false 40 158 151 true 5916765 read 2 true 218472 currently-reading 5 true 218471 to-read 15 false 225063 favorites 13 false 225058 non-fiction 11 false 222634 spanish 11 false 401871 linguistics 10 false 222635 poetry 6 false 256836 abandoned http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61096650 Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater (Hardcover) by Matthew Amster-Burton
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/59017401 to: A Tale of Two Cities (Paperback) by Charles Dickens
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/59017291 Dreams from My Father (Paperback) by Barack Obama
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/24878062 to: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Hardcover) by Steven Pinker
bookshelves: linguistics
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/46782132 to: Elephant Rocks: Poems (Paperback) by Kay Ryan
This was my first exposure to Kay Ryan -- I got it after hearing her on NPR after she became poet laureate. I was moved by the poem "Niagara" on the radio, which is indeed quite a nice poem.

There are a number of very nice poems in this book -- she has a sense of dark humor undergirding her writing that I very much appreciate (it reminds me of another favorite of mine -- Mark Strand).

The one complaint I have with her is her occasional use of overt rhyme, which just felt sloppy to me. Like many modern poets, she can be quite crisp and clean with the occasional slant-rhyme and the neat lining up of more subtle sound-patterns. Occasionally though she'll lead of a poem with a feminine rhyme or another strong "rhymey" rhyme pattern. Now I actually love structure in poems, but these little plays never gave-way to a full on rhyme scheme or structure, so they just felt like mistakes to me (much as rhyme in prose feels like a mistake). ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/46781634 to: The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World (Hardcover) by Charles Yang
I was looking for a book focused on child learning. This book was actually more like an intro to linguistics with a child-learning slant. I did learn some more things about child language acquisition, but mainly I got to get Yang's version of the story of modern linguistics.

If you're looking for a first text, Pinker's books are certainly more engaging and better written, but I do have a fondness for Yang's writing, and he doesn't have any crackpot theories of his own to advance (like Pinker's crazy-ass reading of "could care less"). The one theory of his own Yang pushes here is his variant on the parameter theory of language, and I think it's a reasonable and interesting one.

So, overall, a pretty good read. If I were a parent interested in learning the basics of linguistics, I'd go with this book. If you're like me and you've already read a lot of popular linguistics materials, you might do well to sit this one out. The one place he goes substantially deeper than Pinker is in the parametric theory of language. If I were choosing between this book and the "Atom of Language" book that's out there on the parameter theory, I'd choose Yang's -- there's a good bit of material that was confusingly presented in the "Atom" book that was made much clearer here (though I did learn a lot about Mohawk from the other book...) ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1973341 to: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Revised and Expanded Edition) by Steven D. Levitt
In truth, I was disappointed by freakonomics. There was never enough discussion of the economics behind the ideas to really convince me of the correlations they were discussing, often what they said was not all that surprising, and I found the lack of structure made finishing it feel arbitrary (like the book could have ended a chapter sooner or later with no difference). Particularly disappointing was the chapter on babynames, which proved totally uninteresting.

Given the subject of the chapter, there was remarkably little information about how naming affects success beyond some pretty basic and predictable observations.

But, to be fair, I've been reading and enjoying the freakonomics blog for some time, and that may have had the affect of making me internalize most of their insights/methodology, so that what was surprising about the book wasn't surprising to me, and I was left finding that there was less meat around the bone than I would have hoped (but this is true of this genre of pop-nonfiction generally -- it's certainly true of Gladwell's books, for example).

All that said, I think freakonomics might be a better blog than a book -- they're ideas are interesting enough for just that attention span, and when they stretch it to a chapter, rather than getting lots more detail and data and convincing insight, you just get more text. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16230855 to: Cat's Eye (Paperback) by Margaret Atwood
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16230822 to: The Jungle (Paperback) by Upton Sinclair
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