FollowWhat I’m reading March and April 2026
Muscle Man by Jordan Castro
A colleague who I run into the gym recommended this. It’s the quirky story of Harold, an unhappy literature professor who finds solace from a mundane career in weight lifting. The key scenes are his ruminations during a faculty meeting, during which he hides a purloined knapsack while listening to colleagues he disdains, and his thoughts at the gym, while lifting and sweating (with some homoerotic overtones) in the sauna. In the background is a mysterious colleague who is his lifting mentor and his obsession with Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.
Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard by Robert Desjarlais
At a recent chess tournament, I was in a game where not much was going on and started to watch the other players—the fidgeters, the poker-faced, the ones holding their heads in their hands, the compulsive piece adjustors, and the ones whose hands hovered over several pieces before moving one. I remember thinking, someone should write an ethnography of chess tournaments. Desjarlais’s Counterplay is not quite that, but it’s the next best thing. Desjarlais draws on his own experiences (at the Manhattan and Marshall Chess Clubs and at events like the World Open) to explore the unique grip of from a variety of perspectives. Only occasionally academic, the book gives anecdotes and insightful character sketches in what goes on in the minds of experienced players during competition. A good read for players and the people than live with them.
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
A husband disappears and his wife and daughter track him down, discovering his secret life. I moved briskly, Harlan Coben-like till the end, where things got rather convoluted.
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley – A woman arrived in Paris to meet her brother, who it turns out is nowhere to be found. Instead, she encounters an Addams-familyesque apartment building filled with secrets. This book struck me as the opposite of The Last Thing He Told Me, a bit slow at the start with its revolving narrative, but gripping at the end.
Reflections of English Word-Formation by Laurie Bauer
I reviewed this for CHOICE, so I won’t repeat it here. But it offered 30 short commentaries on all areas of morphology and plenty of great examples.
Why We Talk Funny by Valerie Fridland
An excellent book and my long review is here.
The Politics of Language by David Beaver and Jason Stanley
I gave a progress report on this and will post a fuller review soon.
How Deeply Human Is Language? Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy by Yosef Grodzinsky
Grodzinsky makes the case that for distinguishing knowledge of language from what large language models do and he does an especially nice job of presenting the history of generative grammar and the history of AI models. More on this book to come.
Next up: Revenge Prey by John Sanford. Time for some summer reading.
