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The Bilingual Brain

Berlin is a bilingual city. Even despite writing this review in English, I am not quite anglo- or egocentric enough to mean its linguistic identity is split between German and my mother tongue. But it is a city in which an extraordinary number of people have proficiency in more than one languages (and many in many).
Costa's book, an excellent introduction to the neuroscience of what it means to be bilingual, is therefore a book for Berliners. In witty, digressive prose, he charts how bilingual people's brains are shaped differently (sometimes literally) from the moment of birth to old age. Although he is cautious not to claim too many pure benefits (as a Barcelonan, fluent in Spanish, Catalan and English that could be perceived as smug), he does say bilinguals may be more empathetic and less susceptible to dementia than monolinguals. A book for polyglots to feel more smug about themselves and to inspire monolingual, anglophone Berliners to finally sign up for that German course...

A Book of Days

Patti Smith is an inspiring artist of our time. By expressing herself through writing, music, photography, and thus bringing together different genres through her art, she never fails to impress me. In this book 365 photographs represent each day of the year. Since 2018 the artist has been very active on Instagram, sharing her photos online and allowing insight into her daily life. This book contains some of these pictures, her polaroid collection since 1996, and some that have never been shown to the public before. To each picture there is a little description or anecdote. A beautiful book about an interesting woman's life.

Endless Flight

It is pretty extraordinary that there has basically never been a major English-language biography of Joseph Roth. For the last two decades or so, the translations of his work by Michael Hofmann have turned him into one of the German writers deemed 'most contemporary' by modern audiences. Keiron Pim has happily come to fill that gap and even more happily, his book is really very good. There are faults - he inexplicably spells out the plots of almost all of Roth's books over many pages and he gets a bit hung up on Roth's Austria obsession - but fundamentally this book fills a gap which has existed for far too long. Following Roth's cantankerous and alcoholic life isn't exactly pleasant reading but Pim teases out much of his protagonist's character and humanity to make this highly compelling as well as genuinely interesting.

I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf

Ahoi book lovers and aspiring writers! You will adore Grant Snyder's creative one- to two-page comics. Going through this book a few pages per sitting, I couldn't help but marvel at Snyder's ingenuity and wit.
A failsafe gift for literary buffs.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The titular essay in this collection is one of the funniest bits of writing you will ever read (full stop). Foster Wallace may be beginning to descend into the realms of the unfashionable but that should not stop you reading his account of a grim holiday on a cruise ship. From the name he gives the ship to his feelings of pure hatred for a small boy who sits at the table with him each evening and his endless stream of snide footnotes, I don't think there are many funnier examples of the essay form in English. The rest of the collection (like all collections) has some major highs and a few lows but the cruise ship is worth the cover price alone.

A Book of Days

Patti Smith is an inspiring artist of our time. By expressing herself through writing, music, photography, and thus bringing together different genres through her art, she never fails to impress me. In this book 365 photographs represent each day of the year. Since 2018 the artist has been very active on Instagram, sharing her photos online and allowing insight into her daily life. This book contains some of these pictures, her polaroid collection since 1996, and some that have never been shown to the public before. To each picture there is a little description or anecdote. A beautiful book about an interesting woman's life.

A Book of Days

Patti Smith is an inspiring artist of our time. By expressing herself through writing, music, photography, and thus bringing together different genres through her art, she never fails to impress me. In this book 365 photographs represent each day of the year. Since 2018 the artist has been very active on Instagram, sharing her photos online and allowing insight into her daily life. This book contains some of these pictures, her polaroid collection since 1996, and some that have never been shown to the public before. To each picture there is a little description or anecdote. A beautiful book about an interesting woman's life.

The Enchanted April

It's admittedly slightly too late for this recommendation, but then again the Italian April is arguably more equal to the German May. An absolutely delightful holiday novel about four women escaping to a romantic Italian castle for some time to themselves - only to be literally spellbound by it. Read it for the lush Italian gardens and the irresistible spring airs - maby skim over some of the more dated romantic version of musical chairs.

The Book Lover's Quiz Book

Like quizzing? Did you even like it before the pandemic when it did not just happen over Zoom, with Google all too close at hand? Think that it's a shame quizzes very often only scratch the bibliophilic surface with very obvious questions about writers everyone has heard of while music fans get to come across as exceptionally intelligent in complex and challenging music rounds?

I could go on posing these question but quite honestly if you like books and quizzes, Gary Wigglesworth has put a great fun, challenging set of questions together to make up for all of the music rounds that lost your teams top marks in the past. The question are broad enough to sweep up a lot of tastes and there is a fun mix of pure trivia and more needling teasers. Great fun and (while we stubbornly stay in lockdown) it is a pretty effective way to pass an evening in between the sourdough fold and stretches...

Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

We're zooming in and out of T. Fleischmann's life in this dazzingly beautiful piece of literature, which is exactly what its title would suggest: a fragmentory reflection on what it means to have a trans body, and how it affects Fleischmann's way of existing in time, explored through a work that is part memoir, part travelogue and part essay about the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Fleischmann choses to literally reject all kinds of metaphor, but they also don't feel the need to spell things out - that's why this book manages to invent an unusually poetic space where things remain just as they are, capable of carrying multiple meanings at once (queer experience being the main aspect this relates to, but not exclusively so). This is a text that is messy on purpose, that is hard to grasp and at the same perfectly precise; an ode to being complexely alive in the world.

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