Rating: 8.0/10. Book covering a lot of research about best practices in language learning and teaching. There is a lot of implicit knowledge that’s required to effectively use a language: the obvious ones like phonology, syntax, and the lexicon, but also often-overlooked ones like pragmatic differences between languages. There is some overlap between this book…
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Yut Di – One Earth by EHK Ho
Rating: 7.4/10. Novel about the first Chinese immigrants to Canada, escaping war and famine in China in search of a better life. The year is 1880 and the story begins with a wealthy businessman (Cheung) and his son (Wing) on a ship to British Columbia. Their plan is to make a business selling supplies to…
Assessing Vocabulary by John Read
Rating: 7.9/10. A classic book-length survey about vocabulary testing: the research literature, design considerations, and its usage in education. Many linguistic questions lie at the core of vocabulary testing and don’t have clear-cut answers, like what counts as a word family? (eg: socialize and socializing should probably as a single word, but socialism is quite…
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rating: 7.7/10. A romance novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author. The story is set in a coastal town in Colombia in the late 19th century. The novel starts with elderly doctor Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina Daza attending a funeral; Urbino falls off a ladder while reaching for his parrot and dies; immediately…
Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition by VanPatten, Smith, Benati
Rating: 8.1/10. Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction by Bill VanPatten, Megan Smith, and Alessandro G. Benati Linguistics textbook about second language acquisition, covering key questions such as: Does L2 acquisition use the same processes as L1? Is input or output more important? Can L2 learners become nativelike or is there a critical…
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Rating: 8.3/10. One of the most influential philosophical essays by English philosopher John Stuart Mill, written in 1859 and espousing the values of individual freedom. It has since served as a foundational work for liberalism and many of its principles have been adopted into democratic societies. Mill argues that society tends to force the preferences…
Shadows on the Rock by Willie Cather
Rating: 8.2/10. Historical novel set in Quebec City in the year 1697, when the settlement was just a small town on the frontier. The story follows Cecile, a 12-year-old girl whose father is the apothecary (similar to a doctor). Not much plot happens, rather, the novel is based on characters: we get to hear stories…
Introducing Second Language Acquisition by Saville-Troike and Barto
Rating: 7.0/10. This is an introductory textbook on second language acquisition, approaching the subject from the perspective of linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this book and dropped it after about halfway through. It tries to cover a lot in only 200 pages, but the writing is disorganized, giving only a brief treatment…
A Short Course in Digital Photography by London and Stone
Rating: 8.3/10. A good overview of the art and science of photography, suitable for a beginner. Each page is fully colored and has an abundance of photos to serve as exemplars of what good photography looks like. Section 1 talks about basic camera controls including aperture and shutter speed. Both control exposure, but additionally, shutter…
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Rating: 7.9/10. While technically a novel, there is not much a plot beyond the narrator conversing with a telepathic gorilla in a Socratic dialogue. Ishmael, the gorilla, teaches willing pupils on how to save the world. According to Ishmael, our civilization has accomplished many impressive feats, but is on a surefire path to self-destruction since…
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Rating: 7.7/10. A fairly short novel set in French Indochina (now Southern Vietnam) in the 1930s. It is supposedly autobiographical and is based on the author’s own experiences growing up in the region, but was written several decades later when the author was around 70. It is a romance between a young and poor 15-year-old…
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier
Rating: 8.4/10. Book for new and aspiring software engineering managers about how to do the job effectively. Unlike an individual contributor, your output as a manager is basically the output of your team (plus others that you influence), so the job is less about your individual output, and mostly about getting others to achieve their…