Books I Loved That I Never Reviewed

Compared to a lot of other book bloggers, I haven't been reviewing books for very long. I started this blog a year after I graduated from college, so that leaves many books that have gone unmentioned here. Below are some of my favorites that I read pre-blogging:

1. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868): This is for sure my all-time favorite detective novel (not that I have read very many) that was so much fun to read. A very well-written page-turner full of colorful characters that you shouldn't pass up.

2. White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985): Still my favorite DeLillo, if you are going to read one book about the 20th century, I think this one should be it.

3. Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1993): This one is pretty dark but if you can make your way through, it's worth it. At it's core, it examines race relations in post-apartheid South Africa.

4. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2004): Confession: I have read this book three times and I love it even more with each read. It is a romance novel with a dose a sci-fi, but still smart and and I love it. It will always be a book that I won't hesitate to pick up and reread when I need a good love story in my life.

5. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (2007): This is a truly heart-breaking read that examines a subject I feel is important for those removed from it to learn about: child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

6. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860): This is my all-time favorite bildungsroman (yes I like it more than Jane Eyre) and if you are interested in Eliot I think this is a great place to state.

7. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (2007): I think this is the most interesting of Pinker's books I have read. He combines his vast knowledge of language and human behavior to examine what the words we use say about ourselves.

8. Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr (2009): This is a hysterical and intelligent look into specific words in our ever-changing vocabulary. It reads like an amusing dictionary. If you are a nerd about words, this is for you.

9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884): A children's classic that I read as an adult, this novel is about the nature of freedom and the meaning of human connections.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish
photo via Pretty Books

Quotables: Roy Blount Jr.

Awhile ago I picked up the book Alphabet Juice and I am having a ton of fun with it - mostly because I'm a nerd.

This book is unique and I am going to let the inside cover do the talking: Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince? Ever wonder why so many h-words have to do with breath?

Roy Blount Jr. certainly has, and after 40 years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, (author of over 30 books) except greeting cards, he still can't get over his ABC's. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. 

As I mentioned, I am having a ton of fun with this book. It consists of entries that resemble a dictionary but rather than definitions, Blount provides us with a humorous and intellectual take on what makes words so scrumptious.  And, of course, the book is filled with words involving usage and grammar. 

Here are two of my favorites so far:

absolutely

Is heard more and more often in conversation as truth gets more and more relative, whether we like it or not. We need a good solid thumping way of saying yes when, as Alessandra Stanley puts it in The New York Time's, "practically every... drama in prime time is a spooky mystery in which things are never as they seem and nobody can be trusted". Cf. amen

groin

AHD says this is perhaps from the Old English grynde, meaning "abyss" or "hallow," influenced by loin. WIII agrees on grynde (related to ground) but says the oin influence is from the British-dialect groin (related to grunt) meaning "the nose and sometimes the upper lip of an animal (as a swine)."

   (Omigod, I just discovered where oink comes from.)

   If you ask me, groin is a portmanteau of grind, as in bump and grind, and loin.

I also enjoyed Blount's take on Google but the entry is three pages long and in my book, that surpasses a quotable. 

You can read the introduction of Alphabet Juice, courtesy of The New York Times and a review that actually does the book justice, via The Washington Post.