pickMy 2025 Book Bracket!! Next year I am going to do 2 brackets. One for my Bookspin reads and the other for the Mark Twain Awards. I promised my 9 year old granddaughter that I would read all 12 nominees with her this year. I‘m so happy she loves to read.
pickThere's nothing more magical than New York in the snow. This morning, I'm alternating between flipping through these pages and looking out my window at “the real thing“ 😅(by the end of this storm, we're expecting eleven inches here in NYC).
#2025Book57
We are in the Northern Hemisphere for our first ever winter Christmas! Went to New York for 4 days & were so excited to be treated to real snow! Although we‘ve driven to a mountain to go tobogganing in NZ we‘ve never seen falling snow or snow on the streets of a city. So exciting & luckily my boots were up to it! Also went to Strand books - such a special store but enormous crowds because its obv the Christmas rush. Will have to come back one day!
Holy #chunkster, Batman! This was a gift today from a very kind coworker. It sounds fascinating but I think it will take some planning to actually read. 😂
pickWonderful look at language communities in New York.
Recommended!
If writing is honey in terms of sweetness, then writing one's own language is ambrosia. If writing is sauce, then writing one's own language is the seasoning [salt]. If reading is work, then reading one's own language is its respite. (Translated [from N'ko] by Coleman Donaldson.)
"The idea of the shtetl was formed by Yiddish literature,' says Boris, "by writers like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem ... living in the big cities." Whether transmuted through a Chagall painting or a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof, the shtetl has come to stand in for the whole vanished world of traditional Jewish life Eastern Europe, shrunk down to the scale of a folklorized village....
With all her languages, Rasmina is almost an unofficial, unpaid interpreter [in Seke]...
"It's what a lot of immigrants go through," she says...
...these things add up. She draws the line when aunties, like aunties everywhere, try to follow their kids onto social media: "The social media is getting to them. They're very addicted now. Every day somebody's mom is like, 'Make me Instagram, make me TikTok,' and I say, 'No thank you!"
"Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey," said the linguist and polyglot Jakobson. In other words: it's possible to say anything in any language, but each language's grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously. This is the essence of what makes linguistics fascinating and revealing.
