What Are You Reading?

Just finished reading Dead Run by Dan Schultz

Dead Run by Dan Schultz

Lynne: What specifically would you like to know about the young readers and those that write for them?

Just finished Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy, and now I am reading the the trilogy by one of his translator's Ken Liu. I just finished the second book of The Dandelion Dynasty, it is titled Wall of Storms. This trilogy has been described as a Chinese Game of Thrones, I think it's better than that.

Bad Climber -- Just finished reading Dead Run by Dan Schultz, a fascinating book about the biggest manhunt in western history after a trio of militia/enviro whack jobs kill one cop and injure a couple of others. This was back in 1998. It's very well written. Get after it.

Timid Toprope: I cannot understand someone not willing nor interested to read novels (fiction). 

God is Not Great, C. Hitchens.

Three of mine which might fill you in to the different styles of rock climbing are:
PO Wall tr, Merriam PK tr and Beggars Buttress tr.
These and some others will give you an idea of how climbers interact and approach this nonsense.

“Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him.”

― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Confessions of an Idiot--autobiography of "Douggs" McDougal--rad BASE nut.

I get on these horrific early Polar Exploration nightmare book benders, can't seem to get enough!

Before that it was "Shantarum," by Gregory David Roberts. also, quite good and long, 930 pages. I'm not sure if it is fiction or nonfiction.It is presented as non-f but after reading.....

Europe is a wonderful place, but when we go travelling, English-speakers tend to ignore the continent’s beautiful and bewildering variety of languages. In Lingo, Gaston Dorren leads a guided tour through Europe’s linguistic landscape, taking in Shelta, the language of Irish Travellers; Ossetian, an Iranian language spoken on the border between Russia and Georgia; and Monégasque, a subdialect of a dialect of Italian with about 100 native speakers which is taught for seven compulsory years in Monaco’s schools.

Lingo is that rare thing: a book about language that manages to be both genuinely interesting and enormous fun. Particularly impressive is Dorren’s ability to flip with ease from jokes and surprising facts to the discussion of complex linguistic ideas. He uses Basque to explain the workings of an ergative language, while his account of Icelandic offers an overview of the factors that cause language change. In between a comic dialogue about Hungarian and a satire on the political tussles around Belarusian, you’ll find a five-page crash course in the Cyrillic alphabet. Throughout, Dorren weaves in key ideas from historical linguistics and sociolinguistics without ever appearing pompous or obtuse.

Swedish makes for a fascinating case study in the social life of language. Until the end of the Sixties, Swedes had to navigate between a series of complicated terms of address, which took into account gender, societal position, formality of occasion and a number of other niceties. The pronoun du was reserved for usage with children, lovers, and friends who had shared a “du-drink”. The Sixties changed all of this, but nowadays there’s been some movement to the more formal ni, while some have argued for abandoning second-person pronouns altogether.

Dorren gives space to the stories of languages lost or just limping on. On June 10 1898, a landmine exploded on the island of Krk in the Adriatic. “There were two casualties,” says Dorren: “a man named Tuone Udaina, and the Dalmatian language of which he was the last speaker.” Today, there are around 500 languages that have fewer than 100 speakers, while some 50 languages have just one speaker remaining.

Other languages live on in strange forms: the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777, but the language witnessed a 20th-century revival, complete with turf wars over correct spelling, usage and pronunciation. Speakers of Irish – of which I am one – have a tendency to treat the language like a carefully restored classic car: we’re very proud of it but rarely risk taking it out for a spin.

John Gallagher