Daniel Hahn

One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial. No worse than most English-language readers’, perhaps, but still with dramatic, unnecessary bias towards the Anglophone, with only Freud and a single battered Madame Bovary representing the other 90-odd per cent of the global population. Morgan prescribed herself a corrective, embarking on a 12-month course of reading one book from each country of the world. (Which is how many, exactly? We’ll come to that…) The experience was recorded on her blog, ayearofreading-theworld.com, and is now synthesised into this brilliant, unlikely book.

So Basque is an ergative language! Well, I never. I couldn’t have told you that a week ago. I even know now what that means (more or less). And, well… so much for Basque. Moving along, then… In Lingo, Gaston Dorren speeds around Europe, giving each of his chosen 60-odd languages three or four pages’ attention before striding off again. Brisk doesn’t begin to describe it. Each language is introduced by means of one quirk, or in a simple picture sharpened by viewing through one particular historic/grammatical/circumstantial prism — the ideology that drives Sweden’s pronoun wars, say, or why Spaniards always seem to be talking so quickly, or Ossetian’s peculiar position as sole European representative of the Iranian language group.