I’m calling it: 2026 is the year I will get back into reading. Inspired by Kathryn Tanaka’s incredible “To Read Or Not To Read…” article from last issue (I highly recommend you go check it out!), I decided I too was going to embark upon a two book per month journey. However, I’ve added one requirement for myself: one of the two books per month must be nonfiction.
You see, I am typically not the largest fan of nonfiction literature. Although I do love learning new things, I’ve never quite had the stamina to sit through an entire book that is simply raw facts unless it was for school (shout out to Dammed Lies and Statistics by Joel Best) or a memoir. But hey, it’s 2026, and I’m going off to college soon. It’s time to branch into new genres and work my brain so it’s not completely rotted when I start meeting new people. Or, as Adam Aleksic would put it, I’m bookpilling so I can brainmaxx as an academiacore student in college.
[One Penny Deposited]
Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic
★★★★☆ – 4.5/5 stars
This book is partially the reason I wanted to begin this reading challenge. I’ve followed Aleksic online from his username @etymologynerd for well over a year at this point, and when he announced he was releasing a book, I knew I had to read it at one point or another. As the title suggests, Aleksic’s book highlights the effects of social media and its algorithms on language, focusing primarily on English.
I greatly enjoyed reading this book, as Aleksic manages to make me, a complete newbie to etymology and algorithms, understand both with clear examples strung throughout the book. Full of incredible tangents I would’ve never expected to be even remotely related to linguistics, Aleksic is able to utilize his own experiences as a content creator to explain situations and provide a human touch to a topic that could easily get boring. I particularly enjoyed his connection of linguistics to self identities, showing how the way we perceive and alter our language actually impacts how we view and shape ourselves as well. He uses a lot of the lingo and slang popular online as examples, which, as someone who is unfortunately chronically online, helped me understand many of the complex concepts presented in the book. For anyone even remotely interested in linguistics, I highly recommend this book. (And for those who are avid readers of The Shield, you may recognize it from my article “No More Killing—Only Unaliving.”) He also expands his analysis to languages other than English, such as Spanish, French, and American Sign Language.
[One Penny Deposited]
True Biz by Sara Nović
★★★★☆ – 4/5 stars
True Biz wasn’t exactly the book I expected to pick up for this month. Originally, I hoped to read Phantom of the Opera, but after heading to the library to pick up some CDs, I found this book in the monthly showcase and decided to diversify my reading. True Biz follows three main protagonists: two deaf children and a CODA (child of deaf adults) headmistress at a school for deaf children. Charlie, a deaf child with faulty cochlear implants, struggles with a mom who’s embarrassed of her deafness and subsequently performs poorly in school as she cannot understand the instruction. Austin, a deaf boy from a long generation of deaf family members, helps Charlie acclimate to her new boarding school: The River Valley School for the Deaf. All the while, the children are completely unaware of the struggles their CODA headmistress, February, faces as she fights for the school’s—and students’—right to exist.
I really liked this book. Nović’s ability to comment on the difficulties and hardships the Deaf community faces while educating her readers on Deaf culture and ASL signs is truly incredible. While I did sometimes question the accuracy of some of the characters’ behaviors for them being teenagers, looking back, I do see its use in highlighting how easily young deaf children can be manipulated and influenced when very few can actually speak—or teach—their language. I did have to get used to the unique lack of quotation marks around spoken dialogue, which I believe may be purposefully omitted to show how difficult it can be for deaf people to understand spoken language. However, I did like the clever use of formatting to show signed communication. ASL uses body language to separate speakers, and when telling a story, signers will physically shift their bodies and signs to show who’s speaking. In Nović’s novel, she uses different locations on the page to show signed conversations without having to repeat “Charlie signed,” for example. I found this application of indents was truly genius! True Biz has also fueled my urge to learn more about the Deaf community, one that despite being hard of hearing, I’ve never been able to immerse myself in. I hope when others read it they feel a similar pull to learn ASL and support the Deaf community.
[Maximum Payment Reached. Please Return Next Month]