52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2006: a review

See the rest of this year’s listings • What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?

2006 was in some ways a disappointing year for this meme. My hope had been to read as much as two times the stated number (i.e. 104 books in 52 weeks), but I had enough stumbling blocks along the way to severely hamper my progress.

Without further ado, I present my year’s total:

68 books; 22’904 pages

This is 4 more books and 1’486 more pages than last year.

I will definitely be doing this again in 2007, and hopefully I can once again beat my record, pathetic though it may be.

§1595 · December 31, 2006 · 1 comment · Tags: ,

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow by Mark Monmonier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Year: 2006
Pages: 230

I stumbled upon this book by chance, and after reading the cover flap, I was reminded of a section in Bill Bryson’s Made in America (funny how everything seems to center around Bill Bryson’s books) in which he talks about some of the dirty place names that were given during the westward expansion of the United States.

The informational length of Squaw Tit is relatively short, but it’s a dense book: it actually reads more like a long paper than a book. Oh, it’s interesting, to be sure, but doesn’t have the easy readability that it might have if a more talented writer were at the helm.

The book deals with two primary points. The first is the obscene naming of local features in the early days of America—including words like ‘nigger,’ ‘squaw’. Monmonier talks about the forces that brought about such namings as well as the gradual process of changing or purging such epithets from government maps, which is considerably more difficult than it might sound, since a fine line must be walked between local usage (esp. w.r.t. tribal land), states’ rights, and the Fed).

The second part strays into international territory and global conflicts about naming—for instance, whether the Sea of Japan should be labeled as such or as East Sea. Monmonier also covers the use of maps as a way to suppress and persecute (something a bit more common in politically turbulent countries like Russia or Turkey). Again, it’s incredibly interesting, but very dry. Monmonier is a brilliant cartographer and a very smart man, but if it wasn’t for the inherently titillating subject of his book—not to mention the ribald title—this book would never wedge its way onto the “featured” shelf at the library, which is where I found it.

§1593 · December 31, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: , , ,

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
Publisher: Scribner
Year: 2004
Pages: 272

I generally stay away from trendy magazines like SPIN, for which Chuck Klosterman is a senior editor. However, the more I read about its snarkiness, the more I wanted to read it, and so I found myself biting the bullet and getting it anyway.

Chuck Klosterman’s writing reminds me of a lot of things. His droll self-deprecation and dry wit hearkens to writers like David Rakoff (and to a lesser extent, David Sedaris), but the way in which he takes a seemingly shallow topic (for instance, Pamela Anderson) and ends up spinning a thesis that deals heavily the the abstract and the literary (in this case, he iconifies her as modern sexuality, but in a completely non-specious way), reminds me very much of David Foster Wallace, but without all the footnotes.

He walks a fine line, always, between mocking hyperliterate intellectuals and being one, and it is this, too, that reminds me of Wallace, whose hypocrisy in this regard doesn’t fail to impress me. But Klosterman is a consummate cynic, in relatively stark contrast to Wallace, and his opening essay in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a lamentation of the culture that has produced unrealistic expectations of romance and relationships (he blames John Cusack and Coldplay). Five years ago, I would have been jumping up and down in empathy, but of course I don’t react so viscerally anymore, though certainly I can agree with much of what he has to say, intellectually.

As genuinely intelligent as Klosterman’s essays are, they’re really more funny than informative, and I think perhaps that’s the point—his prevailing interest seems to be irony, and so it doesn’t fail to escape him that he is writing a “low culture manifesto” in the manner of a scholar (albeit one with a predilection for the word ‘fuck’). From internet pornography (and its general preoccupation with amateurs rather than models) to soccer (he hates it) to tribute bands, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is not only a pleasure to read, but it’s actual pretty damn funny, too. Klosterman has a real talent for mixing the right proportions of humor, intellect, and fluffy rhetoric.

§1589 · December 28, 2006 · 2 comments · Tags: , ,

Alpha Beta

Alpha Beta Alpha Beta by John Man
Publisher: Wiley
Year: 2001
Pages: 320

I borrowed this particular book from my friend Abou, who is a big Classics buff, and who raved about it after buying it from the bargain book shelf at Barnes & Noble. Because this is the exact same way I came upon Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard, I thought I should read it. I happen to be a linguistics buff myself, so I was very interested.

And a little surprised, as it turned out. The book wasn’t quite what I expected, having much more to do with archæology and anthropology than directly with orthography and the alphabet. There is a good reason for this, of course, since the adoption of an alphabetical system (as opposed to the pictographic language written in China, for instance) had very much to do with who conquered whom, as well as shifts in markets, cultures, attitudes, and governments.

I was only surprised because I expected something more of a technical, scholarly discussion of the nature of the alphabet, and what I received was an anecdote-laden history of the alphabet’s origins, more in the style of Bill Bryson than Albert Baugh.

Man takes the stance that the alphabet was a particular cultural phenomenon that need a particular environment to take root—namely, a burgeoning civilization on the edges of an established one—and speaks of it in terms of Richard Dawkins’ “meme,” a “gene” of information that is passed from one generation to another, in this case bidirectionally.

One of the neat features of the book is the appendices, which offer timelines for the development of different alphabets, as well as an extensive table that offers information about various alphabets, including their cultural context and phonetic comparison to the modern Latin alphabet. In fact, as you will find out if you read the book, we can trace the origins of conceptual alphabet back to Egyptian hieroglyphic or its script counterpart, hieratic, and then through various Semitic variations, and finally into the Greeks, and then Etruscans and Latins. Sometimes he veers into conjecture, but none of it is specious seriously pushed. Man just likes to have fun with his topic, which in my experience is one of the best ways to teach it.

§1586 · December 27, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , ,

Wednesday’s Word: tchotchke

tchotchke
n. a trinket or knickknack

You just have to love Yiddish words—bupkis (lit. “beans” or perhaps “goat droppings”; fig. “nothing”), schmuck (from shmok (שמאָק), lit. “penis”; fig. a general pejorative), klutz, schlep, and schlong are all common to SAE now—and this one is no different, though I hadn’t heard of it until now.

Pronounced CHOCH-kuh, this word came to us late (the second half of the 20th century, in fact) from the Yiddish tshatshke (טשאַטשקע), which itself came from the Polish czaczko. The etymological lineage retains the same meaning throughout.

I’m a little curious as to how we were still borrowing Yiddish words as late as 1970, but my suspicion is that it was used ironically—Yiddish is so uncool, it’s cool—and ended up catching on enough to become part of the vocabulary.

§1588 · December 27, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags:

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