This month, I hit a wall. I'm not truly mad at myself because I know there are people in this world who struggle to finish one book and I did finish a total of six, but compared to the last few months, six feels like such a piddly number. I think part of my problem is that I attempted to read some non-fiction books. I keep pushing myself to read more non-fiction and then I struggle so hard to read it. Let's talk about the books I did manage to finish this month, shall we?
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"The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English" by Lynne MurphyThere has been a debate going on for many years between the Brits and the Americans. Obviously, the squabble between the two started with that whole "we're sailing off for a new world" and the you gotta fight for your right to rule your land (don't get me started on the less than savory methods of obtaining said land...) and has come to this: Americans are ruining the English language (or so the Brits think...). Lynne Murphy is an American-born professor at a university in the UK teaching linguistics to a bunch of Brits. I know what you're thinking: How dare she? Well, that's her right, I guess. This book goes (topic by topic) through the differences between "British" English and "American" English. I enjoyed the general concept of this book. The differences between American and British English are quite stark. We as Americans think that a British accent is "sexy" or "exotic" when in reality they're speaking the same exact language as us, just in a different way, using different phrases. (Example: Brits say "toilet" where we say "bathroom" or "restroom". Murphy points out that Brits are apparently more comfortable using the phrase of the thing we use while we're in there than Americans are, and I have to agree with her...)
I did mostly enjoy this book but to be honest it got very tedious very quickly. Murphy goes through, individually, the differences between American English and British English. Individually. There are a LOT of differences between the two and Murphy chose the best way to address these issues was to do it separately. Which, I agree with. In theory. Like I said, by the middle of the book I was less than invested in what Murphy was writing about and skimmed the last half of the book. This is not a jab at Murphy per-se. I enjoyed reading what she'd written. I appreciated the fact that she's spent a large majority of her life living in the two countries she was pitting against each other. She has heard first hand the differences between the two languages and for that I appreciate and respect her authority. It's just a lot to go over and it got dry. (This was a library book.)
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"What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves" by Benjamin K. BergenIf you've ever wondered why it is that some people curse, this is the book for you. Bergen has compiled years of other people's research into a convenient book for your curious naughty mind. There are four main categories of curse words: those related to sex and acts of reproduction, those related to defecation, those related to religion, and those related to racial slurs. I find it so fascinating that there are people who are so interested in finding things out (like, in the case of this book, why people curse) that they go out and do research and write about it so that I don't have to do the research myself. Thank you, random researcher for you sacrifices to the cause of my education.
This book and my feelings about it mirror the previous book: I enjoyed reading about the topic but it could've been half the length and I may (or may not) have been just fine with that. There is only so many times one can read the N word before it becomes too much. I found the first part very interesting, in which Bergen addressed the four categories (he simplified it into a list of some four letter words that I chose not to include for various... offensive reasons) but also compiled some research in which lists of words were composed in order of their offensiveness in different parts of the world. THAT was interesting. I skimmed most of the rest of the book, but I'm still counting it towards my total for the month... (I borrowed this from the library.)
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"Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by Gretchen McCulloch
It's no secret that the Internet has changed a lot about the world. This book addressed how the Internet has changed our language and how we communicate. Emoticons have snuck their way into our everyday communication and things like "LOL" have made their way into the dictionary (I don't really consider "LOL" a word, but whatever...). We've started abbreviating in new and exciting ways. McCulloch breaks down the various parts of our communication and how the Internet has truly changed how we speak, possibly forever.
This was another book that turned into a snooze fest pretty quickly. Again, I'll be forever grateful that people like McCulloch (and Bergen and Murphy) took the time it required to put together these books, but they got tedious. I found myself skipping chunks of this book because I really didn't care about everything McCulloch felt the need to add. I enjoyed the concept of the book and I was fascinated by the beginning of each section, I just went cross-eyed trying to grasp everything the writers were trying to convey. (This was another book I borrowed from the library.)
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"Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" by Gregory Maguire
If you like "The Wizard of Oz", you may enjoy this. "Wicked" tells the origin stories of Elphaba and Galinda (or, as you may know them, "The Wicked Witch of the West" and "The Good Witch of the North"). Turns out, they were roomies at University before Elphaba became evil and decided to terrorize Oz and Dorothy.
Elphaba's life is not a glamorous one or a happy one. She is disliked by her parents from the moment she's born, a fact that is made only more obvious by the fact that her father sends her little sister, Nessarose, a pair of glass-beaded shoes as a "back to school" present. On her first day at University, she is made to room with Galinda, a spoiled girl from the upper crust of the world of Oz. The two of them strike up an unlikely friendship that continues well into their lives. Rocked by loss of loved ones, the prejudice she faces as a green-skinned woman, and the rejection of people around her, Elphaba slowly turns towards hatred and magic as solutions to her problems.
The world building Maguire accomplished in this novel is incredible. We learn so much more about the world of Oz than we could've ever hoped to in the movie and we certainly learn more about Elphaba and why she became known as the "Wicked Witch of the West". Elphaba faces all kind of prejudice. She certainly wasn't always the evil woman willing to kill a girl for a pair of shoes we came to know in the original movie. I very much enjoyed this book and look forward to eventually watching the musical at some point.
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"Flipping the Script: Bouncing Back from Life's Rock Bottom Moments" by AJ Gibson
This book was getting passed around my family for the longest time because AJ is (somewhat) related to us. His dad was married three times. The first to my great-aunt. She died and he got remarried to some other woman. They got divorced and this time, it was to a woman who would become AJ's mom. (I know that this is really none of you guys' business, I just felt like I needed to explain how I got ahold of this book. Also, AJ addresses his Dad's many wives in the text, so I'm not spilling tea that wasn't already spilled.) So, he's not REALLY related but he's family, but when AJ started writing about how much his life sucked growing up (gay) in rural Ohio, people in my family started to take note. A copy of the book was obtained by someone and people started passing it around. I was told it was "scandalous". That's how it ended up in my hot little hands. Plus, if I SAY I'm related to AJ, then I'm related to a relatively famous person who has met other famous people and this is that seven degrees of separation I've been hoping for when it came to me knowing Chris Evans/Tom Hiddleston... Anyway, back to the book.
AJ was gay. AJ is gay. AJ's been gay for a long time. And when you grow up in a rural part of Ohio that worships Jesus and doesn't eat fish on Fridays, being gay is like the worst possible thing you can be (I was going to say something here but I decided not to... I'm behaving!!). So, AJ talks about how much it sucked to live in rural Ohio and be gay and how much his life sucked when his little sister/best friend told him he just needed to pray harder and he wouldn't be gay anymore (I don't think that's how that works...). How much it sucked when he got a tax bill for over $16,000 because he didn't realize they weren't taking taxes out of his paycheck when he landed a spot on some TV show. His car was on its last bumper. And he figured out how to escape from it all: kill himself.
He didn't do that, obviously. But he was really close to doing it. This book was him talking about that rock bottom moment and pulling himself out from underneath the rubble and figuring it all out. I enjoyed most of this book. At the end of each chapter, AJ did this thing he called "script re-writes" in which the reader (me, in this particular example) was supposed to do something. Write something down. Make a plan to change some aspect of your life. I'm not really into self-help books so that part for me brought down the vibes we'd been working so hard to accomplish.
I won't say that this book was cheesy and simplistic because sometimes I write stuff here on this blog or on my own personal writing spaces that's cheesy and simplistic. But, none of my stuff has been published (here's the point where I'm assuming some of you were all Thank the HEAVENS!!!). This book has obviously been published and distributed to I don't know how many people. It took me approximately three hours to read all 256 pages of this book.
What my family very obviously found scandalous was that AJ was spilling the tea about what it's like growing up and being gay (or just different in some way) in rural areas like he or I did. I'm not part of the LGBTQ+ community but I know how difficult it is for people in this community to grow up in these areas. I may have some radical ideas but for all of those people out there who worship Jesus and then think it's okay to kick your child out of your home for being LGBTQ+ because the "bible says not to be gay", should probably re-evaluate your "No, ALL lives matter" comeback to "Black Lives Matter"... (Just a thought.) AJ spilled the truth about how shitty it is to grow up in a community that thinks of you as less than a person because you think differently and love someone differently than they do. This book was no more scandalous than some of the stories of the Bible and yet, some members of my family clearly clutched their rosary as they read this.
Thank you for sharing your story AJ. Even the not-so church-approved parts of it. Change can't happen unless people like you share it. So keep doing what you're doing.
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"Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time" by Michael Shermer
"Why People Believe Weird Things" drew me in by the title alone. There are things, which I'll call "conspiracy theories" that people believe for almost no reason. Why are there people believe that the Holocaust never happened when there is evidence that very much proves that it DID happen? Why do people believe in psychics? Shermer wanted to explore these topics and figure out what it is that makes people believe these things. Sounds like a great concept for a book, right?
I thought so, obviously. I purchased this book for the outrageous price of $2.14 from Half-Price books. I had it in my hot little hands. I was pumped. I'd read most of the introduction while waiting for my companions that I'd travelled to that particular store with finished browsing whatever it was they were browsing. I was ready to read the rest of it. I settled in with my book and my water bottle and... quickly realized that Shermer had bamboozled me! The fascinating introduction was a little bit of bait and switch. The book was BORING. I didn't care about ANY of what Shermer was writing. This was another book I skimmed the last half of. I don't know what I was expecting, but this book didn't deliver that to me at all.
I struggled my way through four of the six books I read this month and that is depressing to say the least. While I obviously have all the time in the world right now to read and expand my brain, I feel like I've wasted a month's worth of good books. I loved "Wicked" and enjoyed "Flipping the Script" but other than that, these books were a flop. I hope that July will be better because I'm ready to get June 2021 out of my memory banks. Thank you so much for reading and until next week...
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Picture Sources
(Each image is a screenshot of the covers taken from each books respective Goodreads pages, which are linked down below.)
- The Prodigal Tongue: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35787525-the-prodigal-tongue
- What the F: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29101497-what-the-f
- Because Internet: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739320-because-internet
- Wicked: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10750.Wicked
- Flipping the Script: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40851363-flipping-the-script
- Why People Believe Weird Things: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33547173-why-people-believe-weird-things
