Recommended Read Deck, Jeff and Benjamin D. Herson. The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010. [ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59108-1] So what do you do if you want to change the world and your superpower is a knowledge of grammar? If you’re Jeff Deck, you climb […]
Recommended Read Ghomeshi, Jila. Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010. [ISBN-13: 978-1894037-44-0] If English is going to hell in a hand basket, how is it that there are so many rigidly prescriptive grammar guides in bookstores? I sometimes wonder about this when hunting between such guides for books like […]
Recommended Read Bartlett, Allison Hoover. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2009. [ISBN-13: 978-0-14-3116824-9] The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is the story of John Charles Gilkey, an inveterate rare-book thief; Ken Sanders, the rare-book dealer and […]
Recommended Read Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. [ISBN-13: 978-0-06-093384-5] The argument that grounds Proust and the Squid is that the human mind isn’t hardwired for reading the way it is for speech. While the average child left in earshot of others’ speech […]
Recommended Read Crystal, David. Txtng: The gr8 db8. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2008. [ISBN-13: 978-0-19-957133-8] One of the most notable things about texting is the impressive furor that has accompanied its meteoric rise in popularity over the past ten years or so. David Crystal recounts some of the many dire warnings texting has occassioned, quoting […]
Recommended Read Abley, Mark. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008. [ISBN-13: 978-0-679-31366-3] Take a moment to be astonished at how much English has changed in the 600-odd years since Langland wrote Peirs Plowman: In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne, I schop me into a shroud, as […]
Recommended Read Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. [ISBN-13: 978-0-06-077705-0] Seeing Francine Prose speak last week galvanized me into finally posting on a book of hers I read last winter. Reading Like a Writer is […]
Recommended Read Kenneally, Christine. The First Word. Toronto: Viking, 2007. [ISBN-13: 978-0-670-03490-1] Who spoke the first word of human language? When was that first word uttered? What did that speaker say and why? Linguists outlawed these questions in 1866 when the Société de Linguistique of Paris declared a moratorium on the topic of how and […]
Recommended Read Poerksen, Uwe. Jutta Mason and David Cayley, trans. Plastic Words. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1995. [ISBN-10: 0-271-01476-8] Plastic words are words so pliable that their use in almost any context tends to sound authoritative and important. However, these words are inhabited more by what the listener wishes to hear than what […]
Recommended Read Chappell, Warren and Robert Bringhurst. A Short History of the Printed Word. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc., 1999. [ISBN-10: 0-88179-154-7] A Short History of the Printed Word is an impressively complete history of print and its astonishing cultural ascendency, beginning with the invention of moveable type in eleventh-century China and ending with […]