500-509: General Science. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

Okay, I've finally emerged from the 400s with one big takeaway: my Spanish is improving all the time as I read with a pencil and dictionary and boldly speak every chance I get. On to the 500s, which is all hard science, all the time. "Everything under the sun"... or rather "everything in creation," as all the stuff beyond the sun is also included. The first decade is, as usual, for general introductions, and Bill Bryson seems like he would be an entertaining guide to life, the universe, and (almost) everything. I should have known better when I didn't read him in the 390's, and again when I so didn't read him in the 420's that he didn't even get a mention. Maybe I should confine myself to his travel books, having listened to both A Walk in the Woods and The Road to Little Dribbling with great enjoyment.

To be fair, A Short History is also a travel book of sorts... if time travel counts. Not only time travel as in, "I will begin the story of the Universe at the beginning of the Universe," as Dickens might have said, but also and even more time travel through the development of our ideas about the development of the Universe. Because, as it turns out, Bryson doesn't really want to write about neutrinos. He wants to write about how they were discovered-- and, more importantly, he wants to gossip about their discoverers.

He starts innocently enough, by detailing how the sound of the background radiation resulting from the Big Bang was simultaneously heard by two Bell Labs employees and described theoretically by a team of Princeton researchers. So, that's a pretty interesting story, and along the way you get a very clear idea of what this noise is and how much it matters. But one thing leads to another, and the next thing Bryson knows, the book has really become a series of anecdotes about the wacky antics of geologists, astronomers and the like, which is not exactly what I wanted. I was looking for a popularization of science, not a popularization of scientists. Oh well.

The stories I read were very entertaining, I'll give Bryson that, and along the way I did learn some very fun facts. My favorite fact is that good old Bishop Ussher, who dated the six-day Creation of Earth to October 23, 4004 BC, had long since ceased to hold sway over the thinking of even deeply religious scientists before Darwin made his discoveries. In 1770, for example, George-Louis Leclerc tried to estimate the earth's age based on patterns of heat loss, arriving at a figure very roughly in the neighborhood of 100,000 years. By the middle of the nineteenth century most educated people were thinking in terms of millions or tens of millions of years. Darwin did not knock down the "young Earth" theory--that had already been done. What he did do, along with Lord Kelvin, was turn the millions of years into hundreds of millions of years (current estimates are running about 4.6 billion). So that's an interesting little tidbit.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that what Bryson really wants to do in this book is what he did so well in the books I enjoyed-- he wants to tell human stories. He wants to talk about people, not ideas. So if you want to meet a lot of very smart, very odd people, and get a whirlwind tour of life, the universe and everything, I guess this is the book for you. As for me, nearly everything turned out to be a little too much.

490-499: All Those Other Languages

Was Melville Dewey a genuinely unpleasant person, or just a product of his times, as we all are? I don't know or even care any more. What I do know is that the more I use the Dewey Decimal System, the more I see how arbitrary it is. In the 200s, Christianity gets 9/10ths of the numbers. In the 400s, many European languages get 10 full digits, while all the languages native to all the other continents are left to smash into this area, 490-499. Of course, through the magic of decimals, it's not hard to create a classification for Tagalog, but it's not going to be 407. (It's 499.211, by the way. Nearby are Vietnamese, 495.922, and Lenape, 497.3.) The problem is that to make a substantive revision to the system, thousands of poor assistants and pages would have to scrape millions of numbers off book spines, so we just keep lumping along.

Speaking of lumping along, in the local library I have most ready access to, the only volumes in the 490-499 range are Russian dictionaries, and I think I've mentioned before how much I am not going to read a dictionary, even in the service of my noble quest. Oh well-- when in doubt, I resort to the children's section. (Hey, look-- last time this happened was at the beginning of the 400s!) That's where I found something on a topic I could actually get behind: The Rosetta Stone!

The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone: Key to Ancient Egypt, by James Cross Giblin, is just what it sounds like: a summary of the discovery and importance of the Rosetta Stone. It is beautifully and generously illustrated with photos of hieroglyphic and hieratic (demotic) Egyptian writing. If you don't know the significance of the Rosetta Stone, here's what happened:

In the 7th century AD, Greek scholars began to get curious about the meaning of the carvings they saw all over tombs and statues, which they called "hieroglyphs," meaning "sacred writing." They asked around, but by this time Egypt had been conquered by the Arabs, and anyone who had used this formal script was long gone. That didn't prevent people from forming theories, of course, but it wasn't until the 1700s that CJ De Guignes made an astute observation (that certain patterns of hieroglyphs were often enclosed in a border, which he called a cartouche), followed by an accurate and useful guess: that these patterns represented names. This insight proved to be one of the keys to the Rosetta Stone, which, in turn, unlocked both forms of Egyptian written records and enabled us to have all the Egyptian history we know and love today. 

Because the Egyptians intersected with other groups that kept written historical records, such as the Jews and the Greeks, and, I suppose, because they must have had their own oral history about the spectacular artifacts amongst which they lived, it's not like nothing was known. But it really wasn't until Napoleon's armies ran across this inscription that contained the same decree in three scripts, two mostly unknown and one extremely familiar, that the writings so generously provided on and in every statue and tomb in Egypt could be deciphered and a detailed history of that ancient civilization pieced together. 

One thing that takes this book to the next level, in my opinion, is that it provides extensive excerpts from the translated text of said decree. The style is not actually very gripping, any more than the ones we write today proclaiming "National Jam Day" or whatever, but the content is a bit startling to modern ears. It basically boils down to the idea that King Ptolemy is really great, has done a lot of good things, will hereafter be known as "the well-favored God revealed on Earth," and welcomes the worship of all people. I don't know how much of that he got, but he certainly deserves our thanks for leaving behind this handy linguistic breadcrumb trail!

470-479: Lingua Latina. Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life, by Harry Mount

I decided to major in French in college because of Baudelaire:

"Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes."

-From L'invitation au voyage

*Swoon*. What adolescent could resist that?

I almost changed to Classics, but I can't remember why exactly. It might have been my first instructor, who was only a few years older than me. It might have been Catullus or Virgil. It might even have been the time we went around campus at Christmastime singing "Gaudete"-- despite the fact that my instructor was a Bhuddist. 

I can't imagine it was the declension charts... but those are what I remember best. "Hic, haec, hoc, hunc, hanc, hoc, huius, huius, huius, huic, huic, huic, hoc, hac, hoc"... I recited it on the way to classes and in the shower. I made these pig noises so many times I still pretty much remember this chant, the way you could rattle off: "I say, you say, he, she or it says, we say, you say, they say." 

Latin conjugates its verbs, declines its nouns, and goes into moods that are barely remembered in English, like the subjunctive. Our closest equivalent is the almost prissy-sounding "If I were..." (but I'm not) or "I wish you would..." (but you never will). And if you spend the first semester of your freshman year memorizing all these tenses and cases and moods, by winter of your sophomore year you will be able to sing medieval Christmas carols, and by spring of your sophomore year you will be reading Virgil. The Aeneid. In the original. And understanding it! Take that, fourth semester French or Spanish! We sure didn't read Victor Hugo or Don Quixote in fourth semester! I suppose the fact that we did not need to spend any time learning to actually speak the language (or write original sentences) saved a lot of time.

All of this to say that Carpe Diem brought back fond memories of those college days. Even the (rather too lengthy) list of commonly used phrases, which felt more like a dictionary than I would have preferred, contained some old friends it was nice to see again... as well as some rather dated references to celebrities from John McEnroe to Juvenal. Well, what do you expect from a book about a dead language? Highly recommended, if your goal is to brush up your rusty Latin-- and why wouldn't it be?

460-469: Spanish. Dios habla hoy.

You guys! Inspired by Juhmpa Lahiri's example, I said I would translate Bible passages from the Spanish, and I'm doing it! I also checked out a SAT-II Spanish prep book, just as an example of my other thrilling options, but I just tested out of it here, so I am excused from wading through that.

I am using Dios habla hoy instead of the classic Reina Valera. I already owned an RV, but I got tired of fighting with the antiquated language. Since my goal is to improve my conversational Spanish (without having to actually take the risk of actually conversing-- yet), I didn't want to end up walking around sounding like the Spanish equivalent of a King James Bible.

I translate about a paragraph a day, more or less. I do it in writing, which forces me to be honest about the words I don't know. Sometimes I just reread what I have already done and see how many of the new words I still remember. Sometimes, when a passage is very familiar, I just translate as I read.

I find the vocabulary of the Epistles is pretty manageable, since any unusual, theological words are probably cognates of English. The Psalms, though, are really teaching me a lot of great vocabulary for weather phenomena, weaponry, and emotions. I'm also getting some practice recognizing idioms: "tener presente" (to keep in mind), "hacer pedazos" (to tear into pieces),  "tocar en suerte" (a transitive for "to luck into").

I kind of love this one: instead of saying "I lucked into a beautiful home," in Spanish one says "A beautiful home touched me in luck." The Spanish language is very good at removing human agency from events: it's not "I forgot my homework" but "Se me olvido la tarea" (The homework forgot itself to me). I was just standing there, and that darn homework went and forgot itself! What could I do? There I was, and a beautiful house reached out with a lucky touch!

Before I can learn what the idioms mean, though, I have to realize that's what they are, that is, that even though I know the individual words, I can't translate word for word, but that the combination means something else. I've watched English language learners struggle with this phenomenon, so it's good for me to have the same experience.

450-459: Italian. In Other Words, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Continuing to hack my way through the 400s without resorting to reading dictionaries, I was thrilled to learn that Jhumpa Lahiri had written a book about learning Italian. Otherwise, I would have had to resort to claiming the first third of Eat, Pray, Love, on the grounds that I learned "attraverso" (let's cross over) from it. That was one of Gilbert's favorite words, and Lahiri had hers, too. As I was listening to Lahiri read her own audiobook, her beautifully pronounced Italian became a convincing soundtrack for her love story... the story of how she fell in love with the Italian language.

Lahiri didn't just fall in love with Italian-- she committed to it. She moved to Rome and made a vow to write only in Italian. The main thing that has come out of that vow so far was this memoir, which contains two very satisfying short stories and a number of more or less chronological but somewhat repetitive essays. While this is not the greatest book or even the greatest memoir I have ever read, it must have been pretty effective, since it did inspire me to action.

Lahiri's description of reading on the sofa with a pen, a notebook and a dictionary made me want to read in a foreign language again, too. I used to read a lot of French-- Andre Gide, Victor Hugo-- and I used to read the Bible in Spanish every day. Becoming more fluent in Spanish would really be useful, and reading the Bible in a modern translation might help me with that. Lahiri talks about how reading in a third language, one she was still learning, forced her to read more slowly, so this practice might help me devotionally as well. If I actually follow through!

Marrying the Guy Is Not Just a Stunt: When in French, by Lauren Collins

Dear reader, you know I love me a stunt memoir, from My Year of Living Biblically to My Korean Deli. But it's one thing to dedicate a whole year to, for example, reading the whole encyclopedia in hardcover (The Know-It-All), and it's another thing to marry a guy and move to Switzerland. When it comes to learning French language and culture, Lauren Collins went all in, complete with extended family, a H*Y*M*A*N*K*AP*L*A*N-style language class, and a lot of research on the history of simultaneous interpretation, Queen Victoria's efforts to learn Urdu, and prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics.

If you have half an hour or so, you can get the drift from this excerpt in the New Yorker or the even shorter one in the New York Times. But I can summarize the story this way: Lauren grew up with no particular culture and gravitated towards men-- a "yo-boy," an "Englishman with two middle names," a "tall Tennessean" who seemed to have a stronger sense of self. When she finally met Olivier and realized he was the one she'd been waiting for, well, she couldn't even pronounce his name correctly, but his self-identity was secure enough that he apparently didn't mind. He also brought to the party not only a language and a nation but a full set of relatives, who of course had their own customs and manners, as extended families always do...

Interwoven with her own story, Lauren presents her research. She reviews the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the presumption that language shapes perception which paved the way for the discovery that people who speak different languages see colors differently. She talks about the data underlying a very common experience: it's much easier to talk about emotional situations and decisions in a second language. Turns out that's the "emancipatory detachment effect," and it's why missionaries want to learn and translate the Bible into "heart languages," so that the gospel won't be stripped of its affective weight.

And, in the end-- and maybe this is a spoiler alert, but, if so, a happy one-- she and Olivier start to build their own little bilingual family, taking advantage of two sets of vocabulary to describe that experience that is somehow both the most personal and the most universal, the most well-understood and the most difficult to explain in the world-- the experience of having a baby. A charming story and a nice introduction to linguistics... and remember, big chunks of it are available online!

440-449: French language

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.