A Year in Reading: Adam Ross

Languagehat is a freelance editor in Hadley, Massachusetts.This year I have two pairs of books to recommend, one pair on language and one on history.The subject I blog about, of course, is language, and this year I’ve read two books I can strongly recommend to anyone, The first is almost a decade old: Language Myths, by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill. The format is simple and brilliant: have a bunch of linguists take a bunch of popular myths about language and deconstruct them, explaining why linguists look at the issue differently and what the facts of the matter are. Some of the myths discussed are “the meanings of words should not be allowed to vary or change,” “some languages are just not good enough,” “women talk too much,” “some languages are harder than others,” “some languages have no grammar,” “double negatives are illogical,” and “Aborigines speak a primitive language.” Obviously some sections are better written than others, but anyone who reads the whole book will have not a grounding in linguistic science but something more important for the average citizen: a basic grasp of how linguists think about language, and an understanding of why the silly ideas that irritate linguists so much are silly.The second book came out just this year: Michael Erard’s Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. Erard got a master’s degree in linguistics before going into journalism, and it shows; he’s one of the few reporters who consistently gets it right. He writes knowledgeably and with verve, packing in fascinating bits of information on each page; for instance, in talking about the “Freudian slip” he provides a detailed dissection of one of Freud’s most famous examples, the case of the young man who tried to quote a line from The Aeneid but left out a word – for Freud, an extremely significant slip that stemmed from the man’s fear that his lover was pregnant. Erard cites other researchers who point out that it can be analyzed as a perfectly normal speech error, and that if you take the Freudian attitude you could provide “insightful” interpretations no matter which word was left out. In Chapter 5 he gives “A Brief History of ‘Um’,” explaining that he started by assuming that the condemnation of “filler words” went all the way back to the ancients but found that it didn’t really begin until the 19th century (Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “Don’t strew the pathway with those dreadful urs” in 1846) and didn’t become popular until the 20th. He talks about Reverend Spooner (he who toasted Queen Victoria by asking for “three cheers for our queer old dean” and greeted a group of farmers as “noble tons of soil”), Thomas Edison (a recording of one of his public exhibitions of the phonograph is full of “uh”s), linguist Victoria Fromkin and her insistence on the importance of slips of the tongue, and all manner of other tidbits. If you’re looking for a present for someone who loves language, I can’t think of a more enjoyable one.The other topic is Russian history, which has been obsessing me for a few years now. Having worked my way through World War One and the Revolution, I’ve gotten up to the Civil War, and two books I’ve recently read, taken together, provide a nicely stereoscopic view of that terrible period. The first is Vladimir N. Brovkin’s Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922. I bought it a few years ago, but held off reading it until I had a basic overall picture (which I got from W. Bruce Lincoln’s Red Victory), because Brovkin goes into considerable detail. Other histories of the period tell you about armies sweeping back and forth over much of Russia, giving you a good sense of the destruction that was wrought but leaving you wondering why exactly it was happening and what it was like for the people caught in the middle. These are Brovkin’s questions, and his focus on the changing political climate in the cities and provinces, resulting from and contributing to the often viciously counterproductive policies of the occupying regimes, Communist and anti-Communist, gives convincing answers and provides a framework that helps the reader understand the war as something other than one damn massacre after another.Like any historian, of course, Brovkin is trying to give an overall picture, no matter how many details he provides; furthermore, he looks primarily at the regions overrun by competing armies, pretty much ignoring life in Petrograd (which of course remained in Communist hands). This gap was filled for me by a remarkable memoir I happened on in a bookstore, having never seen a reference to it: E.M. Almedingen’s Tomorrow Will Come, originally published in 1941 and reissued in 1968. Miss Almedingen, who became a children’s book author after she moved to England in 1922, spent the period of revolution and war in Petrograd, increasingly preoccupied with simple survival and ignorant, like almost everyone, of what was going on outside their immediate neighborhood. One striking result of this is that she doesn’t even mention the October Revolution; she skips directly from the revolution of February 1917 (after which “never again in Russia was I to see water running from a tap in any house I lived in”) to the spring and summer of 1918 and rumors of the peace of Brest-Litovsk. Her account of being driven from one shelter to another, increasingly shabby and tenuous, of the deaths of people she loved, of appalling cruelty from some strangers and courageous aid from others, is riveting. Her family is odder than most (her father was a famous professor who deserted the family when she was a child, her mother considered herself an Englishwoman and wanted her daughter to go to Oxford, her aunt lived in Paris and considered herself French) and as a result she takes an oddly outsider view of what was happening, but that in itself makes it easier for an outsider to see it through her eyes, and her infallible eye for the telling detail and vivid memories of childhood experiences (like the annual Lenten fair on the Horse Guards Boulevard) make it an unforgettable read.More from A Year in Reading 2007

Millions contributor Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family and is a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction. This year, his work appeared in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best of the Web.When it comes to books, I’m less a gourmet than a gourmand. It’s not that the slim, perfect novel doesn’t excite my palate, but when I’m in the middle of a sensational meal, I want it never to end – or at least to give the illusion of infinitude. And so I hunger for big books – thousand-calorie entrees I wrap rubber bands around to keep the bindings intact.This year, as I approached my thirtieth birthday, these big books appealed to me with even greater urgency. At some point soon, the demands of family life and the writing life are going to leave me with less time for “loose, baggy monsters,” and so I’ve been trying to get the important ones under my belt. After all, there are only so many behemoths out there, right? Well, it turns out that big books share certain Hydra-like properties with books in general. This year, I knocked off ten enormous tomes; I added about twenty to my “to-read” list.The best of the best – the book that came closest to being everything I want in a novel – was Mortals (712 pp), by Norman Rush. It’s a funny book, in that it forgoes the immediate pyrotechnics of Rush’s first novel, Mating (a mere 474 pp), which I also read this year. Still I’m convinced that, once you’ve acquired a taste for Rush’s penetrating yet hugely compassionate voice – his astonishing negative capability – you will find Mortals to be one of the two or three best American novels published this decade. And it just gets better as it goes along: the 100-page climax is almost literally explosive.A close second was Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (893 pp), a novel I’m still thinking about, half a year after first reading it. As with Mortals, I hesitate to recommend diving straight into it; you might want to learn to trust Bolaño, as I did, by first reading his more trenchant performances (Nazi Literature in the Americas (227 pp including epilogue) (review), then Distant Star (149 pp), and then The Savage Detectives (still comparatively lean at 577 pp) (review)). But 2666 is a cabinet of wonders, and a landmark in contemporary letters.Inspired by Joshua Ferris’ 2007 Year in Reading entry, I went on a late-period Henry James bender this year, which (to return to the food metaphor) is sort of like gorging on lobster with a heavy cream sauce. In its rich evocation of human subjectivity, The Wings of the Dove (711 pp) is a dazzling technical achievement, but it’s James’ deep feeling for his characters that makes this my favorite of his novels. Of course, if the representation of subjectivity is to your taste, I should also recommend Under the 82nd Airborne (230 pp in The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg) (review), in which our finest short story writer refines into deft turns of phrase what James took pages and pages to do. I think of Eisenberg and James as two-thirds of a triumvirate: Discoverers of the American Mind. The third third is Saul Bellow, with whom I spent most of June. Of the several books I read, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (260 pp) struck me as the most surprising, courageous, and challenging.Ms. Eisenberg’s advocacy, at a PEN World Voices panel, persuaded me to sate my appetite for German-language literature with Robert Walser’s Jakob van Gunten (176 pp), a bewitching (and blessedly brief) evocation of adolescence. I also marveled at Alfred Döblin’s pitch-black Berlin Alexanderplatz (378 closely printed pp). Then I turned back to the big American novel. Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1192 pp) is the longest book I have ever read, by a good 150,000 words. It took me six weeks to finish, at least, and, python-like, I’m still digesting, but the achievements in sections like “Larry,” “the future,” and “Alias Missing Conversation” rank with the best of Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, and David Foster Wallace.Speaking of Wallace, the best book I re-read this year was Infinite Jest (1079 pp with footnotes), which was fresh in my mind when news of the author’s death reached his readers. IJ still looks to me like the fictional high-water-mark of a generation. I welcome debate on this point, but revisiting the book debunks claims that Wallace is too intellectual, too indulgent, or too stylized; here, he does everything the ten next-best American writers can do, and does it better (see, e.g., pp 851- 981). That we’ll never get to see another novel from him is an incalculable loss.Fortunately for us, the reservoir of literary talent in his generation runs deep; following other writers as they advance the cause of fiction forward is a kind of consolation. Trance (505 pp), by Year in Reading participant Christopher Sorrentino, was the book by a young American that most impressed me this year (review). The writing – tough, funny, elegant, jive – really astonished me, as did the way the novel mobilizes the 1970s in service of the now. I guess all history really is present history.The work of nonfiction I most enjoyed in 2008 was Janet Malcolm’s Gertrude and Alice: Two Lives (224 pp). Malcolm is at least as good a critic as she is a journalist; her approach to literature is refreshingly humble, nimble, curious, and delighted. (I’m reading her Chekhov book now (205 pp.)) I only made it halfway through Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans this summer (it’s an annual endeavor; 925 pp), but Gertrude and Alice, which I devoured in a single, lovely July day, was a welcome substitute. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention Timothy Donaldson’s book on the development of alphabets, Shapes for Sounds. Reading it is like sitting in on a lecture by the most brilliant professor in the department. It is also – not incidentally – a triumph of design on the order of David Macauley.Finally, I have to say something about political books, which functioned this year as quick, bitter palate-cleansers. For eight years, a small corps of investigative journalists – Hersh, Wright, Mayer, Packer – has been working to keep our government honest. I’d like to nominate Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman for inclusion on this honor roll. In addition to being a riveting, lively, and infuriating read, his book, Angler (384 pp), introduced me to one of the most fascinating literary characters I’ve yet encountered: Richard B. “Dick” Cheney. For pure, mysterious “lifeness” (to borrow the most useful term from James Wood’s How Fiction Works (248 pp)), Cheney rivals Wallace’s Don Gately, and Rush’s Ray Finch, Bellow’s Artur Sammler, and Eisenberg’s many protagonists. We’ll be chewing over (or choking on) his legacy for years to come. It’s a good thing we’ll have good books, large and small, to nourish us along the way.More from A Year in Reading 2008