No matter how eclectic the reader, everyone has something up with which she will not put, and for me, it turns out to be dictionaries. Even the adorable Leo Rosten could not hold my attention for an entire volume of Yiddish. And besides, having been a French major, and having cut my teeth (literally, I believe-- I think there were little baby-tooth bite marks on the cover of our family copy) on the Petit Larousse Illustre (follow this link! You'll thank me later!), I was considering giving myself a pass on this section of the Dewey Decimal System.
But I trudged over to the library anyway, just because I don't want to be stuck in some kind of linguistic purgatory all year, and lo and behold! Although "French language" seems to mainly consist of dictionaries and grammars and phrase books, it also includes memoirs of people's experiences learning French! Hooray! Presumably, the same will hold true for the languages still to come: Italian (Jumpa Lahiri, no less), Spanish, etcetera. It would be an interesting experiment to see how much of the Dewey Decimal System one could get through reading only books written in the first person.
