Native Tongues (Charles Berlitz)

Berlitz knows languages, and this book is a collection of interesting facts about languages. Here are a few examples: After discussing various Chinese ideograms, including the one for "horse" and the one for "door," we learn that the symbol for something surprising is a horse in a door. I love knowing that the Latin word for "seagull" means "noise with feathers."  Berlitz includes the worlds most efficient travel dictionary, based on the claim that knowing eight words in 25 languages will allow you to convey most essential ideas to the vast majority of the people in the world. Language tells a lot about a culture (in traditional Chinese, the word for "wife" is "the person inside") and about history (the Russian word for "train station" is just their version of the name of an English train station, Vauxhall, that early Russian railroad engineers admired). I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about how we talk to each other, and why.

Lexicon (Max Barry)

This story reminds me a little of Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus, in its premise that words can have profound, devastating effects on people's minds. I enjoyed this one more, though, because it wasn't as relentlessly dark and hopeless. It tells of two people, a street-wise runaway girl and a stoic Australian EMT, caught up in an international conspiracy of people who learn to use the power of words to control society. Some of the characters' transformations seem a little weakly justified, and some of their antagonists seem a little mustache-twirlingly evil, but overall I found the story more than just entertaining. It explores some of the challenges of being a good person in trying circumstances, and the difficulty of knowing just what a good choice might be. I quite liked it.

The Flame Alphabet (Ben Marcus)

This is an brilliant, disturbing book about language becoming toxic. It starts with the words of children (specifically Jewish children) poisoning their parents, then all children poisoning all adults, and finally all language poisoning all adults; only children remain immune. What would the world  be like if  hearing someone speak, or reading words, or speaking or writing yourself, made you physically ill? What if exposure to language gave you seizures and even killed you? Can people even survive without language? What would you do, who would you hurt, if it meant you could speak again, or hear the voice of your child once more? These are some of the questions this story raises, but doesn't answer. It definitely made me think, but I can't say I enjoyed it. Its level of existential pain made me squirm, and I'm sure that was what the author intended.

Finishing the Hat (Stephen Sondheim)

The lyrics Sondheim writes for musicals are full of unexpected rhymes, intricate interweavings, and other forms of wordplay that I love, so I was happy to read this book for my book club. Actually, I didn't read it all; it's much too dense, including as it does every lyric he wrote for every show between 1954 and 1981, along with what he refers to in the subtitle as "attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes." What I did was read all of the material on shows I was familiar with ("West Side Story," "A Funny Thing Happened...," "Company," "A Little Night Music," and "Sweeny Todd") and skim the others. It was delightful to read about how these songs came together, what he thought about each one, and why this one worked and that one didn't. For example, there's nearly a whole column on the invention of Kearny Lane, covering the difference in intonation between Lanes and Streets and the strength of the consonant K, although this place name exists in one line in one song in Sweeny Todd.This book would be a treasure for anyone who writes words for music, and I much enjoyed the bits I read.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (John McWhorter)

I really enjoyed this investigation into the history of English grammar and the various influences that, apparently, made it what it is today. Since I'm not a linguist, I grew tired in a few places where the author became strident in his condemnation of the traditional story, but this detracted very little from the weird and wonderful story he wove. English is a Germanic language, but has several quirks of grammar different from all the others in this family, such as the "meaningless do." We say "You like pasta," but also "You do not like pasta" and "Do you like pasta?" The do in these sentences has no meaning, and almost no other languages in their world require this. Why is it there? McWhorter thinks he knows, and he makes a good case. I found it fascinating.