the rest of it

  Books I’ve written about language books I read this year on SbaCL , but recommended items from my non-linguistic reading are: Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime , about his childhood in Johannesburg. Completely devourable . Colin Woodard’s American Nations , in which he proposes that the US is really 11 countries masquerading as one, showing how current political/social/cultural values relate to migration/settlement patterns. I know that there are quibbles with some of it, but so much is recognizable. I think I’m going to leave it at that. I read some very good books, but I can’t write about them all here. I did enjoy having a one-book reading group (via Zoom) with Celeste, reading Robin Dunbar’s Friends a bit at a time. (I give it a mostly positive but mixed review, in that he presents fascinating research, but I am suspect of some of his evolutionary-psychology conclusions about what it means, particularly in that he doesn’t seem to pay enough attention to modern women’s awarenes...

My year-in-review posts are a bit delayed by travel woes, but here is my review of my resolutions and my time. 2021 Resolution Because I spent so much of locked-down 2020 on various self-improvement binges, I decided against making a new year’s resolution last year—but then I made one anyway, a few weeks in: to read more books than I acquired. Strictly, I didn’t make it, but since I was counting all book acquisitions, even if they weren’t books I’d read cover-to-cover (textbook inspection copies, reference works), and I have or will soon use all the non-cover-to-cover books, maybe I can count it? Anyhow, I’ve already done the accounting on books read at the SbaCL blog . 2022 Resolutions In the beforetimes , I had a system of three new year’s resolutions: a small daily habit, a one-time time investment that will make things work better, and something to make me happy. This year, I have three, but they don’t quite fit that profile.   1.      Daily ...