A Little Book of Language

It's fair to say that I've shown more of an interest in language than most over the course of my life. I wouldn't have ended up with an MA in translation and gone on to work in the field otherwise - and I wouldn't be looking to add more and more languages to my collection if that interest wasn't ongoing. Linguistics, however, is an area of language I haven't touched on much, despite being one that I find very interesting. As it turned out, David Crystal's A Little Book of Language, a crash course on the huge range of topics that fall under that umbrella, was a very good entry point.

Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on linguistics, but this particular book dials back the academic side of things, being presented for children. This meant that the style was simple, the content laid out in a straightforward manner, and everything backed up with plenty of practical examples. And as good as my technical knowledge of language - or rather languages - may be, I appreciated it for all of these things. As Crystal says, the study of language is perhaps the biggest field of study of all, and I'm sure I would have felt lost at least in some places had things not been spelled out so clearly.

That being said, there were moments where I wished that he had been a bit more direct. While the examples were useful, there were also a lot of them; at times too many for my liking for the sake of making what could be quite simple points. And the writing style as a whole came across at times like a grandfather rambling on to his grandchildren, whether they showed any interest or not.

Ultimately, though, there was a lot to enjoy here, and a lot to learn. For instance, how the majority of the world's languages have never been properly studied and mapped out, to the extent that we still have no idea how most languages outside of the Indo-European sphere relate to each other. Or that we probably never will, as one language is lost every couple of weeks. And how even languages that have been studied for centuries, like English, are far from being completely documented in terms of their every usage.

Best of all were the chapters on the very first stages of language - the ways in which parents adapt their speech patterns to pass language onto their children, who then go through a multitude of processes to form sound, combine sounds to form words, and then words to speak coherently. It seems like an impossible task when broken down that way, and I was left amazed that we ever managed to talk at all.

4/5

So I can only imagine the amount of brainpower that would go into something like this:

Closing Time

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has been my favourite book since I first read it at the age of 17, and I have yet to come across anything since that matches it in terms of its combination of genuinely epic scope combined with microscopic attention to detail, and passage after passage that resonate even after multiple readings and a million times removed from the situation in which Heller found his inspiration.

So how can you create a sequel to perfection? Well, Heller tried, although it took him over 30 years, and the result, like a lot of sequels, is a long way short of what came before. Not to say that Closing Time is a bad book; far from it.

Set in 1994, it catches up with three of the more interesting characters from Catch-22 to survive World War II - protagonist Yossarian, who has made his fortune, started a family and is now faced for the second time with a genuine prospect of death; Milo Minderbinder, who, having expanded his trade empire into a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate, is now trying to sell planes to the government; and the squadron chaplain, pursued by the FBI for his ability to produce tritium organically. Heller fills in the events in their lives since the war ended - and since the fate of all three was ambiguous at the end of Catch-22, it was actually quite nice to hear that things had been going relatively well. While it was slightly disappointing that Yossarian's solution to the titular catch had failed, it was necessary for the purposes of this book that he was still caught in it, and all three are provided with a certain amount of closure as to their problems in the first book.

That only accounts for half of the plot, however, the rest being given over to Sammy Singer, who appears in Catch-22 although I believe not by name, and his childhood friend Lew Rabinowitz, who served in the war as an infantryman. These parts I found harder to get through; their tales of working-class Jewish life in Coney Island almost impossible to identify with and the fact that Heller writes them in a much more conventional prose style to be very jarring with the rest of the book. There were some moments of poignancy but these were few and far between, and I had to wonder why Heller had decided to include this plot line at all.

But there was much to like elsewhere; more than enough, in fact, that I could enjoy the book as a whole. Heller's dialogue positively fizzes back and forth between characters, there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines, and he finds room to slip in quite a few catch-22 scenarios for the present day. None of this is anything like on the level of Catch-22 itself, but he had an impossible act to follow in that respect. And indeed the book stands on its own at times as well, as Heller slices through late 20th-century consumerist excess, the everlasting obtuseness of military bureaucracy (the scenes where Milo pitches his new stealth bomber to a bickering group of government advisers are by far the best in the novel), and the it-couldn't-happen-could-it ludicrousness of American politics, as the book's unnamed president inadvertently brings about nuclear Armageddon by mistake while playing a video game.

So all in all, it's not a bad follow up to the best book of all time - in lots of ways a spiritual successor, in other ways trying to do something a bit different and for the most part succeeding at both. It's almost as funny, almost as sad, and way more bizarre - and given the bar that had been set for it, that's no mean achievement.

4/5

This is a book about the end, and the book itself states that this is the soundtrack to it. I can kind of see it.

Life... With No Breaks/Mad Love

A week's holiday requires some easy reading - and it doesn't get much easier than Nick Spalding. Having read a couple of his books, I consider myself a fan, and so it wasn't too much of a challenge to get through two more in a matter of days.

Life... With No Breaks was Spalding's debut, and actually his most interesting concept - could he write a fully fleshed book in 24 hours? Well, yes and no. Firstly because it took (slightly) longer than that, and secondly because the result isn't your average book. It's more of a conversation with the reader, as Spalding takes considerable time to introduce himself and recap why he has set himself this challenge. From there, though, it is an interesting and enjoyable read as he slides between topics nicely, bemoaning various aspects of modern British life and veritably churning out one-liners in the process. And he's not afraid to go deeper, touching on death, his divorce, previous failures in the literary sphere and the inevitable passage of time. I also found it a good indication of the origin of his writing style, which I have found inflexible in the past - it turns out his characters all talk like he does. All in all it's an interesting idea well executed.

Mad Love is a much more conventional rom-com novel that follows a man from London and a woman from California as a dating website, as a publicity stunt, singles them out for marriage based on the compatibility of their profiles. The prospect of £30,000 and a rent-free year in a penthouse flat is enough to convince Adam, a video game reviewer, and Jessica, a student in nutrition, to go through with it. The wedding itself is dealt with quickly, and the plot soon settles into a routine of arguments as it turns out their profiles may not have been entirely honest. Mad Love lacks, for the most part, the ingredients that got me into Spalding's other work - the laugh-out-loud moments, well-constructed scenes and memorable characters. The ending was predictable, and the dialogue just didn't quite work at times. But the book as a whole was saved by a moment of breathtaking sadness that proved that, if Spalding ever decides to write something serious, he would probably do a very good job.

All in all, I pretty much knew what to expect going in and both books delivered - lighter than air, capable of raising a smile, and a much-needed break before going back into the heavy stuff.

Life... With No Breaks - 3.5/5
Mad Love - 3/5

Life... With No Breaks seems to have anticipated a trend that has recently emerged in music of writing fully-formed songs in as little time as possible.  This is the best combination of time/result: