The Art of Language Invention, David J. Peterson

Though this is written by the linguist behind Game of Thrones’ Dothraki, this isn’t a populist cash-in type of book. It goes into the history of conlangs (constructed languages) a little bit, and then delves deep into all the ins and outs of creating a convincing one — from phonology to grammar to script. It’s fascinating, if sometimes a little hard to follow for someone who isn’t interested in building their own invented language, and thus doesn’t have something to apply the ideas to.

The book covers a lot of ground by including some case studies of invented languages as well (Dothraki, unsurprisingly, included). Less usefully for me, it includes phrasebooks for some invented languages.

Ultimately, I think you have to be pretty darn into conlangs to get much value out of this, but it is a fascinating subject.

Rating: 4/5

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo

I’m not usually one for self-help books and such, and pretty much only read this because I had a reading challenge prompt of reading something in the genre. That said, at least I picked something useful; to a great extent I agree with Marie Kondo’s ideas about minimalism and only owning objects you really love. The suggestions for how to tackle your space are great, and the reminders about not just shipping it off to a parent’s house and so on are important. (That isn’t tidying, it’s cluttering up someone else’s house.) Some of her suggestions about understanding that an object has already fulfilled its purpose were interesting too — I like the idea that a gift has achieved its purpose as soon as you’ve received it, for example.

Some of it gets a little too… woo, for me. I’m not knocking a view of the world that imbues everything with spirit, but it doesn’t work for me, and it sometimes just stretched my credulity too far. If you’re strongly opposed to the idea of talking to your belongings and thanking them for their service, this might not be a good book for you at all — you’d spend too much time scoffing.

I do like the ideas and methods to a great extent, though, and I’ll be keeping that central question in mind as I clean out my wardrobes and such: “Does this spark joy?”

I did stick my fingers metaphorically in my ears and la-la-la through the bit about throwing books away. There were some reasonable points, actually — no matter how excited I was to receive a book back in 2011, if I haven’t even touched it since then, am I really likely to read it? But. But. Books.

Rating: 4/5

Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

If the brain is predictably irrational, then the books which warn us we aren’t the rational creatures we hope are also predictable. I don’t think there was a single circumstance in Ariely’s book I wasn’t already aware of from one experiment or another, one summary or another. That said, Predictably Irrational is well written and easy to digest; there’s no technobabble, and everything is presented in a very readable and readily understandable format. It’s not Dan Ariely’s fault that I’ve read all this stuff before.

If you don’t know much about the topic of the way our brains work, and how counter-intuitive it sometimes is, then this is a good place to start. Unfortunately, that means I don’t have much to say about it — it didn’t hold any surprises for me.

Rating: 3/5

Gut: The Inside Story of our Body’s Most Underrated Organ, Giulia Enders

Gut is a fun light read; it’s not in-depth or academic at all — it doesn’t even have an index! — but it is fun and informative for a layperson. There’s no technical stuff here that isn’t explained, and there’s a fairly light tone to all of it, sometimes quite irreverent. Sometimes, however, you can’t really say it’s irreverent because it’s full of an enthusiasm and awe for our digestive system and everything it can do.

My main quibble was that it was too casual, too light, too much for the layperson. This wouldn’t be my chosen field even if I wanted to, but with just a couple of other books covering similar topics under my belt, a lot of it was just boring. (For example, for stuff on microbes, go for Missing Microbes by Martin Blaser, instead. Much more informative and in-depth, albeit not so easy a read.)

It’s fun, and it probably works well for the intended audience; I’m just not that audience, really. I did learn some interesting facts, and the diagrams/illustrations are pretty fun.

Rating: 3/5

Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth, Chris Stringer

I’m a little baffled by those who say that this book is for the scientific community, because it so blatantly isn’t — it explains how DNA and various methods of dating work, for example, which definitely wouldn’t be required by someone with even baseline knowledge in the scientific community. (Including me. There was no single technique this book covered which I didn’t comprehend, and only one or two I wasn’t aware of specifically.) I think it can be a little bit dry — especially when it explains things like DNA being in a helix or mtDNA being transmitted only through the female line… And the structure could definitely use some help. While I can see that he’s trying to interrelate his chapters by saying “see chapter x”, it means that sometimes the significance of something isn’t as apparent as he thinks.

Overall, though, I found it pretty readable and unexceptionable: Stringer freely admits that he’s been wrong at times about the course of human development, and that we don’t have all the answers now. He’s respectful of ideas he disagrees with, and covers some of them well, including the evidence which does point in that direction. I’m surprised by how little evidence of hybridisation he sees; I thought hybridisation with Neanderthals and Denisovans was more of a foregone conclusion than it appears from Stringer’s analysis.

It’s slightly more up to date than the Homo Britannicus book by the same author, too. Of course, it covers worldwide human history in general, so it’s less limited, but it also includes stuff I missed in reading that book, like some discussions of the Denisovan caves and the remains discovered there.

All in all, a reasonably good read, though naturally in general drift it supports the author’s hypothesis of a Recent African Origin for H. sapiens.

Rating: 4/5