Book Recommendations for 2017

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. You know, once a year we do a show where we recommend books as gifts to other people. One of the books that I want to recommend this year is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. Charlie is a woman. This book has a familiar premise, a little bit fantasy, a little bit science fiction. It’s where magic and technology compete head to head. They kind of coexist. And in the end, there’s a confrontation between the two and a fight over the future. I really enjoyed this book. It was a super fast read. One of the things that I liked about it is it’s about whether or not we will be controlled by artificial intelligence, an intelligence that knows our every move, or will our behavior be controlled and influenced, perhaps punished by a secret group of magical people. And that’s an adult book?

That is an adult book, yeah.

But I do have a kid’s book to recommend. I know that because I read books with my son and so does my wife. This book is called It Ain’t So Awful Falafel by Farouze Dumas. This is a story about a teenage Iranian girl who lives in California. It starts in 1979. And she finds herself kind of having to explain what is going on in Iran to her classmates and friends. And she also has this crisis of identity. Is she Zomorod Yusfizadeh or is she Cindy, the name she decided to call herself? And this funny and poignant book not only shows what it’s like to be a teenage girl in America, but talks about the immigrant experience, talks about straddling two worlds, talks about California in a lot of ways and what California 30 some odd years ago went through to become this state that it is today. Really, really loved this book.

And I liked the way that the author Dumas, D-U-M-A-S, just like the famous French author, although she’s not related. I really like the way that history shows up in this book, but it’s not too didactic. We get just enough taste of the Ayatollah and the Shah and the crisis and the hostages and that whole thing, if you remember that. So she’s got this problem. Should she know enough about the Shah to explain it to her classmates? Should she become the expert? I mean, teachers keep asking her, for example, to stand in front of the class and tell people about what’s happening in Iran. But she’s just a teenage girl in California.

Although that’s my main recommendation from the author, Farouzay Dumas. She also has two really interesting books for adults. They’re nonfiction called Funny and Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent. And they’re about her own life directly. They’re even more autobiographical, where she talks about language and culture and the funny stories about living life here as an outsider who’s becoming an insider. And they’re both wonderful. I think I want to read all three. Her name, by the way, I should spell this, Firouze Dumas is F-I-R-O-O-Z-E-H and D-U-M-A-S.

So let’s have those titles again. So her books are It Ain’t So Awful Falafel and Funny and Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent. And then the first one I mentioned by Charlie Jane Anders is All the Birds in the Sky. And I would just add the books that I’ve been giving as gifts are books that we’ve talked about before, one of which is Corey Stamper’s Word by Word, which I keep hearing from listeners about people loving this introduction to lexicography and the life of a lexicographer and also the life of the English language. It’s a fantastic introduction for anybody who’s interested in English. And then the other one is Whiteout. And that is a collection of poems by Jessica Goodfellow that are about mountaineering, but they’re also about life.

We know that you’re big readers and you want to share your books with us. Send us the titles. Tell us what’s up. Tell us what you think we should be reading. And perhaps we’ll share that with the rest of the listeners. 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.