Made in America by Bill Bryson

Before the 1820s, dining out was an activity reserved almost exclusively for travelers. Though it was possible to eat in hotels and taverns, there were no places dedicated to the public consumption of food for the mere pleasure of it, nor any word to describe them. Then, in 1827, a new word and concept entered American English from France: restaurant.

-Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

If you're going to pick up a book by Bill Bryson, be prepared to learn things. So many things--truly interesting things--that there's no way you'll be able to remember everything you'd like to. (O, for a photographic memory!) You will be highly tempted to put down the book every few pages and tell anyone in the vicinity whatever nugget of trivia you've just learned. If you're reading Made in America, I hope you keep company with people with a thirst for more information about language and history.

I very much enjoyed the facts thrown at me on every page; so many that I can't even begin to recount them (though the excerpt above, with the introduction of the word restaurant, is a good example). Just as when I read Bryson's At Home, I was staggered by how many things in everyday life I'd never stopped to consider. Like how the phrase "mother of all," in the sense of the biggest of something, only dates back to the Gulf War. Who knew?

I will say Made in America isn't a page-turner--it lends itself to being read in little chunks. You could certainly put it down for a while and return to it later without losing the thread of things, I think. It took me a bit longer than expected to get through it, but it was definitely a worthwhile read. I wonder if Bryson has considered updating it, since it came out in 1994--certainly an additional chapter on the last twenty (well, nearly--gulp) years wouldn't go awry.

Up next: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

On Writing by Stephen King

[B]ooks are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laudromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

-On Writing 

When I was about 15, I went through a Stephen King phase. It was summer, I remember, and I'd picked up a sheet from the public library with spaces to record everything I read (a habit I picked back up in college, and basically just expanded upon when starting this blog). The Stand, Thinner, The Shining—just a fraction of King's bibliography, but a pretty good run. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided his books were too scary for me and moved on to other things (I think this was also around the same time of my ill-fated foray into Oprah's Book Club books, oddly enough). On Writing is the first Stephen King book I've read since, and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

On Writing is subtitled A Memoir of the Craft, which tidily sums up the different sections of the book. In the first section, C.V., King lays out his history and details how he got from the four-page stories he wrote as a kid to nailing rejection slips to his wall to publishing his first big success, Carrie. King has a special talent for developing an instant rapport with his reader, and I was with him immediately. He's plain-spoken but clever, honest about criticism he's received, and, heck, he just seems like a cool guy. It's hard not to be in his corner.

In the second section, On Writing, King gets into advice for aspiring writers. He covers everything from grammar to dialogue to editing, with some nifty examples included. His biggest piece of advice is simple but undoubtedly true: if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot. (I don't have the book with me right now, but I believe King stated he read 50-60 books a year; a list of his reading in the years he was working on this book is included at the end). I first heard the advice about reading more to write better from my 9th grade English teacher. As a voracious reader since childhood, I could always handle the "read a lot" part. "Write a lot" is harder. King recommends at least 1000 words a day (he himself writes 2000 daily). Whew. While not impossible in the least (you have to average 1700 words a day to make it through NaNoWriMo), it's a definite commitment. Which is good, really—you should be committed to something if you want to get better at it. But coming up with the words yourself is harder than reading them, that's for sure.*

The third section of On Writing is the most affecting. In it, King covers the 1999 accident in which he was hit by an out-of-control van. As someone who has been in the hospital pretty recently, I was wincing in sympathy. The extent of his injuries is actually difficult for me to fathom. I know how awful it is to break your leg in one place. King broke his in nine places; his doctors seriously considered amputation. Plus there was the broken hip, broken ribs, collapsed lung, etc. Really horrifying.

King was in the midst of writing On Writing when the accident occurred, and—unsurprisingly—it took him a while to get back to it.  Thank goodness he was able to. I enjoyed On Writing thoroughly. It even left me open to idea of trying a little more of his scarier works in the future—Misery, for one, sounds pretty gripping. It might be a good Halloween-y sort of read...

Up next: Continuing on the memoir kick: Lit by Mary Karr, whose book The Liars' Club is said to have started the memoir craze.

*This entry (minus the excerpt and this aside) is 610 words, just as a point of comparison, and took me a good hour to write.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility. In the living room, Scrabble is about who has a better working vocabulary. It's a sort of crossword puzzle in reverse. But in the tournament room, Scrabble has nothing to do with vocabulary. If it did, I – an Ivy league-educated professional journalist, for crying out loud – would rule. But I can only dream of competing with the champions. No, Scrabble isn't about words. It's about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.

-Word Freak

I love Scrabble. I've played it since I was kid and I consider myself to be a decent living room player. But I'll never play at the same level at Stefan Fatsis and, honestly, I wouldn't want to—I get hung up on the whole "real word" thing he discusses in the passage above. Nevertheless I love love love Word Freak.

Word Freak chronicles journalist Stefan Fatsis's journey into the world of competitive Scrabble. It's a weird place, populated by all varieties of social miscreants.  Stefan begins at the bottom of the heap, playing the blue hairs—and not always winning, either. He begins studying words, which means memorization, and lots of it. Can you imagine memorizing a list of two-letter words that are valid in Scrabble? And then, when you've finished that, three-letter words? And four, five, etc. There are more words on each list, naturally. It's a Sisyphean struggle for Stefan, although he does make slow progress.

Word Freak is not all about words, though there are certainly plenty of them. Let's get back to those social miscreants, the real heart of the story. It takes a special kind of person to be an expert Scrabble player. Dedicated would be one word for it. Experts could doubtless think of many more, a fair amount of which might be less flattering. But while Stefan's new Scrabble friends may be single-minded in their devotion to the game, they're also pretty fascinating. There's the friendly but ever-ailing "G.I" Joel Sherman (the G.I stands for "gastrointestinal"). There's the funny, hot-headed Matt Graham, who takes smart pills by the handful in order to boost his performance. Matt's friend, Marlon Hill, a smart, temperamental player out of inner-city Baltimore who is working on a book about race in America. And there's Joe Edley, who has mystical approach to Scrabble and coaches Stefan on the psychological aspect of the game.*

There's many more, besides. Some of them, to be fair, seem perfectly well adjusted — but they also get less face time in Word Freak. Stefan is not condescending, although he is honest about the weirdness level, as are many of players. As time wears on, though, and his obsessiveness about the game grows, he finds he has more and more in common with his Scrabble comrades. It might have been a frightening realization to have, but Stefan often finds himself happy with this crowd, playing Anagrams and rehashing games past. They love the game, they truly do.

And I love this book. I enjoy spending time with people who are happy and successful in a way that might not make sense to the rest of the world.  Good for them. And I especially love that this revolves around language, even if many tournament players might not know (or care about) the definitions of the words they play. There is something exciting about finding the perfect word — be it in writing or, when the universe smiles upon upon you, in the mishmash of tiles on your Scrabble rack. I enjoyed celebrating that in Word Freak. It also really, really made me want to play a game of Scrabble.

Up next: For whatever reason, this entry took me forever to write, so I've already finished Tana French's Faithful Place; I imagine I'll be back to write about it soon. I'm planning on starting The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs later this evening.

*If you're curious to see these players in action, the documentary Word Wars covers at least part of the same time period and features many of the same people.

Reading the OED by Ammon Shea

Lectory (n.) A place for reading.

Although I am firmly of the opinion that a book can, and should, be brought along and read anywhere, there can be something almost infinitely pleasing about having a specific place that is designed solely for reading. If you agree with this sentiment you very likely have your own lectory somewhere. If you disagree with this sentiment, you are probably not reading this book.

-Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

I have never read a dictionary - okay, a few years ago I attempted to read James Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage*, but I lost steam quite early into A. (I still have the page marked.) All the same, when I stumbled upon a review of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, I knew I would love it. The review was sprinkled with a few of the words Shea collected in the course of reading the entirety of the Oxford English Dictionary in one year. Words like vicambulist (one who walks about in the street) won my heart.

I had a feeling I had found a literary kindred spirit, which is always a wonderful experience. I remember when I first read Sarah Vowell, and how delighted I was every time I discovered something we had in common: She majored in art history? She can't drive? She loves Lincoln? She knows a song about German prepositions?** There is something so marvelous about that sort of connection with an author, I think.

Reading the OED was similar in a lot of ways. Despite the fact that Shea and I are diametrically opposed on summer and television (I am staunchly pro, he is con), anyone who has such a keen love of words is someone with whom I feel a kinship. Plus, he wrote things like this:

Coffee has long since transcended its role as "the thing that wakes me up" and now has comfortably settled into the role of "the thing that brings me joy."

I was thinking the same thing recently, but with considerably less eloquence. Love coffee.

But I digress. It would be tempting to fill the remainder of this review with words that Shea included - the book is divided A-Z, with each section containing some thoughts on his experience as well as definitions of and commentaries on selected words. I am itching to use a word like all-overish (feeling an undefined sense of unwell that extends to the whole body), for example. But I'll spare you that, and instead try to get back to my NaNoWriMo work. Another brief review, I'm afraid, but I hope I've conveyed my love for this book.

Further reading:

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester: About the writing of the OED. And if that description doesn't sound totally intriguing, don't dismiss the titular madman. It's been a little while since I read it, but I remember liking it a lot.

The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs: One man sets out to read the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Said reading encourages Jacobs to do everything from attend a Mensa convention to audition for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Pretty much a must for the voraciously curious and otherwise nerdy. It's also a go-to book for me when I'm stressed.

Up next: Drood by Dan Simmons. I'm about 45 pages in and I'm totally engrossed. It weighs a ton, though. Reading the OED was scarcely over 200 pages; Drood is more than 3 times that long. It's still coming with me on the subway every day, though.



*Is reading a grammar dictionary nerdier than reading a regular dictionary? Discuss. Also, it was totally interesting, you guys! Maybe I should dig it back out.

**You can sing the dative prepositions to the tune of "The Blue Danube." Fun fact - and probably why I still know my dative prepositions five years after having taken German.