Our language is nuanced with a thousand historical references, even when we think it at its most innocent.What:There’s a t-shirt that reads “English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.” In A Biography of the English Language, Millward presents some of this complicated history of the English language, first talking about what a language is, along with basics of phonology and writing before moving into Indo-European, Old English (the sage of the arrival of the English, the Christianization of England, and various Viking invasions), Middle English, Early Modern English, and then the array of recent forces shaping our language: the printing press, the industrial revolution, colonization, the codification of grammar, and more. It finishes up with present day English, at least as present day as a book written in 1989 can be. I should note that, looking at Amazon, the book is expensive as heck. I suspect any thorough history of the English language will do as well, but this book is VERY thorough. I bet it’s also available through libraries.
Who:Read this if you are a writer who likes to know what’s built into the words you’re using, what they say about their circumstances as well as what resonances they add for the knowledgeable. Read it if you love the minutiae of language, all the little “who would have thought” and “Although unlikely” facts that get seeded into long and drifty conversations, like the fact that Indo-European had three numbers: singular, plural, and dual.
Why: Read this so you can use words both more efficiently and more artfully. SO you know how the literary tradition you are working for and against, bound inextricably within, has been affected by linguistic change and created its own pressures to change in turn.
When: Read this when going among bores, for it will arm you with facts with which any recitation of X-Files plots or sports trivia can be met. Read this when you want something a little academic, with that cleansing flavor of self-improvement that the scrub of dry details can bring. Read it when you’re cramming for a test that involves volcabulary.
Where and how: Read this sporadically, tucking facts away, or with a notebook in hand. Read it for a class that takes you through centuries of linguistic change, showing you how history is tucked into every Vocabulary lesson.
I know. Book prices are unfathomable to me, particularly when it’s an older book list this. I recommended a book to someone the other day and he found it on Amazon, but used since it was out of print, for $163, which he was understandably reluctant to pay.
I know. Book prices flummox me, particularly when it’s a book that’s been in print for a long time. I recommended a favorite SF book to someone the other day and when we investigated, found it on Amazon but out of print — for 160 bucks! Yikes.
On a similar tho somewhat different theme, may I also recommend “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma,” which is a history of the efforts to standardize English.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Reading Like a Writer: Planning It Out
Tracy Townsend just did a terrific workshop this Saturday on Reading Like a Writer, (here’s the highlights from Twitter). One thing I came away with is the idea of planning my reading — or at least some of it — out much more purposefully.
When we did introductions and talked about what people wanted out of the class, it struck me that two ideas kept surfacing. One was the idea of using an activity one loves — the majority of writers are avid readers — to hone one’s craft would be more efficient. The second was a sense that if one was enjoying the writing, such learning couldn’t be happening; that work and joy could not go together.
I heartily disagree with the second, because I constantly draw on the first. Perhaps because now, as in the past, I am perpetually swimming in books, and consider that a dream existence. I was one of those kids who spent most of their hours with their nose inside a book, and at a time when the Internet was yet to appear, so I read and re-read over and over again, particularly L.M. Boston, Zenna Henderson, C.S. Lewis, Andre Norton, Theodore Sturgeon, J.R.R. Tolkein, to name a few.
Nowadays I get sent a lot of books — some attractive, some not so much — partially as a result of the somewhat scattershot way that most publisher marketing departments work, partially because I’m in a lot of anthologies, and partially because I am doing my best to support authors by buying their books through indie booksellers. I also pick up a lot of Storybundles and Humblebundles. While I’m a very fast reader, I’m not fast enough to keep up with the deluge.
So I like the idea of taking the last week of each month to plan the next month’s reading, particularly with an eye to assembling it. Tracy mentioned doing like assembling a D&D adventuring party, making sure it’s a mix. Her suggestions were these categories, all of which may overlap:
authors who inspire and excite you
authors who bring diversity to your reading list
authors who people keep saying you should read
authors who are great at the things you need to work on
Here’s some of the things I want to add to that for my personal plan:
Some current novelettes/novellas. These get overlooked sometimes because they’re usually something best suited to the electronic, but we’re also in the midst of a resurgence of them, and I want to make sure I keep myself of what’s going on there.
Because I’ve been trying to educate myself better about mid-to-late 20th century F&SF history, at least one nonfic book about it and one anthology produced during that period.
At least one nonfiction book that is not about gardening or cooking each month.
So here’s my rough notes as I create my reading list for December. I usually read 20-30 books each month, so I’m going to plan out 15 and leave the rest sort of up to the moment.
N.K. Jemisin Emergency Skin – novella, huzzah!
Diversity – this month I’m going to add a few more LatinX authors to the mix, having read a piece with some recommendations, while also finishing up the collection of Harlem Renaissance novels I started last month. I’ve added two from their list I wasn’t familiar, Felix J. Palma and Adam Silverta, and will find a book from each.
Classic – Walter Tevis The Man Who Fell to Earth. I enjoyed the series based on Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit, but in looking at it, I decided to go with this instead since it’s a pretty classic book that I’ve never read.
Classic anthology-wise, I’ve got a ton on my shelves, so I’ve snagged Orbit 3, edited by Damon Knight. I also bought a collection that’s worth working my way through, The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection, particularly since I want to look at Davidson’s methods of storytelling. For nonfiction that fits into that reading project, I’m adding Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Desirina Boscovich, which just arrived in the mail and is a handsome looking book.
Nonfiction books I recently picked up include NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman; American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People by Jared Yates Sexton, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan; Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. I’m halfway through the last, so I’ll plan on finishing it and reading at least one of the others.
Looking over my Kindle – man, there is a ton of other stuff I downloaded and would like to get to, so I need to stop buying books until I’ve cleared at least SOME of this away.
Only the Devil is Here by Stephen Michell
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen
The Wall by Gautam Bhatia
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix
The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher
The Afterward by E.K. Johnston
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho
Banshees by Mike Baron
Touched by Venom by Janine Cross
Brimstone Angels by Erin M. Evans
*starts to add others then goes aiiieee and runs around in circles for a while instead*
I’m still pondering the various notetaking methods Tracy talked about, but certainly reading more mindfully seems worthwhile. Will any of this be useful? I dunno, but it can’t hurt, and in the meantime I get to read.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American editor, writer, and lecturer whose short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman’s descent into madness, is often revisited in college literature classes. She was a single mother who supported herself by writing — no small accomplishment today, let alone at the time she was doing so, the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Herland is often treated as though it stands alone, but it’s actually the middle volume of a trilogy, preceded by Moving the Mountain in 1911 and followed by With Her in Ourland in 1916. The work was originally published as a serial in a magazine called The Forerunner that Gilman edited; it did not appear as a complete book until 1979, when Pantheon Books published it.
Herland is a utopian novel, in which three men, Vandyk (the narrator), Terry, and Jeff stumble across a civilization where the women reproduce asexually and there are no men. This turns out to lead not to a perfect civilization, but certainly one that seems more appealing than the one Gilman found herself in. Gilman uses the book as a device with which to explore constructed ideas of gender. It is an appealing society in many others; in others, it’s a bit cold and calculating. Girls who are overly rebellious or mouthy, for example, will not be allowed to reproduce.
One of the things that’s refreshing about the book is that it’s not written as though the lack of males is a deficit that warps society. Instead, it’s simply the way things are, and the Herlanders seem capable of getting along quite well without it.
Gilman was one of the important suffrage speakers of her time and a bit of a polymath. If you want to go further into her writing, I suggest a piece of nonfiction, her work on economics, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, which originally appeared in 1898.
Tracy Townsend just did a terrific workshop this Saturday on Reading Like a Writer, (
6 Responses
Pity its so bloody expensive
I know. Book prices are unfathomable to me, particularly when it’s an older book list this. I recommended a book to someone the other day and he found it on Amazon, but used since it was out of print, for $163, which he was understandably reluctant to pay.
I know. Book prices flummox me, particularly when it’s a book that’s been in print for a long time. I recommended a favorite SF book to someone the other day and when we investigated, found it on Amazon but out of print — for 160 bucks! Yikes.
On a similar tho somewhat different theme, may I also recommend “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma,” which is a history of the efforts to standardize English.
I read that and really enjoyed it. Someone on Twitter suggested I would also like The Stories of English by David Crystal.