Books

On the subway to and from work, I've been reading this excellent book called When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda, about "the parts of speech, for better or worse." Who knew such a thing was possible: a fun book about grammar! It reassures me to read stuff like this because of the difficulty I have with language. This sense that the languages I speak are all borrowed and ill-fitting. I struggle valiantly without ever quite achieving fluent, idiomatic expression. The helpless striving of a rube cousin with aspirations. So I appreciate the help.

What happened was, dusting out my head, I seem to find fluky names there all the time. Sometimes I investigate.

For some reason, I was looking up one of them on wikipedia — Michiko Kakutani, the infamously censorious New York Times literary critic — and there was this link to an article by this guy Ben Yagoda, a former journalist and prof. somewhere on the East coast. It was very humorous slam, but not mean, just cheeky and articulate and insightful. So I looked him up at the National Library and found a book he wrote about the history of autobiographies and this grammar thing. Both were great.

It's one of the things I love about big libraries: that there are all these books lying there, mostly mute, turgid, irrelevant, but in the midst of all this weight, lying dormant for years sometimes or decades, some happy flotsam: the testimony to somebody's intelligence and warmth and erudition, there waiting for you to pick it up. Serendipity! (A word Yagoda explains was coined by Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century and based on the title of a fairy tale: The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which were always making discoveries...)

Also, I'm continuing my explorations of children's novels and "early readers". I though Loser by Jerry Spinelly was a little masterpiece and I actually liked it better that The Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, in the same vain. The couple of other Spinelli books I've read so far, I liked, but not as much. I found the illustrated Clementine books pretty charming, both the illustrations and the text, but can't really say the same for the Judy Moody, or the Ivy and Bean series, but then I'm not an eight year old girl so what do I know?