Books read recently. Well, some WNFR.

[rhu]

Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr. (who apparently is particular about omitting the comma before "Jr.") --- Well, I read about half of it, and half of that was because I kept hoping it would get better. It had its moments of Blountian wit, but most of it just came across as crotchety or self-contented. A disappointment, given the author and given the review in the Times Book Review. (And I couldn't get past his references to WIII, which most of us know better as NI3. WIII looks like WWIII to me, and while the release of NI3 may have felt like the end of the world to the generation of dictionary readers who grew up at NI2's knee, it isn't the association I want to recur as I'm reading what's supposed to be a lighthearted work about the language we all love.)

Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer z"l. Interesting to finally read this classic text, especially in the current economic environment. I understand things a bit better now. (I finished this one.)

Nerds 2.0.1 by, um, you can Google it if you care. I don't anymore. Another book that I abandoned about halfway through because I wasn't getting anything new or entertaining out of it.

The Oxford A to Z of Word Games by Tony Augarde. A few interesting games in here, but mostly stuff I already knew about. And many of them are actually NPL flats: beheadments, curtailments, alternades, etc.

[And as for the title of this post, for non-NPLers, WNFR stands for "we never finished reading"]