7: American Shaolin, Matthew Polly

This was excellent fun. The last chapter or two could have been worked out better (more details, less look-at-me-ish-ness), but overall it was fun, fun, fun.

6: Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Winfred P. Lehmann

Pretty interesting. It finds itself in a funny place between pop science and technical linguistics: some of the explanations are long and not easy to follow without linguistic background, and some are oddly elementary. Wouldn't anyone with the required training to read the IPA already know things like the current thinking on the origin of the alphabet?

If anything, this drove home the point that I ought to learn to read IPA.

5: Possessed, Elif Batuman

Stanford grad student travels to Uzbekistan in search of, well, unclear. Language, and literature, and escape.

Not as good as I hoped. Some of it is pretty funny, but the thoughtful passages are mostly boringly pointless. I enjoyed it well enough but it could have been great.

4: Computer Architecture, Nicholas Carter

A crappy Schaum's Outline. It's kind of out of date and the exercises are terribly stupid, but it was a fine refresher.