Summer Reading

On Tuesday, on my first visit to the World Examining Works blog (which I arrived at via that of The Weaver of Grass I found the suggestion that we might like to post on our blogs the following from our Summer reading:-
2 non-fiction books that we have enjoyed
2 new fiction reads ditto
and 2 old favourites re-read.

Well, why not?
The two new non-fiction that I have most enjoyed (actually, am most enjoying: but there we go, veracity to fact is not the deepest truth) are:

"The Stranger's Child" by Alan Hollinghurst
and
"The Hare with Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal

The latter is probably the most unusual book I have read in a long while. The hare in question is a netsuke, one of those tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, which was left the narrator in a legacy. It is a treasure hunt-cum-family saga.

My two non-fiction choices are both technical books:-

"Language Technology and Society" by Richard Sproat, an overview from ancient hieroglyphs to the computerising of Chinese script and machine translation,
and
"The Sound of Poetry; the Poetry of Sound" co-edited by Perloff and Dworkin. It is a collection of papers from scholars, poets and translators - some of whom are all three.

Finally my two old favourites taken down and dusted are:-

"Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow" by Peter Hoeg
and
"Marabou Stork Nightmares" by Irvine Welsh