by Kelly Pickerill
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Though there’s been so much David Mitchell Love at Lemuria over the past few months I’ve just now ventured to read him. After listening to the relative merits of each of his books — I’m pretty sure between the two, Susie and John P., they’ve read them all — I chose carefully with which novel I would begin to develop my reading relationship with Mr. Mitchell. I picked Black Swan Green because the narrator, a thirteen year old boy with a stammer, won my heart just hearing about him. Mitchell is a master at capturing the mood of adolescence and this book is just plain delightful to read.
Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher
My nerd love of language prompted me to pick Deutscher’s first book up, The Unfolding of Language, a few years ago. Deutscher is decidedly not in the camp with linguists like Noam Chomsky who believe grammar is an innate skill, and in this book he presents an argument for the evolution of all languages from a proto-european ancestor language.
In his new book, Deutscher quibbles with the general consensus again, this time presenting evidence that language can affect culture. The cocktail conversation that you hear about this theory, that the French are lovers because of their language for example, he rightly calls silly. But he does present a good argument for subtle ways that our language affects the way we perceive our world.
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