Book Recommendations for Kids and Adults

A lot of times people ask us for book recommendations if somebody wants to give a gift to a book lover or a word lover.

And the one that I’ve been recommending to people lately is Jeffrey Nunberg’s new book, The Years of Talking Dangerously.

He’s, of course, a linguist. You may have heard him on NPR, where he often reads essays.

This is a whole collection of them.

And it’s what he calls snapshots of the language during the final years of the Bush administration.

And all of these essays, like all of his essays, are elegant and pithy.

And they cover things like how the word entrepreneur is used to make the self-employed feel more important.

And one of my favorite essays in here is on a topic, Grant, that you and I have talked many times about, the fact that text messaging is, in fact, not ruining the English language.

I always like the little twists and surprises in Nunberg’s essays.

I love this line from the one on text messaging.

He says, the Victorians developed a breathlessly compressed style for sending telegrams, like the message Henry James had one of his characters’ cable in Portrait of a Lady.

It went, tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer decent cabin.

But that telegraphic style, he writes, didn’t leave any traces on Victorian prose.

When you think of James’ own writing, terse and condensed are not the words that come to mind.

And he just makes a lot of points like that.

I just, I really like recommending this book to people.

How about you, Grant? What are you recommending lately?

Well, you know, I often get requests for books as well.

And these days I tend to talk about children’s books.

Books are an important part of the life of my son.

The part of his imagination is creativity.

He watches a little bit of television, but it’s the books that he brings to us when he wants time alone with one of his parents.

So we like to pay attention to what he’s reading.

And there are collections of books or paths of books that we recommend.

One is a set by David Shannon.

David has a character named David, after himself, who gets into trouble.

And it’s an interesting art style.

He has a round head and jagged shark-like teeth and a triangle nose kind of like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

And David is constantly getting into trouble.

And my son is enthralled with David.

David is always doing the wrong thing.

He plays baseball in the house.

David throws vapor airplanes when he should be listening in school.

David is a troublemaker.

But at the end of the book, David always finds peace with his parents.

He always gets the hug from his mother or the words of praise or the, you know, I love you, those kinds of things.

And my son loves the simple plots.

He loves the mischief of it.

And all of these books are fantastic.

We only have a few of the David books in our home.

But one of them that we’ve checked out from the library a couple of times is Good Boy Fergus, which is about David’s dog, Fergus.

And Fergus, of course, does the same things.

Fergus will knock over and eat the plants in the house, and Fergus will refuse to sit down when told to, and Fergus will beg for food at the table.

But in the end, Fergus is always loved.

And it’s fun stuff.

My son loves these.

Okay, so that was Good Boy Fergus by David Shannon?

Yeah, there are several books by David Shannon, Good Boy Fergus and Oh David and No David and David Smells and David Gets in Trouble.

Right, collect them all.

And for adult word lovers, there’s The Years of Talking Dangerously by Jeffrey Nunberg.

If you’d like to recommend books to us or to your fellow listeners, send us an email to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call 1-877-929-9673.