Weekend Blog Hops - 5 October 2018

It's the weekend once more. That means it's time for my book-blogger hopping.

It's getting close to Halloween. If you HAD to read one of these two genres, which would you prefer--urban fantasy or horror, and why?

Urban fantasy, because it's a genre I like and read anyway. In my youth/early teens I used to read a lot of horror, but I've gone off it over the years. I'll pick up the occasional piece, but the premise  really has to grab me, and I prefer psychological horror to gory slashers.
 



Opening sentence:
A young woman, seemingly in distress, turned up in the spring of 1817 near the resort town of Bath, wearing strange clothes and speaking a foreign language.



 

From page 56:
Gathering specimens of 164 langauges was no easy task in eighteenth-century London, but Pantographia's most impressive feat is a technical achievement, not a research one.

My Current Read

Figures of Speech
Tim Cassedy

Tim Cassedy’s fascinating study examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order.

Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond.

This engagingly written story is sure to appeal to historians of literature, culture, and communication; to linguists and book historians; and to general readers interested in how ideas about English developed in the early United States and throughout the English-speaking world.