The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language by Melvyn Bragg

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
(Hodder & Stoughton, Great Britain: 2005)

READ: September-November 2006

I kept seeing this book in the English-language section of one of the bookstores in nearby Nagoya, and finally I had to buy it. And man, what a compelling read!

As the title suggests, Melvyn Bragg has set out to give us a history of the English language. But far from being dry and pedantic, he has a humorous, often light-hearted twist on the story. He gives further details where needed, and glosses over other parts of the story when they are not key to the advancement of the telling. (A skill I sorely lack.) The result is a thoroughly entertaining read about an important movement in history - the development and entrenchment of the English language across large swathes of the world.

Obviously, this book is a little Euro- ethnocentric, but, well, it is about the English language specifically (not just language in general), so that's hardly avoidable. While he sometimes explodes into overblown grandeur, overall Bragg does a good job of recognizing his bias (and, indeed, the bias of the language itself).

This book is apparently at least based in part on a television documentary (I think for the BBC) that Bragg did a few years earlier, but that's all I know.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Lynne Truss
(Gotham Books, New York: 2004)

First published in U.K. in 2003 by Profile Books.

READ: March 2006

Hee. Another funny book. I was given it as a present back in 2004 immediately before I left for Southeast Asia, but hadn't gotten around to reading it. By March of this year, plans were firmly underway to head to Japan for a year (or some) to teach English, so I figured it was time to figure out punctuation.

I've always been a bit of a punctuation stickler. Not always in my own writing (I do tend to drag things on and on), but when editing others' work. Plus in grade 8, my English teacher, Mr. Waddington (who, strangely, had been my French teacher the year before, but that's another story entirely), told me I overused commas. I'm not sure you can actually overuse commas - usually the problem is underuse, no? - but there you have it.

Anyway, this book hasn't helped really in terms of making me a better English teacher, but it was an excellent book nonetheless. It is quite funny. It's certainly not a how-to book. Truss doesn't really tell you when a comma is appropriate, but she can sure show many examples of inappropriateness. And the poor apostrophe! That's the one that drives me batty. It's so simple to use, yet so rarely used right. I can forgive things like "1970's" (shouldn't be an apostrophe), but "Orange's for sale" is only right if there is one thing for sale and it happens to be called Orange. And "it's" versus "its" - the easiest rule in the entire grammar book - let's just not go there.

Yes, the hype that surrounded its publication was worth it. It's a good book and quite enjoyable.