In the last month I’ve read some very odd books, or an eclectic selection of perfectly normal books, take your pick.

I started with “Laura Spinney’s utterly engrossing Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global [which] tells the story in magnificent detail” of how the Indo-European group of languages got its start. The quote is from the Catholic World Report which asked a bunch of people for comments on what they themselves read last year. I checked the article out because I figured it would be an interesting list and a way to get some different recommendations for my reading.

I was going to be on a plane and traveling, so I knew I’d have focused time. It was a bit of a mistake because I read Proto on my Kindle. Important maps appear for every chapter, and they are hard to see on a Kindle. Since the action takes place in the Caucasus Mountains, and around the Caspian Sea, I was quite lost without the maps.

I enjoyed reading about language in general, but I don’t think I got the major point, unless it is that a tribe called the Yamnaya moved around a lot and split up, and it is their language that is the base of all Indo-European languages. Linney follows up on twelve variants of the presumed Yamnaya proto-language and discusses how these variants must have become the top of the heap in many different places. There’s a lot of information about how language changes, how it interacts with archeology and the new information available from gene analysis. I knew less than nothing about language theory before I read this book. Now I know a little more than nothing.

I read two indie published books by George Phillies. He was a professor at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts. He worked on polymers, game design, statistical mechanics and other things. He has written lots of technical papers, but what I read were two of his science fiction novels, Mistress of the Waves and Practical Exercise. Both have a relatively young girl as the protagonist, and both end up extolling the idea of a university as a great thing. However, this love for universities is not blind to their faults.

Practical Exercise includes a library which is almost impossible to use, because it isn’t arranged in a way that makes any sense and the heroine spends quite a bit of time mapping it out herself. She also goes to a club meeting of students who are supposedly trying to fix the library problem. They can’t agree with each other on whether to shelve books alphabetically by author or by title. When she expresses the idea that maybe books should be shelved by subject she is treated with withering scorn. So last century! Mistress of the Waves includes quite a bit of basic economics, as well as a massive scheme of fraud, that could be compared to tulip mania in the 1600’s.

The Women of Arlington Hall by Jane Healey is more or less historical romance. I went to a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in September, and heard about how and where the women who worked for the government after the war had lived. This book is about the women who worked on Russian code-breaking. It includes a discussion of the Venona files which were declassified in the 1990’s. The book includes obligatory disparagement of women who stay home and have children, along with passionate love affairs out of wedlock for the government workers. But it is fascinating glimpse into what codebreaking could actually entail, and it suggests what it was like to discover a traitor as part of daily work.

I read two books from Project Gutenberg, The Cohansey Tea-Fight by Lucy Ellen Guernsey, and The Story of Mary Jones and her Bible by Mary E. Ropes. The first book turns on the definition of a ‘tea-fight’. It’s set in the middle 1800’s and some girls are going to a tea party/fight except they can’t get there because of a violent rainstorm. They listen instead to their great-grandmother discuss what a tea-fight meant to her. It’s really a story about loyalty during the American Revolution but wrapped up in some odd framing.

I never heard of Mary Jones before. She was a Welsh girl around 1800 who fell in love with the Bible at a very young age. Like six. She didn’t have a Bible, and in fact could not read, initially. Her parents took her to Methodist chapel where she heard Bible stories and memorized Bible verses. She saved every penny she made from age ten to age sixteen till she had the price of a Bible. Then she walked 25 miles to a town where it was rumored that there were Welsh Bibles to be had.

Charles Bala was the man who had Welsh Bibles, and at first he told Mary that they were all gone. When he realized to the full what her story was, he changed his mind and gave her one that he was saving for a friend. Then he started the British Bible Society with the avowed purpose of giving anyone who wanted one a Bible, without having to save for six years or make a fifty mile round trip on foot. The British Bible Society talked about Mary Jones for years and years and at one point there was a plaque for her childhood home. The book wasn’t necessarily well-written but I enjoyed learning about the Bible society even if they were rude about Catholics.