The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond

This book compares traditional societies (which have dominated the vast majority of human history) to state societies like the United States in order to think about the ways in which we can learn from traditional societies in the Western world. While Diamond acknowledges that we may not want to return to many aspects of traditional societies (particularly their approaches to war and strangers), we might adopt (or re-adopt) some of their practices selectively, such as bilingualism, forms of conflict resolution, and forms of child-rearing, and pay attention to other practices in order to modify our lives for the better (for example, we could cut back on the salt and sugar in our diets to reduce illnesses like hypertension and diabetes). I found the book very entertaining (although the main argument was repeated so many times in similar form that it got a little repetitive).

The Conjure Stories by Charles W. Chesnutt

These stories are told in a frame narrative: a white couple, John and Annie, move from Ohio to North Carolina in an attempt to improve her health and to make money farming. When they arrive in the South, they find their plantation is home to Uncle Julius, an African American who was born into slavery and who tells a series of stories about life before the Civil War. Although Uncle Julius may seem like an Uncle Remus figure, John quickly realizes that Julius's stories have a point: he tells the stories as a way of attempting to manipulate John and Annie. While John sees the smaller point, he lacks the emotional intelligence to see the larger ones: Julius's stories expose that although slavery is over, many of the same inequalities still persist in the South. The stories are folktales in which conjure features heavily: many have enslaved and white characters seeking redress for wrongs through magical means (metamorphoses into animals, trees, and other people are common). This conjure (which echoes the Latin for with the law) metaphorically demonstrates what slavery did legally and what Jim Crow statutes did quasi-legally: they turned people into things and established color lines which it might mean death to cross. Julius's stories invite John and the reader to transgress and cross these lines, to imagine what life is like outside of ourselves. While John has difficulty seeing this offer, much of the hope in the stories is that the reader can do what John cannot.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe

This novel follows the adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, after he stows away on a whaling ship and finds himself in the midst of one disaster after another. Mutiny, piracy, cannibalism, and betrayal are all part of this story. Although the plot is wild, this book is more interesting for its unconventional form. At times narrative, at times journal, it ends abruptly--apparently the death of Pym himself (an event too well-known, according to the editorial "Poe" voice, to need further explanation) has cut off the explanation of how Pym and Dirk Peters escape their latest predicament (and why the color white is so terrifying on Antarctica). While the story is a little out-of-control (one problem piles onto another), it poses some very interesting questions about race, community, and narration.

The Valley of Horses by Jean Auel

This book alternates between continuing Ayla's story after she leaves the Clan and has to fend for herself and telling the story of Jondalar, who leaves his family on a Journey with his brother. I enjoyed moving back and forth between these two characters, despite the fact that they don't meet till the last third of the book. There was a lot of thought about domestication in this book (Ayla, through chance and her good-hearted nature, ends up with both a cave lion and a horse), as well as communication and language. I think I liked the first one better, but I'm definitely going to want to see what happens to Ayla and Jondalar next.

Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

This book collects short fiction in a variety of forms. Some of the stories are as short as a sentence (a favorite in this category is "Collaboration with Fly": "I put the word on the page, but he added the apostrophe"), and others are longer meditations. There's a fair amount of engagement with grammar, words, and the meaning of language, in addition to the literary tradition and canon. Two of my favorites from this genre are "Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho" (a brilliant meditation what we can and may get out of reading Beckett) and "Walk" (an encounter at a conference between a translator of Proust [presumably a version of Davis herself, since the story quotes her Swann's Way] and an unappreciative critic). Finally, there are the almost-scientific accounts of characters in various aspects of their lives (Mrs. D.'s attempt to find a suitable maid, a study of the long lives of Vi and Helen (with addenda about Hope), the letters a fourth grade class writes to Stephen who's in the hospital, and the changes that a baby brings, for example). Many of the more-sustained stories (and even some of the shorter ones) think a lot about family--how we relate to each other, what we owe each other, and how we change each other. While some of the stories are more effective than others, all in all they provoke thought--especially about family and language.

Collected Poems, 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott

This collection of poetry shows off Walcott's virtuosity and skill. He has a fine ear for the English language and shows its richness and its beauty throughout this volume. Walcott also uses his poetry to think through colonialism, exile, and the United States empire in really productive ways, turning to classical myth and religion on one hand and the rhythms of Calypso and the Caribbean on the other to help with the work.

Embassytown by China Miéville

This book was very difficult to get into because the world it presents is so different from our own, but richly rewarding in the way it played out. Avice is an immerser, someone who can travel between the manchmals of the worlds we live in normally through the immer, a substance that makes most humans sick. She uses this talent to escape Embassytown, the backwater trading post remarkable for the Hosts, a species that can only speak Language in which only the truth is possible, but not before she becomes a simile in Language. When she returns with her linguist husband, she finds tensions growing over language and the doubled Ambassadors who go between the human colonists and the hosts. This story has a fantastic plot (I don't want to say too much about the conflict, because a lot of the pleasure in the story comes from figuring it out), and not only develops characters that you'll care about, but also reflects on the nature of colonialism, communication, and power. This book was a fantastic read.

Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting it Right by Bill Bryson

I found this book to comprise a helpful collection of entries on style, usage, and grammar. While some of the entries, as Bryson himself admits, are governed more by Bryson's preference than other authorities, Bryson's clear justifications and entertaining prose demonstrate just how seriously each entry might be taken. Bryson has full respect for the following facts: English is not a language governed by an academy (as French and Spanish are), and use and form change over time. The book may be more helpful as a reference than enjoyable as a straight read, but I learned a lot from this book and would recommend to those people looking to improve their style.

Globish by Robert McCrum

This book tells the history of the English language and contends that in its many forms, it is now Globish, the new lingua franca, but one with more staying power than Latin or any previous language because of its openness to change, its use in business, and the role of technology in propagating it. The book is a fascinating read, and I can tell the author feels passionately about the language--as the book is full of examples of English at its most eloquent and powerful.

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson

This book reflects on the English language through history. Although I don't agree with all of Bryson's points (at one time he says that people like English because its spelling and pronunciation are uncomplicated), he does a fine job covering the basics of how English was formed (the ur-moment of the Norman Conquest from which Anglo-Saxon and Norman slowly grew together into something new), but for me, the really new and interesting parts focused on spelling and pronunciation and tracing back their roots to find the sources of the weird and wonderful ways in which English works. There's also reflection on translation and the future of English (in questions like: Will English go the way of Latin and split into vernaculars? but also questions relating to immigration and bilingual education in the US) that I found thought-provoking. Not the most scintillating thing I've ever read, but I'm glad I got the chance to read it.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This book uses a broad approach to explain why some human societies are able to conquer others. For Diamond, it all comes back to environment. He contends that some environments are more conducive (both in their climate and in the naturally occurring potential crops and domestic animals) for food-production and farming than others. Human societies in these environments, then, are more likely to become farmers and sedentary than mobile hunter-gathers. Farmers, in turn, develop diseases (from close living with animals), systems of writing (because food can be stockpiled allowing for people to do other things than worry about their next meal all the time), complex systems of government, and metallurgy and other technologies. I applaud this book for its ambition and its style (very easy to read and entertaining). I could see it skipping and over-simplifying in places, though, and I think its broad scope is thus both a strength and a weakness.

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

In this book C.S. Lewis takes his readers on a trip to Malacandra, a type of utopia where beings are kinder to each other because there's more than one type of sentinent creature. I really enjoyed the parts of this book that explored philology and the nature of language--particularly the part where Ransom is beginning to learn the hrossa language. I also liked the author's note at the end, which gave the whole thing a meta-fictional slant--Ransom complains to CS Lewis about all the things Lewis omitted from the book, thereby including those very things, at least partially. This book has a very negative view of the way that humans treat each other (the idea is that we live on Thulcandra, the silent planet, which is not connected to the higher heavenly order because of a bent world spirit), but I thought it was beautifully written and overall quite enjoyable.

The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico by Miguel León-Portilla

This book anthologizes Nahautl writings about the conquest of Mexico in order to create a smooth narrative telling the events from an indigenous point of view. It's important to remember that this book has been produced through multiple layers of mediation: most of the accounts in this book were written in Nahautl and then translated into Spanish and from there into English. Furthermore, the book's translator freely admits to wanting a smooth read, so much so that paragraphs have been dropped and words changed. Furthermore, the book is anthologized, so rather than following one account, many accounts are excerpted. I would have particularly liked to get more of the poetry (not to mention some explanation of how Nahautl poetry works: is it rhymed? does it use alliteration? what about meter?).

While most of the book is clearly a native account (both through the clarity of the names that Spaniards seemed to have trouble getting right in their own accounts and in the perspective), there are moments when Spanish intervention is clear (for example, most of these accounts are written in alphabetical Nahautl, taught to the natives by Spanish priests, and at times there are references to Spanish places and the Catholic faith in ways that strike me as unusual for natives). The Aztecs don't hestitate in admitting that they first saw the Spaniards as Gods (specifically Cortés was supposed to be Queztalcoatl), but they also quickly see how the Spaniards are debased by their obession with finding gold.

I was also interested in moments of translation within the texts: most of the time, the texts just record discussions, but sometimes they explicitly show the presence of La Malinche (Doña Marina) who translated between Nahautl and Mayan, and a Spaniard who translated between Mayan and Spanish. Often these accounts portray La Malinche as siding with the Spaniards, although they don't necessarily hold this allegiance against her.

Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas by Doris Sommer

This book explores gaps and lacunae in various American texts. Sommer makes a case for reading difficulties in the text as signs of particularity that should be respected instead of as something to be deconstructed and then pushed right over. Rather than the modernist difficulties that showed the reader that his or her work was valuable, these difficulties mark moments when readers ought to realize their status as outsiders. Sommer gives a number of different types of gaps and not telling. I thought her most effective chapters were on Beloved and translation and court cases. I would have liked a conclusion that tied things together more effectively in the end, but in some senses, that might be a lacuna of its own necessary to this text.

Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa

This book is a hodge-podge of forms and ideas. In its mixtures of form (essays, poetry, history, memoir, and myth are forms that come most immediately to mind) and of languages (English, Spanish, and Nahautl) it both demonstrates the problems of living in the borderlands and starts to demonstrate ways that we--by code-switching, by listening, by acceptance--can live best. I particularly liked the sections on the borderlands and on language. Anzaldúa doesn't hold any punches, and a working knowledge of Spanish will help the reader.

Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations edited by Doris Sommer

In this collection of essays contributors begin with a rigorous theoretical exploration of bilingualism and then move to specific examples of how it plays out. The first three essays take as a starting point that in some senses monolingualism does not and cannot exist. Then, essays begin reading various locations and texts to investigate questions of bilingualism in practice. Most helpful to me were the essays dealing with John Sayles's films Lone Star and Hombres Armada and Malinche. I also appreciated that the essays went beyond English-Spanish binaries. Although not all the essays were equally good, it was a great collection