Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little

Things I love: words. Words and I are very good friends, if you know what I mean, which is that I really like learning about them. Where they came from, what they do, how funny they can be. See: my love of a children's book called Word Snoop. And this book is better, because it is for adults and therefore includes swear words. I am a big fan of a well-placed swear word, and Little clearly has practice in this.

I thought this book was going to be about something like the vagaries of translation, because of the title, which references a terrible transliteration of the words "Coca-Cola" into Mandarin. But actually, that's just a bit that's in the conclusion, and the rest of the book is EVEN BETTER, because it talks about verbs and modifiers and nouns and how nouns are pretty set in their ways in English, but how you have to go and decline them in other languages, and how some languages have a really fun time pluralizing nouns, and how the Bantu language family isn't content with just two or three noun classes (aka genders), no, no, how about 16? Or 22? I kind of want to die just thinking about it.

And Little feels that pain, and loves it! About noun class, she writes, "Grammatical gender often appears to be based on just the right combination of reason and utterly arbitrary dart-throwing monkey logic to ensure maximum confusion," which is SO TRUE, at least with what I remember of my French.

Little also throws in all these little sidebars of awesomeness, which highlight things that are really neat about various languages. So in a sidebar about noun tense, for instance, Little talks about how the Guaraní language adds endings to verbs to signify tense. There's a past-tense marker and a future-tense marker, which is cool, but EVEN COOLER is that you can combine them. Little's example uses presidents, so with this combination of endings you can get a word for Al Gore: mburuvicharangue, or "what we thought was going to be a future president but then turned out not to be." How cool is that?

I will grant that this might not be that cool to you — my husband certainly gave me funny looks about that last example and others that I shared with him. But if you've ever suffered through a conjugation in your life, you will probably find something to like in here.

Recommendation: An absolute must for lovers of words or languages or humorous anecdotes.

Rating: 10/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

So... remember when I read Catching Fire and I thought it was pretty crappy but I was willing to let the third book decide my feelings and I said please for the love of goodness count me out of the love story?

Well. I have now read the third book. And I am just not pleased.

I will grant that it is, like the others, a quick, engaging read. I really wanted to know what was going to happen to these kids, even if I didn't care about the kids themselves so much. And there's definitely a lot more of the fun action-y goodness of the first novel than there was in the second. So these are good things.

But, I was amazed at how much I didn't care about the characters. I cared about the situations they were in, sure, but you could have swapped a character here and there and I would have cared about those situations the same amount. And even then, sometimes a situation would get me all interested and then it would be incredibly anticlimactic and I felt a little cheated. Specifically, there is a point when one character gives some very explicit instructions to another character, which would have been very interesting if said instructions had been followed, but they were not, and yet nothing comes of it. Nowhere do we find out why the instructions might have been given; nowhere do we find out even why they weren't followed. Nothing. I felt like I did with those darn spiders from The Name of the Wind, only repeated several times in a much shorter book.

Luckily, that love story business that I hated so darn much takes a bit of a vacation in this book — there's some appropriate worrying at the beginning, but then it tapers off — except that luckily turns into "annoyingly" because there is a really stupid reason that the love story falls apart. But then, definitely annoyingly, the love story comes back at the end, albeit in a much more depressing form.

And then there is an epilogue, and you know how I feel about epilogues (if you don't: I despise them). Though I will admit that this is one of the more unexpected epilogues of those that I have read, and therefore I have a little bit of respect for it. A little.

All in all, book and series? Meh.

Recommendation: Read this if you've read the other two. If you've only read the first, just live with that, you'll be happier. If you've not read any, well, you should of course start with the first one. If you want to. I am very ambivalent about this series.

Rating: 6/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Chrisbookarama
At Home With Books
Persnickety Snark
Jules' Book Reviews
books i done read
...and all of their respective brothers.

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Musing Mondays — Book Club Picks

Today's Musing Mondays question is... "If your book group asked you to bring two (2) suggestions for group reads to your next meeting, what two books would you suggest? Why?"

What an excellent question! There have been rather a few things that I have read lately where I've been like, "Darn it! I should have waited and suggested this for my book club!" so this gives me a chance to recommend them to my delightful book club friends anyway. But just two? Let me think...

Okay, well, first is definitely Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, not just because it's a fantabulous book. But mostly because of that. But also because I think there's a lot to discuss — there's the fact that it's Victorian-inspired, which invites comparisons galore, and there are the plot twists, which are well set up and well executed and can start a discussion or five on morals and ethics and getting what you've got coming and all sorts of other things.

The second... hmm. I'll go with The Black Minutes, by Martín Solares, because it's a book that really needs to be discussed. There's so much going on in that book that you can't possibly catch it all in one reading. It's also good for a book club because it's one of them foreign novels that people (including myself) don't tend to read, so you get to broaden the horizons of several readers all in one go!

But neither of these will be my next book club pick... unless I can't come up with something I haven't read by the time it's my turn to choose. :)

Read-a-thon!!

So I signed up for this 24-hour read-a-thon thing again, because it is AWESOME and I am probably INSANE. On October 9, I will be waking up early, grabbing a giant bowl of Cheerios, and settling into one of the many comfy chairs in my house for some super-awesome reading fun times to begin at 8am EDT (sidenote: Why on earth do we have Daylight Savings for nearly eight whole months? We are a strange nation) and end 24 hours later, though I died after just 20 hours last year and will probably do the same this year!

What I need from you lovelies is recommendations for books! The Read-a-thon is really not the time for 700-page novels or things that are difficult to read; it is for the reading of silly books and short books and books that I might not read if I had anything better to do.

Last year I ended up with a library-based mystery, three kids books, and a super-awesome end-of-the-world YA novel. Oh, and a second round of a delightful music-based audiobook.

Can I do better this year? I hope so! What have you got for me?

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Another frame story! This is becoming a theme, it seems...

And darn this frame story all to heck. I picked up this book not knowing too much about it except that a) I keep seeing people mentioning it as a pretty awesome book and b) it was published in 2007 and therefore necessary for my Countdown Challenge. So when it started in all epic fantasy with its innkeeper with a shady past and creepy spider things that are not demons but are probably something more terrifying, I was like, "All right. This will be fun." AND THEN YOU NEVER FIND OUT ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THE SPIDERS.

Ahem.

One of my pet peeves in epic fantasy is this conceit of showing the reader a gun in Act I and then waiting until act, like, XVII to have it go off. This is only meant to be a three-book series, so I suppose there won't be that much waiting, but UGH.

Anyway, after the whole spiders thing happens, it turns out that one of the characters is some famous scribe who writes down the lives of other famous people, and also that the innkeeper with the shady past is a formerly Very Famous Person now languishing in Do You Remember That Guy land. After the scribe works some psychological magic on the innkeeper, the innkeeper is like, "Fine. I will tell you my story. It will take three days. Hope you don't have carpal tunnel."

This book is Day One of the story-telling, and here the story veers away from Epic Fantasy and settles into a more Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire land, with the long rambling stories that don't really have anything driving them (see: Quidditch World Cup). It is also similar in that most of Kvothe's story here takes place at an Academy, where Kvothe is like the smartest kid there, but waaay too cocky, and also very poor, and he's like Hermione and Harry and Ron all rolled into one, with even a vicious Draco to play against.

But... I liked the Harry Potter book. For all the long rambling quidditch and the ridiculous school antics, I at least knew that something was going to happen, and the things that happen generally lead toward that something. The Name of the Wind is just a set of stories about Kvothe's life, from being a gypsy kid to going to the Academy to trying to track down the thing what killed his parents. But there's never anything really driving the action, and for all I hoped that there would be spiders in the end, there were not. I'm sure that this is all building up toward something in the second and third books, but I'm the kind of reader who has to have at least some little morsel now, if you're going to keep me interested for another couple of 700-page books. And I don't feel like I got that.

Recommendation: Don't go into this expecting classic epic fantasy, but read this if you have the patience for that sort of story that's going to ramble on for a few books.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
medieval bookworm
reading is my superpower

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Fine, fine.

Remember how I said that my new library was not spoiling me? It's getting serious, guys.

I had to run over to the library the other day to pay a 20-cent fine. Was it because I am afraid of fines or am used to not having any? Ha! I'm pretty sure I still have fines at two libraries in Ohio. (Shhh, don't tell!) But I had to pay this fine, because the library here blocks your card if you have any fines at all, which means no checking books out, no putting holds on anything, and no renewing books. Which of course means that there's no way to stop your fine from accruing until you go in and return the book, at which point you need to pay the fine anyway because you can't do anything else until you do!

When I talked to someone on the phone about this before dashing over to pay my 20 cents, he said that they're going to change this soon. THANK GOODNESS.

Interview with the Vampire

This movie had been in our Netflix instant queue for a while, so when Scott and I had our movie day with Halloween and The Core (which is only scary in how terrible it is), we threw in this vampire love-fest as well.

I haven't read Interview with the Vampire. I'm sure that someone has and will tell me that the book is way better than the movie, but I certainly enjoyed the movie itself. Though it could have used more Christian Slater. And less gross blood everywhere, but I'm sure that was half the point.

The story, as far as I can tell, is that this journalist, Slater, stumbles upon a vampire, Brad Pitt, who decides to tell the journalist his life story. The story is not very pretty — Pitt has a crappy life and for whatever reason is picked by the vampire Tom Cruise to become a vampire himself, which is even crappier than being a vampire usually is, because there just aren't that many around. Pitt realizes that he's made a pretty bad life decision, and tries to be as un-vampire-like as possible, but eventually he succumbs and does, like, the worst thing ever in nomming on the neck of a sweet little Kirsten Dunst, who Tom Cruise then turns into a vampire for shiggles. And then even more bad stuff happens.

I guess my one complaint about the movie is that I keep referring to the characters by the actors' names... I remember that Cruise was Lestat, and Pitt was Louie or Louis or something, but I can't for the life of me remember what Dunst's character's name was (a quick trip to Wikipedia tells me it was Claudia). I don't know if it's just the power of a famous name or a lack of caring about the characters. I think it's probably the latter. But the story is good, and interesting to someone whose experience with vampires is pretty much limited to loving Buffy and rolling her eyes through the first Twilight book. So I think it's an overall good time.

Recommendation: Watch this if you like any of the aforementioned actors, or Antonio Banderas, who is also in this movie. Or if you are interested in what the "real" life of a vampire might be like. Or if you really like the look of blood dripping down everyone's chin. Ew.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge)