I have been telling people for a while now (albeit jokingly) that I was going to start one of these sooner or later. Mainly because one of the most common gripes my friends arraign against me is that they professedly never know what to get me when holidays and birthdays roll around, but, more importantly, because I regard information and words--yummy, delectable words--the way a fat kid might regard a cupcake buffet.. and I lack the finances to maintain this habit all on my own. So for all you indecisive aristarchs out there who have the misfortune of having my name on one or more of your gift lists, here's a freebie. The meta-gift of gift-giving:Books You Can Buy Me That Will Convince Me Indubitably That You Spent Countless Sleepless Nights Thinking Up A Gift That Shows You Care
(In no particular order)
- Philosophical Investigations (Fourth Edition) by Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
- The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack
- From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest by T.Z. Lavine
- The Stories of English by David Crystal
- Words Words Words by David Crystal
- The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal
- Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies Edited by John Cottingham
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (Edited by Eric Steinberg)
- How Language Works by David Crystal
- Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language by Patricia T. O'Conner
- Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English, 3rd Edition by Patricia T. O'Conner
I will, of course, do my best to keep this list updated. Also, no, I have not gone looney and stopped reading fiction. I just have a harder time waiting to read fiction, so the likelihood of any spec-fic book making it onto this list before I've already bought or read the damn thing is about as probable as this list running dry any time soon.
