In the Land of Invented Languages - Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius

Efforts to make language simpler, clearer, less divisive and more truthful have backfired spectacularly, to judge by this delightful tour of linguistic hubris. Linguist Okrent explores some of the themes and shortcomings of 900 years worth of artificial languages. She surveys philosophical languages that order all knowledge into self-evident systems that turn out to be bizarrely idiosyncratic; symbol languages of supposedly crystalline pictographs that are actually bafflingly opaque...

Receipts of Pastry & Cookery: For the Use of His Scholars

As the latest volume in Iowa's maverick and distinguished Szathmary Culinary Arts Series, this one brings us a notebook of the London pastry cook and pioneering cooking teacher Kidder (1665?-1739), with recipes presented in handwritten facsimile and in a typeset transcription. Probably dictated, the recipes are brief, will strike most modern readers as brightly idiosyncratic and are utterly free of gastronomic political correctness: Kidder liked his suet. They make ideal bedside reading.

While it's always interesting to hear authors read their own work, this production is not likely to prompt a narrating career for Palahniuk (Fight Club) on par with his literary accomplishments. That's not to say, however, that his style doesn't work with this offbeat story of a sex-addicted medical school dropout whose gift is pretending to choke in restaurants and reaping the sympathy checks of the people who "save" him in order to pay for the care of his sick mother. Palahniuk reads with a husky, occasionally whiny voice that's rushed and intense.
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A meticulously researched, highly entertaining, idiosyncratic look at the how, why and what of bad language around the world.