More Book Recommendations

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If you have a young reader in your life, or maybe you’re a young reader yourself, I recommend a book called A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader. It’s a collection of 121 original letters to the children of today and tomorrow about why we read and what books do for us. And it’s not only a testament to the power of literature, it’s a visual feast.

And the letters were put together by Maria Popova of BrainPickings.org and the independent picture book publisher, Claudia Bedrick. And it includes 121 letters from some of the most interesting people around. Rebecca Solnit, Diane Ackerman, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Daniel Handler. It includes letters from Yo-Yo Ma and David Byrne and Amanda Palmer and other artists like that.

And a few people you’ve probably never heard of, including a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who writes this incredibly moving letter about how smuggled books were a lifeline for her and others. And each letter is illustrated by some of the most accomplished illustrators around, like John Classen and Oliver Jeffers and Christian Robinson and Lisa Brown and Carson Ellis. It’s just a gorgeous book.

And the other thing that’s wonderful about this book is that every one of those participants donated their labor, as did Popova and Bedrick. And all of the proceeds go to the New York Public Library system.

That’s cool. I love it.

And the book again is what?

It’s called A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader.

A Velocity of Being is a wonderful title as well, right?

I know. And it’s just a beautiful, beautiful tome.

I guess I know what a middle schooler in my house is going to get for Christmas this year.

I think he would love it.

Speaking of middle schoolers, I have a tradition of when I recommend books on the show, recommending books for kids. And typically they’re kind of, you know, aged towards my son’s age. He’s now in middle school. But this time I’m going to recommend a young adult novel that I read for myself. And that’s because it was a novel written in Spanish by Isabella Allende.

I’ve been working on my Spanish, trying to get better at it. I haven’t really studied it in some decades. And reading on a Kindle where you can look stuff up easily, find definitions or translate a passage that you don’t understand, is a wonderful way to learn a language.

She has a trilogy of books for young adults. And the first one is The City of the Beast. It’s about a teenage boy from Northern California who goes to the Amazon with his hard-as-nails grandmother. And she’s a world traveler to boot. There he has this spiritual and otherworldly encounter with a variety of different things. And I don’t want to give anything away here.

And it kind of pushes him on his journey from being a teen towards being a man, towards being an adult. He goes from being concerned mostly with petty things towards seeing himself as part of a larger universe. And as the book puts it, he learns how to listen with his heart.

And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea that this is a very woo-woo and awkwardly spiritual book. It’s a fun romp. It’s a kid’s book. They have fun in the Amazon. There’s very interesting action, and there’s a lot of interplay between relationships, and there’s bad guys and good guys. And his grandmother is a character I’ve never seen before.

She’s not the cuddly, cookie-baking grandmother. She’s the kick-ass, boots-wearing grandmother. She pushed him into the deep end of the pool to teach him how to swim when he was four. That kind of grandmother.

Oh, cool.

So she’s good. And my Spanish got better to boot. But I found this book in English and French and other languages. And so that’s The City of the Beast by Isabel Allende, the Chilean author, who, of course, writes wonderful adult novels, too.

The second book I want to recommend is, of course, more towards my other interest, and it’s called The Dictionary Wars, and it’s by Peter Martin. Martin writes this lively, not quite academic book about how Noah Webster became the name we associate with American dictionaries. But the story is more interesting than that because he talks about the bitter rivalries between publishers and lexicographers.

He talks about how had history gone another way, we might be telling people to go look it up in your Worcester. Your Worcester. W-O-R-C-E-S-T-E-R. Joseph Emerson Worcester was with Webster the most successful dictionary publisher of the 1800s. He was fantastic. It was widely regarded and many people preferred his books over Webster’s. And yet the rivalry there, I don’t know how to describe this except to say it’s worse than The Devil Wears Prada. It is some bitter, outrageous fighting.

These are some cranky men, and they are battling over these interesting stakes. Who will become the dictionary that is the American dictionary? Who will become the Samuel Johnson of this country? And so the book is about that, and it’s written so that anyone can read it. You don’t have to be a specialist in dictionaries or lexicography to really appreciate it.

And that’s the Dictionary Wars by Peter Martin.

Did they ever come to blows?

They never.

Oh, but they came to blows in ink. There are a lot of bitter letters written by these men. Oh, just bitter, bitter letters. And the fact that Webster won, I think, is an accident of history. It could have easily gone the other way.

Oh, that’s really interesting.

That’s the Dictionary Wars by Peter Martin.

We’d love to know what you’re reading. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your thoughts about any aspect of language to words@waywordradio.org.