Correspondents' Choice: Book Links for Last-Minute Christmas Shoppers

Since the cafe where I usually blog is closing between December 23 and January 3, here are this month's book links. As before, no caption means you can use the link to send a few pennies to this web site; a caption means you can use the link to send the pennies to an e-friend's web site. (Of course I don't begrudge them the pennies...I want you to use the links in the Permanent Greeting Post to tell me what you want to pay me dollars to write! Let the pennies fall where they may, but if they fall on this web site that's always encouraging.)

Alexander McCall Smith nominates W.H. Auden, a wordsmith who had few if any peers:



+Marsha Cooper shares another art book, this one by F. Sehnaz Bac, to encourage those of us who've already dabbled in too many art forms and need to add another one to the...No. Seriously. I used to know a "Rock Artist" who found craggy, irregular chunks of limestone and chipped and painted until they looked like recognizable rock stars (all ages of Elvis and more). He never got rich. And here's a review that makes me think "Maybe if he'd gone for colors rather than forms...hmm, was he color-blind?"

If the system works properly, clicking on her name will allow you to use Marsha Cooper's link to buy the book.

I don't know exactly what David Bahnsen plans to say about personal responsibility in his soon-to-become-available book on the subject, but I'd definitely be interested in finding out.



+Lyn Lomasi Rowell recommends this follow-up...Regular readers may remember the Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria a few years ago. Most of those girls weren't raped, enslaved, or tortured, as some of us feared...however, author Yaw Boateng claims that sort of thing continues to go on. At the time of posting the book is available only in Kindle form. Some publishers base the decision whether or not actually to publish a book, these days, on the e-book sales--a bad, self-destructive plan, but real.

If the system is working, clicking on her name will ensure a commission on sales of this book for Lyn Lomasi Rowell.

I woke up one morning in December with lagom on my mind...the word, I mean. I don't speak Swedish, and might not have noticed this word as especially useful when I added it to my monster Words Database on the desktop (34 floppy disks and growing). I noticed the word lagom when Swedish respondents explained it to P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich, where he translates it as "average" in order to wisecrack about wishing people "an average day." Apparently it's more like "just right" in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. One chair was too big, one was too small, and the other one was lagom. Anyway, the next day's e-mail contained an ad for this book. I have no idea what the author has to say; I'd like to find out.



Why did Europeans want to "colonize" other countries, anyway? Lizzie Collingham explains: they were hungry.



The Guardian's recommending At the Strangers' Gate suggests that it may lean considerably to the left of most of this web site's correspondents, politically, but Gopnik says it's a book about happiness. Do you like to read about happiness?



John Sandford recommended some other suspense novels, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (reviewed here) and this lively, somewhat violent, somewhat raunchy, frequently funny, specimen of what I've come to think of as the Carl Hiaasen genre novel...they're all action/adventure comedies, some "adult" and some suitable for advanced middle school readers, always set in Florida and featuring at least one Greedhead versus True Green conflict, along with a lot of subplots involving other comically quirky types of people that tend to be attracted to Florida, and frequently involving wildlife. Some characters appear in more than one book. For those who aren't sure which of these beach-oriented novels they've already read, Amazon notes that this is the first one with Mick Stranahan in it.




Have you ever wondered what the grammar of all those "respectful forms" in Japanese looks like, when analyzed? Thanks to Elizabeth Barrette for sharing this simplified version of a 1983 "programmed" (we used to call them "scrambled") textbook. It's an overview. It's apparently like the Spanish book my uncle and I used when learning to communicate with my Tex-Mex cousins--(1) accurate so far as a single book can go, (2) for the formal version of the language that may or may not be what the visitor hears, and (3) some people may need a good course in English grammar to understand the way the author presents foreign grammar. (The language of pre-"transformational" grammar is imperfect even for describing the way the Indo-European languages work, but it serves those who've learned to use it well.) In other words, I wouldn't rely on one book to allow me to speak a language (except by way of amusing native speakers), but one book can be useful for translating a written foreign language into English.



Down at the bottom because the publisher is listed as author--and it's Zondervan--is a new Daily Devotional book aimed at teenaged girls. +Marsha Cooper 's original post about this book, which I plussed and tweeted at the time, contained a Rafflecopter widget through which somebody won a free copy. The raffle's over but the book's still on Amazon:

If this link works properly, it too will deliver a commission to Marsha Cooper.