, but I have no idea where the other one came from. Righting the Mother Tongue seems to focus mostly on the various quirks of English spelling (which admittedly form rather a large topic, being very quirky). The Mother Tongue looks more comprehensive (and has frighteningly tiny print), but similarly fun.

The last book of this collection (though I have a suspicion I have more floating around which could be added) is The Ode Less Travelled, by, interestingly, Stephen Fry. This is a bit different from the other books, as it is not about linguistics, but poetry. It is a guide to understanding poetry and its various forms and terms, though given the author I suspect it's rather funny. I like poetry and read it somewhat regularly, but I do confess myself fairly unfamiliar with the names for things.

You are reading this, so evidently you like reading about reading, but do you read about language? I find it fascinating, and have read several books on the subject. Simon Winchester's Oxford English Dictionary-related books come to mind, and I once read a thick textbook-like thing all about historical linguistics. One often doesn't stop to thing of the individual parts of a word, or what it means more literally than its accepted meaning, so I like being reminded of this, and learning new facts about it. And I'd definitely be on the lookout for new books on linguistics, if anyone has any to recommend.

I need a new bus book (requirements: smallish paperback, need not keep itself open as the house book must to be read at meals), and one of these is destined to be it. I'm afraid The Story of French and The Ode Less Travelled are both ruled out as being too large and heavy, so it's between the mother tongue duo. I'm thinking it'll be Bill Bryson's take on the matter.