January is not the liveliest month in publishing. With few new book releases and half the industry recovering from the busy fall and Christmas season, things can get pretty quiet before the spring season kicks off in February. Fear not – the books pages of the world’s newspapers, magazines and blogs are still crackling with intelligent dialogue on the written word. The American Scholar contains a sobering essay on the misuses of the English language that’s sure to rile up the normally docile ranks of grammar nerds out there. Written by author and teacher William Zinsser, the essay warns of the evils of strangling your prose style with an abundance of Latin-derived words. Why Latin? Zinsser wastes no time in throwing down the gauntlet: ”The English language is derived from two main sources,” he argues. “One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.” We here at Books@Torontoist say “Ouch!” (from Middle English, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German nusca clasp.)
Punk pioneer Patti Smith has written a typically frank yet romantic memoir of her time with former lover and fellow traveller, the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Reviewed by Salon’s Laura Miller, Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, is sure to fill in some of the holes in the history of the early New York punk music and art scene, but as Miller writes, “As much as Smith loves rock ‘n’ roll, Just Kids confirms that she identifies fundamentally as a poet, specifically as an acolyte of the French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, who died in 1891.”
And just so that no one thinks we’re getting too high-minded over here at the books site, here’s a link to a great interview with Toronto comics artist Jeff Lemire on The Walrus blog. The author of Essex County trilogy, Lemire talks of his ambition to write the great hockey graphic novel. “Hockey is such a visceral, fluid activity,” he says. “There’s so much movement and action. You can take the structure of a single game, and you have your narrative skeleton. The tension’s all there; the drama is built into any game.”
