The Iliad, Homer, E.V. Rieu I've read a lot fewer of the classics than I feel I should have, and the main reason is probably that I don't like reading classics. I forced my way through the Divine Comedy - I liked Inferno plenty but experienced diminishing returns - and I've been stalled halfway through Paradise Lost for a year. My reading habits, I suspect, are ill-suited to epic poetry and I'm not one to welcome change. But I would still like access to and familiarity with source material. So the second edition of Rieu's translation of the Iliad was a particularly pleasing find - Homer, translated into extremely readable English by E.V. Rieu last century. With this edition, Peter Jones adjusted the language to restore some idiosyncracies of the original text, which was basically a transcript of an oral text, without hurting the readability. So you get the best of both worlds; it's a page-turner that makes you feel like you're getting the real thing. It contains the only lengthy introduction that I've read in its entirety and referred back to repeatedly. My only regret is that, after the Odyssey, I don't know where I'll find more classics like this.

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter McWhorter lays out a series of interesting points, sometimes a bit repetatively, through an array of examples that gives the impression that he has mastered the vocabulary and grammar of every language on Earth. I learned, or was convinced, that:

• Languages from lower-technology cultures, such as the Native American languages currently expiring, are usually incredibly complicated. I guess all that brainpower not being used by the complications of modern life went into language.
• Normal behavior for a language is to change substantially with each generation. Stasis due to the influence of writing is the exception.
• Languages exhibit continuous variation over time and space, to the extent that it is more accurate to think solely in terms of clusters of closely related dialects than of core languages with peripheral variants.
• Most people in the world are exposed to at least two dialects from a very early age. The majority of monolingual Americans are a stark exception. This should be our excuse for not learning other languages well - we were shortchanged at birth.
• Written language is innately different from speech to the point that it should (in my opinion - I don't think the author argues this in these words) be considered a dialect as well.
• Whatever is considered the "good" version of a language is whatever random dialect the last region/class to sieze power happened to be speaking at the time.
• Massive language death is an inevitable consequence of modern politics and economics; if we are to preserve any of the dying languages it must be by inventing stable new roles for languages, probably as secondary, ceremonial, cultural languages instead of as mother tongues.

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie Big and messy. I put it down for a few months partway through, but later felt the urge not just to finish it but to read it for its own sake, so I did. But I like The Ground Beneath Her Feet more.