Wednesday reading — food, French and fix-its

[mayhap]

What I've been reading

I read The Story of French, which was fairly engaging as a biography of a language, but I have to admit that I found the position of the authors on modern francophony somewhat incoherent—apparently non-French speakers learning French as a second language is awesome and broadening, but French-speakers learning English as a second language is terrible and oppressive because they have to express themselves non-natively. Also there's this hilariously snitty aside about how when the authors, who are husband and wife, give presentations to francophone audiences, Julie, who speaks French as a second language, gets complements on it while Jean-Benoît, who speaks québecois natively, does not. Yeah, that could be a symptom of prejudice against Québec in the French-speaking world, or it could be because you don't complement someone for speaking their native language fluently, duh.

I read The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord's followup to Redemption in Indigo, which is so clearly fix-it fic for reboot Star Trek, recast closer to the original spirit of Trek and cross-pollinated with Le Guin.

I read Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, a graphic memoir-cookbook that picked up an Alex award. I love memoirs by sequential artists; it's such a great medium for conveying this is what I remember it feeling like when I was a kid.

I picked up Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers because I like what he's been doing with Loki: Agent of Asgard. It's been pretty fun and engaging so far.

I read Heartstones, one of Ruth Rendell's standalone creepy stories in novella form, which reminds me that I always love her standalone books and I think there are still quite a few of them that I haven't read. I had a brilliant professor once who used A Judgement in Stone in a class about orality and literacy.

Comments

[qem_chibati]

I think it's because a lot of French people assume that other French people are multi-lingual as a matter of course, but a lot of English speakers are not, and English has become a default international language for a lot of people as it's the 2nd language they learn to speak since a lot of native English speakers won't learn another language / are sure that French people can understand them if They Just Speak Loudly Enough.

/vague experience.

Then again they are French which aha, French linguists are often pretty obnoxious and petty as a matter of course. Also uh, Jean-Benoît may be speaking the wrong kind of French.

/specific experience - my family on one side is French / French creole speaking.

[mayhap]

Oh yeah, French linguists are totally obnoxious and petty! That was mostly why I thought it was so funny that he was complaining about that when it would be easy enough to find someone who would cheerfully insult québecois to his face. They're missing out, though, because Frenches from outside Paris and around the world are awesome.

That's a good point—anyone who's studied a second language has some perspective to draw on even when they're the one using their native language in a given encounter and is less likely to take the Once More With Volume tack, which, OMG, why would you even think that would be effective???