Amazon Raid

[stoutfellow]

Last Sunday, I put in an order at Amazon; it arrived in three separate packages over the last two days.

The contents included two CDs - Dinah Washington, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and Steppenwolf, All Time Greatest Hits - and six books: Laura Joh Rowland, Assassin's Touch (another in the Sano Ichiro series); Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys; George Macdonald Fraser, Flashman's Lady; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (look, you know what a procrastinator I am!); Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World; and James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds.

I'm especially looking forward to reading Empires of the Word; I've heard a lot of good things about it.

Comments

[toraks.livejournal.com]

cool, we'll see then. Thanks for checking. I, of course, have most interest in the Dravidian languages Tamil and Telugu since those are the ones I know. If you remember, I'd love to hear what you think of the book once you've read it. I can look it up if you like it. :-)

By the way, finished the Adventure of English. Pretty interesting light read, though it wasn't exactly lots of new information. Kind of cool to see where some words came from (plenty of word/origin lists) and to hear about some of the history of English in more detail -- didn't know it's most closely related to Frisian for example. So the earlier parts of the book were great. Later, was not so interesting, but still kinda neat to see word origins -- curry is from Tamil! Didn't know that. However, overall the English (language and people) hero-worship did grate, but it was bearable (though I've got a huge anti-imperialistic sore point (possibly inherited)). ;-)