Nicholas Ostler

Nicholas Ostler is the Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages and author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World and Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. A scholar with a working knowledge of twenty-six languages, Ostler has degrees from Oxford University in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and economics, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, where he studied under Noam Chomsky.

Earlier this month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm reading Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, a novel from 1980 written in deformed, but in the end curiously readable, colloquial English, which speculates on Iron Age life in Kent some centuries after a nuclear apocalypse, as humanity is slowly but steadily building up a new path to power and self-destruction.

I grew up in Kent, so I wondered if I should recognize the locales, but it is set exclusively in East Kent, and with a geography deformed by flood, so all I can recognize is Cambry (Canterbury), whose Ardship (archbishop) is one of the characters.

I got into it because I have long known vaguely of its linguistic experiment, and one of the by-ways I am exploring in my new book (on the future scope for English as a lingua-franca) is what might happen if world communications were to break down (as they clearly have in Riddley Walker's world). Hoban experiments with ambiguities that might arise as English words lose definition, and some have theological consequences. So when his culture hero Eusa, dabbling in nuclear research, finds ‘the littl shynin man the Addom’, it is also in some sense Adam, father of the human race.

The language was hard to cope with at first, or just rebarbative. (Language changes are always hard to accept for those they leave behind, I suppose.) But the explanations at http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/cowart1.html made it all much easier to get into.

Read more about Ostler's Empires of the Word at the publisher's website.

Learn more about Nicholas Ostler at the Linguacubun website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske-Dukes is author of several essay collections, books of poetry--including Sparrow, a National Book Award finalist--and novels.

I recently asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I'm reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore & re-reading a fascinating book called Comparative Perspectives, which provides several translations of well-known poems in different languages (I used it in a graduate course I taught at USC last semester called The Aesthetics of Translation), re-reading Auden's The Dyer's Hand, and also (for fun) Nora Ephron's books -- the Neck one and others, including Heartburn!

And I want to read next - The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

I'm also reading Fagles' translation of the Aeneid and Stanley Plumly's wonderful Posthumous Keats.

Read online Carol Muske-Dukes' poems "Twin Cities," "An Octave Above Thunder," and "Like This," and visit her website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael A. Elliott

Michael A. Elliott is professor of English and American Studies at Emory University. He writes about the literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century United States, with particular interest in American traditions of historical commemoration. He is also a contributing editor at ReligionDispatches.org, where he writes about the place of the sacred in otherwise secular spaces. His most recent book is Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer.

Recently, I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

During the summer, I usually try to read some long fiction, both contemporary and not. This summer I started with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which I had not read since I was a graduate student. James is a writer whose talent I appreciate more every year, and I found myself rereading his long paragraphs just to think about his methods of characterization. I remembered this as a gripping novel, but I think it reads very differently now that I am a little older and, well, a little more married.

Mark Jude Porier’s novels are a delicious treat for me, and so I keep an eye out for anything that he blurbs. That is how I ended up reading The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Poebus K. Dank, by Christopher Miller. The novel is a kind of Pale Fire for the sci fi set. Written as a kind of literary encyclopedia of a prolific (but awful) science fiction novelist -- loosely modeled on Philip K. Dick -- the book is both a satire of and a love letter to the genre. Any science fiction reader with a sense of humor should have it on the shelf. As an aside, I have been reading Dick sporadically over the last five years, and just acquired the Library of America compilations of his works to read as well.

Like so many others, I have been meaning to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for years. And like so many others, his recent, unfortunate death has provoked me to do so this summer. I am about half way through the novel right now, and words are insufficient. Tennis. Drugs. Quebec. There’s really nothing else I can say about it right now.

Finally, one of my reading rituals at this point in my life occurs just before the reluctant slumber of my five-year-old son. Recently, we finished reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. This is a beautiful book in every way possible. Hugo Cabret is an orphan living in a Paris train station in the early twentieth century, and he meets a mysterious toy seller who gradually draws him into the world of early, silent film. But the plot is only part of the achievement of the book, which has a format that is different from anything else that I have read with my son. Some pages of Hugo Cabret have text, and others advance the narrative through enchanting black-and-white drawings. Unlike other illustrated books, the words do not accompany the images, and the illustrations do not visually reproduce the action that the text describes. The format alone makes Hugo Cabret a special reading experience, and it was a real pleasure to observe my son as he switched from hearing me read the story to looking carefully at the illustrations. It is a book about film and magic that manages to be both filmic and magical.

Read an excerpt from Custerology and learn more about the book at the University of Chicago Press website.

Learn more about Michael A. Elliott's scholarship at his faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Custerology.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry has published over 30 books for children, including the Newbery Award-winning Number the Stars (1990) and The Giver (1994). Her new book, Crow Call, is due out in October.

A few days ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I usually have more than one book going at the same time, and that is true now. I'm reading Rafael Yglesias's A Happy Marriage, which though written in fictional form is really a memoir: the story of his own long and happy marriage. The chapters are interspersed, going back and forth, beginning with his first meeting Margaret, immediately contrasted in chapter two with her last days as he cares for her during her final illness, then back to their courtship in chapter three. It's a -- I began to say "glimpse" but it is much more than a glimpse -- it is a study of a deep and lasting relationship through many years.

At the same time, I too am going back and forth, and my other book is an Anthony Trollope --The Duke's Children -- sixth in his Palliser series, and a good read in a rainy summer. Trollope never disappoints. His keen insights into the social and political issues of the day are still fresh, and his novels, though lengthy, move along at a fast clip (many were serialized, like those of Dickens).

Visit Lois Lowry's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers who tried to Build a Perfect Language.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood. I never would have chosen this novel on my own: the tagline is "A story about love and friendship and Marxism." It is indeed about love and friendship, though not in the trite way the tagline would suggest, and it is not really about Marxism at all. It is about a group of friends who, when they were young and politically-charged Oxford students, agreed to pool resources to support the most brilliant of their group so he could fully dedicate himself to writing an important book about important ideas. Decades go by, their beliefs change, their brilliant friend causes misery in their lives in various ways, but they continue to support him out of a sense of duty to a promise made. My old English professor, a specialist in 20th-century British women novelists, recommended it to me, and I'm glad he did. The plot is engaging and full of drama, and the way it easily and deeply exposes inner lives and shifts in perspective is utterly absorbing. But I've never read a book that left me so unsure of what I was supposed to think about characters and events, and it unsettled me (in a good way). I felt the need to go find and read some criticism on it in order to help me understand my reactions. So, Professor Soule, if your plan was to get me back to the college-days excitement of interacting with literature, it worked.

I also wouldn't have thought to pick up Science from Your Airplane Window by Elizabeth Wood if it hadn't been suggested to me. I wrote about how Mark Shoulson, my guide to the world of Klingon, pulled it out of his bag when we settled in for our flight to a Klingon conference in Phoenix. That detail was meant to add to a portrait of his nerdy pursuits, but I later bought the book, thinking it would be a fun, educational diversion for my son the next time we took a flight. (Here's to the passing along of nerdy pursuits!) I haven't yet remembered to pack it for a flight, but I have been picking it up occasionally to learn a fascinating tidbit about the shapes of lakes, the polarization of light, or the plow lines in farms. It is written in a very simple, direct style that gives you exactly what the title promises. The simplicity is almost poetic; it captures the essence of good non-fiction. It says, "Here, sit by me. Let's look out of this tiny window together. I will show you things you never noticed and change your perspective on the things you have noticed. Even though this window is tiny, through it you can see the whole world."

The language book I have going now is John Baugh's Beyond Ebonics. A fascinating look at a grossly misunderstood linguistic controversy.

And I read The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander a while ago, but I can't pass up an opportunity to recommend it. Though I'm reluctant to play the "he reminds me of" game, I was reading a lot of Primo Levi – one of my favorites – right before I started this book, and the transition to Englander's voice was almost imperceptible. Englander writes with a similar wary wisdom and gentle, humorous absurdity about absolute horrors. Ministry deals with Argentina's "dirty war" but it is really about all wars, all injustice, and the sometimes dangerous compromises people make in order to lead a normal life in abnormal circumstances.

Learn more about Arika Okrent and her work at her official website and at the In the Land of Invented Languages website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Tel

Jonathan Tel is the author of the story collection Arafat’s Elephant (Counterpoint, 2002) and the novel Freud’s Alphabet (Counterpoint, 2003). His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope. He has worked as a quantum physicist and an opera librettist.

Tel's latest book is the short story collection, The Beijing of Possibilities.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I have several books on my desk, reading a chapter of one, a chapter of another, as the fancy takes me. I'm going through some books about China, related to my own writing, as well as those about places and times I know little of.

The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu is oral history: a series of interviews with Chinese at the bottom of the ladder. Most of his subjects are elderly, having lived through the turbulence of the last half century. Fascinating stories from a professional mourner, a safecracker, a mortician, a restroom attendant, and more. The interviews are skilfully edited, so that each has the shape of a short story, with the help of Wen Huang, who was also the translator. I like that the translation has a strong Chinese flavor.

There was a tradition of erotic fiction in the Ming dynasty - an entire body of literature most of us know nothing of. Patrick Hanan has translated much of this; now I'm reading his collection, Falling In Love. Fascinating to learn about a culture so unlike our own, yet not as far as all that from contemporary China.

I was a poet before I was a fiction writer. I admire the rare combination of novels in verse, with rhyme and meter, please. So I'm re-reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, set in and around San Francisco in the 1980s. Also Equinox by Matt Rubinstein. Taking place over twenty-four hours in Sydney, the lives of various characters intertwine. The book is unobtainable outside Australia, but it was seralized in the Sydney Morning Herald, and I'm reading it on their website.

Read "Year of the Gorilla" and "Though the Candles Flicker Red," selections from The Beijing of Possibilities, at The China Beat.

Read more about The Beijing of Possibilities at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Standage

Tom Standage is the business affairs editor at the Economist and the author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, The Victorian Internet, The Turk, and The Neptune File. He has written for Wired, the New York Times, and numerous magazines and newspapers.

His new book is An Edible History of Humanity.

A couple of days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm reading three books at the moment. On the fiction side, I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem. This is a very large book — so large that it does not fit in my bag — so I have the e-book of it on my iPhone, too. The book depicts an alternative history in which mathematics has become a religion. It takes a while to get going, but it is packed with geeky in-jokes, as Stephenson's books generally are.

On the non-fiction side, I'm reading Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler. It's a megahistory that looks at world history through the prism of language, and it's fascinating, particularly in the way it draws analogies across space and time. I enjoy megahistories a great deal, which is why I have written two myself (looking at world history from the perspectives of drink and food).

Finally, I'm reading Chris Anderson's Free, which I am reviewing for The Economist. It does not have an elegant central thesis in the way Anderson's previous book, The Long Tail, did. So I find it less intellectually satisfying. But much of the criticism of the book seems to be coming from people who have not read it, and who think it says that everything ought to be free. Actually, the book does not say that. What it says is rather more complicated: that some products can have zero as one of their many prices, or something. The fact that I can't neatly sum up what it says is telling.

Read an excerpt from An Edible History of Humanity, and learn more about the author and his work at Tom Standage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York. She is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College. In 2005, she received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in 2005-2006, she was the Bennett Fellow and writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 2007, she graduated from the new MA program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in Arts & Culture journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others.

Her first novel, Love Marriage, was published in April 2008. Washington Post Book World named the book one of its Best of 2008. It was also longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Not so long ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

It’s never occurred to me before, but I approach reading the same way I do writing in that I like to have several things going at once. If I’m not in the right mood to read something, I put it down and pick up something else. I read non-fiction for both research and pleasure; obviously, I also read fiction, and I have recently returned to poetry.

At the moment I am reading:

Beloved by Toni Morrison—I read this many years ago and picked it up again when I was going through old books. I was thinking about what my former Iowa classmate Nam Le wrote about it on The Millions blog. I’ve been struck anew by how painful and simultaneously lovely this book is. How does one make a reading experience out of pain? How does beauty of style and language balance against raw and powerful content? How do the two work together? These are among the most basic questions we ask about writing—form and content—but it’s useful to think about them again in this framework. And I’m concerned with morality in my fiction, and obviously Beloved tackles that. I’m loving reading it again.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer—I still read children’s literature, young adult literature, and fantasy. I’ll read really anything that grabs my attention. I saw the Twilight movie recently—with good friends and good wine—and found it delightfully bad. There is a particular part in the movie in which vampire Edward tells innocent human Bella how he reads people’s minds, and he describes to her what every person they see is thinking. He gives them one word each, and it’s very funny. (I won’t spoil the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it.) But anyway, that line is NOT in the book, which is nevertheless also delightfully bad. Definitely reading the rest of them.

like myth and mother: a political autobiography in poetry and prose by Sivamohan Sumathy—I admire Sumathy a great deal. I was on a panel with her at the Galle Literary Festival, which was held in Sri Lanka in January, and I liked a lot of what she said. Her poems are surprising and forceful, unapologetic and subversive. Of course I am particularly interested in writing about Sri Lanka and by Sri Lankans.

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani—I couldn’t tell you if I am reading this book for research or pleasure—I don’t know yet. But I am reading an increasing number of books about politics and ethics.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir and The Giant’s House, both by Elizabeth McCracken—(Full disclosure: Elizabeth was my teacher.) The first book here is her latest, a memoir about losing her baby. I am almost done with it. It is fantastically well written and enormously sad. See: Beloved. As to the second, it seems to me that although I have read the whole book, I am never really finished with The Giant’s House. Rather, I am always carrying it around. There is a passage I like to read when I am stuck. It is at the end of part one, when the heroine talks about deciding to love the hero. It’s one of my favorite passages in anything, ever, and it begins: “Sometimes, when your lover does not step from the woods to save you—because how many of us are rescuable, how many would look at some fool in a pair of tights and a pageboy and say, Of course—sometimes you have to marry your tower, your tiny room.”

Maybe that’s what all writers do: Marry our towers, our tiny rooms.

Read an excerpt from Love Marriage, and learn more about the book and author at V.V. Ganeshananthan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Castronovo

David Castronovo--a New York critic, essayist, and humanities educator whose work largely concerns modern literature, English and American social life, and the history of ideas--is currently C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City.

His latest book is Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature (Continuum International, 2009).

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’m on summer literary manoeuvres these days, which is to say preparing for the next book I’m thinking of writing and kicking back a bit. W.H. Auden’s demanding but very rewarding long poem titled “New Year Letter (1940)” in Collected Poems (The Centennial Edition, Modern Library, 2007) has taken up some time. It’s a pungent, moving survey of civilization on the brink of war. Auden’s subjects in this crisp poetic discourse--very classical in style--are art, the just society, social sin and guilt, European suffering, failed ideologies, and the spirit doing battle with mass culture. He twists and turns his reader’s mind as he describes his own doubts and his hunger to believe in individual men and women.

Edward Mendelson’s superb biography Later Auden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) is extremely useful for deepening an appreciation of the poem and does what these monster biographies almost never do--provides lucid, searching commentary on the work of literature as well as the writer. Also from the same period is Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. I only knew the title story, but now I’ve found the entire New Directions volume a rich exploration of Jewish life in Washington Heights in the 1930s and 1940s, complete with all the mishegas and misgivings. The sly style, the miseries mixed with the absurdities, the streets and interiors, the speech cadences make this book an original source for those who want to know about the social and intellectual yearnings of Jews in America. The title story--terrible and lovely at the same time--is bold in conception: our narrator watches a movie of his parents as they are about to become engaged in a Coney Island restaurant. But the stories about groups--young people who hang out and argue on Saturday night in “The World is a Wedding,” family in “The Child is the Meaning of This Life”--are wrenching social studies of thwarted lives. Clifford Odets covered such things in “Awake and Sing,” but Schwartz left this much richer legacy for Bellow and Roth. His kibitzers and whiners and yearners have real depth.

Now while kicking back I have enjoyed Irish Brooklyn of the 1950s in Colm Toibin’s beautifully controlled and evocative novel Brooklyn: having been a boy in that borough back then, I can say that he captures the restrained mores of the time and the feel of old downtown with its department stores and nearby row houses. Joseph O’Neill’s masterpiece Netherland is a crazy mix of Brooklyn elements from a different period; it’s an exuberant and very sad treatment of West Indians, American dreaming--and a dream of making cricket a major American sport.

I’m also reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina. I first read Anna in 1970--and believe me, this translation makes it seem like I’m having a completely new adventure. Lucidity and nuance on every page.

Learn more about David Castronovo and Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy J. Shannon

Timothy J. Shannon teaches Early American, Native American, and British history at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (2008), Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America (2004), and Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (2000), which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars. He is also co-author with Victoria Bissell Brown of Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History (second edition, 2008). His articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, and Ethnohistory.

Late last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

It is summer, the time of year when I try to squeeze in most of my pleasure reading. My usual tactic is to pick one contemporary work of fiction and one long-neglected (on my part at least) classic and then to see what those titles lead me to next.

I started off with Dear American Airlines, a well-reviewed debut novel by Jonathan Miles last year. The story is told by the protagonist, a recovering alcoholic and divorced father who is trying desperately to make it to his daughter’s wedding, only to find himself thwarted by the capricious nature of modern air travel. His angry letter of complaint, composed during an interminable and unplanned layover, becomes a confessional account of his life, told with hearty doses of black humor. Of course, I may have been cajoled into reading this one simply by the description of the author’s day job on the dust jacket: he is the cocktails editor for the New York Times.

The classic novel I have selected for the summer is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. I read some of his short stories in college and his criticism pieces in the New Yorker, but I had never read any of his novels. His death last year made me put this on my list. However, I have not cracked it yet, as I have already been distracted by other things.

My family and I are spending June and July in Britain with a study abroad group, and so I wanted to read something that would put me in the proper frame of mind for travel. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London seemed like a good choice, as we would be spending time in both cities, and I always wanted to read something by him that was not on one of my high school reading lists. The book reminded me of Orwell’s wonderful dexterity with English prose, and it also proved him to be adept at the brief character study. He does a wonderful job of conveying the personalities of the various down-and-outers he meets while living as a homeless person in London, and his descriptions of working in the bowels of a Paris hotel kitchen will make you think twice about what you are getting on your plate the next time you eat in a fancy French restaurant.

From Orwell, I moved on in search of some comic relief and found it in Cold Comfort Farm, a satire of English country life by Stella Gibbons. A friend had recommended this title to my wife and I shortly before our departure for the UK. I found a paperback edition in a used bookstore shortly after our arrival and figured it was a sign from heaven. I have never indulged in the sort of works this book was intended to lampoon, Victorian tales of isolated gentry families slowly descending into madness and rot out there in the moors. But now having read it, and smiled the whole way through, I feel like I have digested Wuthering Heights as well. So I am glad to recommend it as a highly enjoyable two-for-one.

The historian Kevin Kenny wrote of Shannon's Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier:

Shannon’s book takes us from the zenith of Iroquois power in the early eighteenth century to its nadir in the Revolutionary era, concentrating on the intricate art of diplomacy in treaty negotiations over war, peace, and trade between the various colonial governments and the Indians. In this account the Iroquois are major players rather than pawns in history, even if their story ends, inexorably, in tragedy. In keeping with the tone of the series, Shannon writes about even the most complex issues in an impressively deft style.

--Marshal Zeringue